Recently, for the second time in my life, I watched Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood "for the first time." What I mean is, after I see a film for the first time in the theater during its initial release, the next time I watch the film is when I really start to notice things and analyze it closely. In other words, that second time around is when I find myself really starting to appreciate the film (given its worth appreciating).
What struck me about There Will Be Blood is not surprising: the film is incredibly powerful, largely thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as Daniel Plainview–the oil man protagonist of the film. Lewis is positively gripping as Plainview. I am in agreement with this author, who writes: "Plainview, has at some point we never see poured himself into a mold.
He’s beside himself from the beginning, remote-controlling himself from
an undisclosed location. Day-Lewis method-acts a method actor character." And to be more precise than what I just said, what I found to be truly gripping was the character of Plainview himself (which, of course, is probably due to Day-Lewis' portrayal of him).
This led me to wonder about a simple yet interesting question: what is so appealing about Daniel Plainview? In one sense, he is an awful human being. He is ruthless, anti-social, envious, spiteful, and full of hate. However, I find myself rooting for Plainview because he is so deeply aware of himself. He is completely honest about himself, both with himself and with others. When social convention calls for a trivial breach of the ethic of frank speech, Plainview is clearly in pain. He knows exactly who he is and does not apologize for it. He is resolute; authentic. So while in an important sense–the sense of what is morally praiseworthy–Plainview is despicable, in another important sense–the sense of ethics as a self-fashioning and process of self-understanding–he is in fact admirable. One finds oneself cheering for Plainview as he brutally pummels Eli, the conniving preacher and charlatan.
An analysis of one particular scene best expresses what I mean here. When Plainview's "brother...from another mother" first shows up at his camp, he is initially suspicious (as he is of all), but ends up confiding in him. Their conversation that evening after dinner is a (the only?) direct account of Plainview's psyche. "I hate most people," he tells his new brother. "I have a competition in me...I want no one else to succeed." The appeal of Daniel Plainview comes from his ability to utter these words in complete honesty–he means exactly what he says and somehow the viewer can have no doubts about this.
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
7/24/10
Absorption & Reflection (part 2: or, On the prospects for moral phenomenology)
Perhaps my previous post (see below) was too hasty. There I characterized 'absorption' as an experiential modality. This means that absorption is a property of experiences rather than a property of the objects of experience. Thus, when I see this black cheese grater here on my desk, I do not say that my experience is black--rather, the cheese grater is black. My experience is visual, and thus an experiential property rather than a worldly property. So, to use Heidegger's familiar example, hammering a nail does not "have" the property of absorption. Rather, absorption is a property of the experience of hammering a nail. In this case I am not reflecting on my activity, I am simply absorbed by it. (Experiential properties presuppose a subject of experience).
I also characterized absorption as dangerous. Of course, I did not intend for this to be a blanket characterization--that is, there's certainly nothing wrong with being absorbed in hammering, or playing music for that matter; in fact, absorption may be a better experiential modality for these sorts of things. When I said that absorption could be dangerous, I meant that experience which rules out reflection is prone to violating other subjects. While driving to the hoop in a game of pick-up basketball, absorbed in my activity, the bodies and limbs of my opponents are merely things inhibiting my purposeful activity. (The reflective attitude of basketball is thus embodied by the referee, whose task it is to not become absorbed in the game and to remain detached from it). One can see how venerating an experiential modality that rules out reflection could have dehumanizing consequences. The subjectivity of others is not acknowledged. Persons become bodies. Lives become means to the telos guiding my absorbed activity. (Yes, this is all very loose, but its a blog--ah, I'm reflecting!)
But what I may have overlooked in my last post was the possibility of a modality of experience that could be called absorption, but with the modification of being an absorption-like modality specifically oriented to the subjectivity of others. This would mean a direct, intuitive, noninferential awareness of foreign subjectivities that would be more than just empathy (for that is what empathy is) in that it would include an additional experiential-property-aspect that we might describe as 'moral attunement'. I believe Levinas approaches ethics in a manner along these lines. For him, the experience of the other--the experience and not the other himself--grounds the first and foremost ethical principle not to violate the other. In Levinas' colorful prose, the "face" of the other "calls out" to me, demanding moral recognition.
If there is to be such a thing as moral phenomenology it would undoubtedly have to address this issue of a moral experiential modality. Regardless, the difficulty still remains as to whether this would be moral philosophy proper and not merely a descriptive treatment of moral experience.
I also characterized absorption as dangerous. Of course, I did not intend for this to be a blanket characterization--that is, there's certainly nothing wrong with being absorbed in hammering, or playing music for that matter; in fact, absorption may be a better experiential modality for these sorts of things. When I said that absorption could be dangerous, I meant that experience which rules out reflection is prone to violating other subjects. While driving to the hoop in a game of pick-up basketball, absorbed in my activity, the bodies and limbs of my opponents are merely things inhibiting my purposeful activity. (The reflective attitude of basketball is thus embodied by the referee, whose task it is to not become absorbed in the game and to remain detached from it). One can see how venerating an experiential modality that rules out reflection could have dehumanizing consequences. The subjectivity of others is not acknowledged. Persons become bodies. Lives become means to the telos guiding my absorbed activity. (Yes, this is all very loose, but its a blog--ah, I'm reflecting!)
