That's Alright René

Inspired by Scott Hershovitz' Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I wrote a song about Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Dualism. I hope you like it. Fun Fact: The two guitars on the outro solo are my cheeky little version of dualism - one in the right speaker, one in the left; one playing single-note lines, the other octaves. Fun huh?

PB&J

My son advised this past Saturday that: “Daddy, I never want to hurt your soul.”

“Thanks Ju Ju but are you forgetting the classic problem of parallelism?”

*son runs off to play with leggos…

“You see Julian, Descartes defined the…

*son runs outside...

Later on that day as I was having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich it hit me: they can continue to run parallel but we can experience them both at the same time, just like the magic of a peanut butter and jelly sammie! Clearly peanut butter and jelly never mix, interact. Obvi! but in my mouth, mmm, a heaven of non-interaction.

My mouth is the arena for the clear and distinctly defined peanut butter (clearly the body) and jelly (the cogito) just like experience is the arena for the material and immaterial.

So I guess I went ahead and solved that paltry parallelism dilemma. You are welcome. 

Heidegger And The Bottle

I found myself oddly thinking about Heidegger last night as I gave a bottle to my little guy in the darkness of his room with the noise machine on, my eyes closed.

I thought about how Heidegger was an ontologist, studying Being, and how, like Descartes, he deduced a baseline, a fixed point, a north star if you will from which he could find his way.

Every freshman philosophy major will indeed be slack-jawed, rapt when they read Descartes’ Meditations and marvel at his fixed point – the cogito, deduced amid the hyperbolic doubt he so deftly describes. (Look at me, alliterating like a beatnik! (Thank you Captain Holt)).

Heidegger found his fixed point through phenomenological analysis:

In studying Being, this study begins from an individual being – the wondrous, beautiful, mean-what-we-say-say-what-we-mean german term Dasein…a being there. This being there is YOU!

This term is so packed and dense it is sublime. As a being there you are subject to a time, subject to a place and you were not free to choose the time or the place (time and place is the umwelt – the world around). This lack of freedom is something Heidegger called facticity – the inescapable accidents of your existence, like being born in 1970, in Ohio... and also you are not merely in the world, you are thrown into the world – another great german word: geworfenheit.

However, working through Sein und Zeit, one learns that after being thrown into the world, you freely choose your future, you freely choose your time and place but always in the light of historical constraints. You can be authentic while recognizing your facticity.

What occupied my mind the most was remembering the idea that with each choice we make, an infinite number of available choices become possible. Turn to your left and a whole new world is possible, turn to your right, the same. This may sound inane but consider your life: Did you follow your bliss? Did you become a success? Did you fail? Did you…?

Here’s the thing, it is not only the new world that opens with every choice, this is not the only thing that makes you up, because with each choice you make, other worlds and other choices are no longer possible.

Do you see it now? The fragility of the future, the past, the present? This is why the existentialists harped on authenticity. You should be authentic and follow your bliss because this world is tenuous my man, fleeting AF.

And here is where it got weird (er). I thought about the election. And all the possible worlds that will no longer be possible. And I felt fragile and as the parent I never thought I would be, I felt the fragility not just for me but for the little guy in my lap taking the bottle, and for his big brother trying to get to sleep upstairs.

I slept ok but I would be lying if I told you I’ve felt this way before…I have not. And I am 46, I have been through a few elections.