In (silent) praise of inarticulacy

I doubt if a film like Manakamana will be seen by more than 50 people.

And that is just fine, going by the core philosophy of makers Pachao Velez and Stephanie Spray's Documentary. The philosophy seems to be that the best of thoughts may go unexpressed and thus unheard; the best of things may go unseen and the best of sounds may go unheard.

The film is about the journey pilgrims make to Manakamana, a Hindu temple in a small mountain village in Nepal. Inside the temple resides the goddess Bhagavati.

The temple is in a remote location; over time pilgrims have endured, happily so, the arduous journey to the site. Recently, they have been riding a cable car to and from the temple. The cable car is a technological insertion into nature, but the regular pilgrims are not mesmerized by the cable car. Some mumble the fact that this is the first time in their life that they are aboard a cable car. 

That's it.

The Documentary is not a homage to technology or to many aspects of modernity that we have taken for granted and feel deep lacunae when they go missing from our surrounding.

The Documentary is one that somebody like philosopher and art critic Susan Sontag would have liked: a no-frills-attached registering on our consciousness of a fleeting experience that quietly leaves its imprint on us.

Sontag had cringed at the thought of over-articulation of experiences, at the sight of tourists taking pictures of things they visit and see, at the cultural proclivity to record and note every sensation one experiences when one is in the presence of, let's say, a "wonder", man-made or natural.

The temple of Manakamana is a wonder to its pilgrims. But the pilgrims generally remain inarticulate about the wonder. Because of the cable car and other conveniences, the temple is now visited by outsiders as well. Tourists, the nemesis of a Sontagian universe, take pictures and jot down notes; there is a rock musician who jokes around and expresses cynicism. They are not looking at the temple; in essence with the noise they create, they are looking at themselves. The jokes they sprout, the cynicism they express, the notes and the photographs they take are silent echoes of themselves.

The traditional pilgrims approach the shrine with awe and ardor and leave in awe and ardor. The wonder they experience is left at that, not translated into words or into a narrative.

Of depths and surfaces

When was the last time you complimented somebody for her depth?

Often times we say somebody is "deep" or has said something that's "deep" to mean the person is thoughtful or not superficial. However, on most occasions we don't know what we precisely mean when we use the word deep as a qualifier of human character.

David Brooks comes up with an interesting perspective on what constitutes depth in human character.

Depth connotes the bedrock or something that lies at the bottom. When navigators plumb the depths of the ocean, for instance, they plumb the ocean bed wherein are rooted, some say, the fundamentals of life as we know it.

What is the human analogy for the ocean bed? Is it the human unconscious?

Thanks to Freud, we now know that the human unconscious, like the ocean bed, is home to all those impulses, primary emotions and mammalian instincts that we try our best to tame and discipline with reason. 

Generally speaking then, the primary emotions constitute our depths, while the rationality makes for the top of who we are. By this definition, if a person is able to dredge up the primary emotions and live them out in her daily life, then that person is said to be invested with a depth of character.

How wrong we would we, writes, Brooks, to confuse our deepest selves with our unconscious.

When we attribute "depth" to a person, we are, on the contrary, alluding to the rational self, the one that a person has acquired through a life time of experience and "suffering", compromise and negotiations with the other self in us, which is the emotional and instinctive self.

Brooks says:

When we say that someone is a deep person, we mean they have achieved a quiet, dependable mind by being rooted in something spiritual and permanent [...] A person of deep character has certain qualities: in the realm of intellect, she has permanent convictions about fundamental things; in the realm of emotions, she has a web of unconditional loves; in the realm of action, she has permanent commitments to transcendent projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

Depth is not a biological predisposition, but is something that we cultivate over time. "Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made, engraved by our thoughts and actions", writes Brooks:

So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. People make commitments — to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones — and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions.

When the 19th century Romantic poet and philosopher, William Wordsworth said that the child is the father of man, he meant that children have greater depth than adults because, chronologically speaking, babies are closest to our creator spatially and temporally, and their minds are still filled with those "intimations of immortality" that our creator shares with us. These intimations or these sparks of depth get dispersed and weaken over time under the surgical knife of experience. 

Experience, said Wordsworth, severs us from our natural depths.

David Brooks says the opposite: Experience creates depth depending on how we as adults wish to live our lives. If we cling to our biological dispositions exclusively, then we are unlikely to acquire depth of character. In Brooks' terms:

Babies are not deep. Old people can be, depending upon how they have chosen to lead their lives. Babies start out very natural. The people we admire are rooted in nature but have surpassed nature. Often they grew up in cultures that encouraged them to take a loftier view of their possibilities than we do today.

Looking back, I now wonder why Captain Ahab, the one-footed, obsessive whale-chaser of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, resented Moby the whale so much for its depth. I had understood the root of Ahab's obsessiveness with hunting down the whale, as a quest for something humans are incapable of attaining--depth. The whale in Ahab's eyes didn't acquire depth, but was born with it by virtue of living in the depths of the ocean.

Ahab must have labored under misperception; he was by far the deeper entity in the tale.

Why we teach?

Why we teach?

For those of us who are in the business of teaching, at whatever levels, it's a question worth pondering.

Gary Gutting, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and a frequent contributor to the Times' The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers to discuss issues pertaining to philosophy, writes that for him "teaching is not about the amount of knowledge one passes on, but the enduring excitement one generates."

Gutting is primarily interested in enabling "close encounters" between students and "some great writing."

"What’s the value of such encounters?" He asks, and the answer is that 

They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. They may not enjoy every book we read, but they enjoy some of them and learn that—and how—this sort of thing (Greek philosophy, modernist literature) can be enjoyable. They may never again exploit the possibility, but it remains part of their lives, something that may start to bud again when they see a review of a new translation of Homer or a biography of T. S. Eliot, or when “Tartuffe” or “The Seagull” in playing at a local theater.

From the vault of Walter Pater

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

Artistic and aesthetic

Philosophy professor Gary Cutting has a thing or two to say about Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes.

He confesses that regardless of their iconic status in the art world, the boxes, and by extension the entire corpus of Warhol's work, does "very little" for him.

In other words, Warhol maybe an artist but he does not necessarily produce aesthetically moving experiences in the minds of many a beholder of his art:

Praise of Andy Warhol often emphasizes the new possibilities of artistic creation his work opened up. That would make his work important in the history of art and for that reason alone of considerable interest. But, as Jerrold Levinson and others have pointed out, a work can be an important artistic achievement without being an important aesthetic achievement. This, I suggest, is how we should think about Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

A question of freedom

Are we more free when we resist our desires, or when we do what we want? This is the question that governs the narrative of Paul La Farge's short fiction, Another Life.

The desire to differentiate between freedom that only seems so and freedom that is more fundamentally so, is inspired by Rousseau's essay on the origins of inequality. In the essay Rousseau says, "Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist." 

Makes me re think the status of "acquiescence" in the world as being more than mere passive submission to the status quo. To acquiesce is also to exert a choice.