But what I may have overlooked in my last post was the possibility of a modality of experience that could be called absorption, but with the modification of being an absorption-like modality specifically oriented to the subjectivity of others. This would mean a direct, intuitive, noninferential awareness of foreign subjectivities that would be more than just empathy (for that is what empathy is) in that it would include an additional experiential-property-aspect that we might describe as 'moral attunement'. I believe Levinas approaches ethics in a manner along these lines. For him, the experience of the other--the experience and not the other himself--grounds the first and foremost ethical principle not to violate the other. In Levinas' colorful prose, the "face" of the other "calls out" to me, demanding moral recognition.
If there is to be such a thing as moral phenomenology it would undoubtedly have to address this issue of a moral experiential modality. Regardless, the difficulty still remains as to whether this would be moral philosophy proper and not merely a descriptive treatment of moral experience.
7/21/10
Absorption & Reflection
I want to draw a contrast between absorption and reflection. This has vague historical influences, but if it turns out that I am misreading Heidegger or misappropriating something, just focus on the concepts and not where they may have come from. By "absorption" I mean the modality of experience where one is "absorbed" in an activity. We typically speak of athletes and musicians being "absorbed" in their activities, unaware of "what" they are doing insofar as they are simply doing. In this sort of mode the boundary between subject and object seems blurry. By "reflection" I mean the modality of experience where one "steps back" and "regards" the very activity they are undertaking. Philosophy has typically been done in a reflective way--attempting to step back from the immediacy of experience in order to gain a third person perspective on things so that the structure, or logic, of experience can be made explicit.
Does Heidegger favor absorption to reflection? If so, I see his romanticization of absorption as problematic, and open to a relativization or complete degeneration of moral life. On Heidegger's account, we have gradually "forgotten" Being as such. We have forgotten how to be authentically attuned to the world, how to authentically be-IN-the-world. I characterize this as our movement from absorption to reflection. Nietzsche speaks of something similar, vis a vis the movement from master to slave morality. Or we could examine Richard Moran's recent classic, Authority and Estrangement. We are, indeed, increasingly estranged from our biological heritage- from our absorption in the practical concerns of surviving in nature. But this estrangement brings authority. As we are increasingly able to step back to reflect, we are increasingly moral. Following Levinas, we can see estrangement as the condition for the possibility of ethics. One's confrontation with oneself is the a priori condition for the ethical encounter with the other. When absorbed in playful, spontaneous, or violent activity, the other is but a feature of my world--and this is not the world. This is my world; my consciousness has absorbed it into the activity which consumes both self and world. In this mode, the other is subject to my activity and has no ethical standing.
Does Heidegger favor absorption to reflection? If so, I see his romanticization of absorption as problematic, and open to a relativization or complete degeneration of moral life. On Heidegger's account, we have gradually "forgotten" Being as such. We have forgotten how to be authentically attuned to the world, how to authentically be-IN-the-world. I characterize this as our movement from absorption to reflection. Nietzsche speaks of something similar, vis a vis the movement from master to slave morality. Or we could examine Richard Moran's recent classic, Authority and Estrangement. We are, indeed, increasingly estranged from our biological heritage- from our absorption in the practical concerns of surviving in nature. But this estrangement brings authority. As we are increasingly able to step back to reflect, we are increasingly moral. Following Levinas, we can see estrangement as the condition for the possibility of ethics. One's confrontation with oneself is the a priori condition for the ethical encounter with the other. When absorbed in playful, spontaneous, or violent activity, the other is but a feature of my world--and this is not the world. This is my world; my consciousness has absorbed it into the activity which consumes both self and world. In this mode, the other is subject to my activity and has no ethical standing.
6/1/10
Kant's Majesty
Passages like this will always keep me coming back to Kant:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless magnitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.
-Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996.
One might argue that the whole of philosophy is contained in this passage. Kant touches on contingency, necessity, time, space, and morality with grace and precision. Additionally, he does this with a phenomenological tone: there is something that its like to have this most unique perspective, that of the zoon logon echon (animal having reason)--our being-in-the-world as well as our being-beyond-the-world.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless magnitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.
-Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge 1996.
One might argue that the whole of philosophy is contained in this passage. Kant touches on contingency, necessity, time, space, and morality with grace and precision. Additionally, he does this with a phenomenological tone: there is something that its like to have this most unique perspective, that of the zoon logon echon (animal having reason)--our being-in-the-world as well as our being-beyond-the-world.
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