David Bennett

Existence and Being

Follow-up to a lecture given by Henrik Schøneberg ‘Awakening of Consciousness’. He described Sartre’s theory of existentialism – that existence precedes essence. That is, that it is only by acting, by making choices, that we give meaning to our lives. But if we bumble along without making conscious choices, then we do not realise our purpose and we do not become.

It’s a point of view. I can see how Sartre might see himself as exhorting people to wake up and realise that they must make themselves, not follow the web of established thinking. But does he accept that he too might be wrong, that the truth might lie outside his own thinking?

Heidegger

Schøneberg talked about Heidegger as being the most analytic of the existentialists, but that he ‘went too far’ when he joined the nazi party. As the song goes in Springtime For Hitler, in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, the way to get ahead is to get smart. In the words of the song: ‘Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party’.

The philosopher, Heidegger says, is resolved ‘to understand time in terms of time,’ and not time in relation to eternity. He does not want to be involved with the Divine. Religion is an agent of modernity, and Heidegger hated modernity.

Modernity

Modernity is, he says, the process by which powerful movements based on illusion rather than reality, seek to make a paradise on Earth by running people’s lives. I cannot understand at all how Heidegger does not see the nazi party as a prime example, but he sees nazism as going back to the roots of German Being, with a capital B. It is the cure for his existential homesickness.

I kind of get it, it’s visceral and basic and beast-like, and powerful. It’s before all the ‘fancy ideas’, all the fancy rational thinking that screws us up because we think we are rational when in reality we exist before that. It gets your blood up and it makes you feel good, so it must be real.

Well, yes, maybe. That’s the appeal, but in reality the nazi were all scared witless of the guys higher up on the ladder. You can tell from the cut of their uniforms and the swagger. Humility will take you anywhere, but swagger will only get you so far.

Voegelin

Moving on, I came across an article that compared and contrasted Heidegger and Eric Voegelin. Voegelin says it is ‘ridiculous to pretend that there was nothing to consciousness but the consciousness of objects of the external world.’

Well that is either self deception, metaphysics that take one further from Being as Being as meant by Heidegger and Sartre, or else Voegelin is right. Maybe.

On the one hand we have Heidegger’s ‘Being without concepts’. On the other hand we have Voegelin and humility and a sense of awe at the mere existence of existence. And why wouldn’t one want to enquire as to the ‘why’ of existence? Why is it only right to start from existence and work forward? Why wouldn’t one want to search for meaning outside of desires and passions? Voegelin asks whether man can perfect the world without God, and he answers that it is not possible and one shouldn’t try. And that is kind of like Heidegger’s opinion of modernity, so to that extent they can agree.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Does man become divorced from himself by searching for meaning? Is that it? I can see that, too, because we humans are pattern makers above all. We detect patterns, sometimes even where there are none. So we can lead ourselves up the garden path and lose ourselves in metaphysics and lose the simple truth of setting ourselves free to Become. Maybe.

I looked up Heidegger’s personal life. His Wikipedia entry describes he personal life this way:

Heidegger married Elfride Petri in 1917. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to Hermann in 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann’s biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann’s biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar.

Heidegger had a long romantic relationship with Hannah Arendt and a steamy affair (over many decades) with Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of his. Arendt was Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany before the start of World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war.Heidegger’s letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his.

Voegelin, on the other hand, married and as far as I can see, had neither affairs nor divorces. I can cut all this philosophising down to size and say that Heidegger was drawn to go downwards to the brute essence, looking outward like an animal because that is what he was attracted to. Voegelin had a different temperament and looked for the Divine in the everyday. Maybe it was just a difference of temperament.

Existence and Being What?

Thinking back about Sartre, I guess what he does is make the break between existence and being. He thinks it is not automatic that one thinks and chooses and becomes because one exists. He does not say ‘I am and therefore I think. He says I exist and I had better get my skates on and start understanding my situation before it is too late. OK, but where to go from there? To follow one’s passions? To follow one’s desires? On what are those passions founded? What happens when the passion dries up? Is passion enough?

What happens when one’s passions run up against the opposing passions of others? It all seems very lone wolf, like Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

Freud

Freud would say that ego is made whole and balanced and sane when expressed in the community of people. It cannot be made alone. If that is right, then it stands opposed to existentialism, which in Freud’s view would simply be narcissism. That is unless of course through a happy coincidence of passions, the existential person chooses to join the community of people and gain expression there. In the view of Sartre, Heidegger, and Freud it would work just as long as the community of people steer clear of metaphysics and ideologies.

That leaves me with a question. Is there even the beginning of a scale by which to measure the value of such a community? Or is the notion of ‘value’ a descent already into metaphysics and the loss of Being?

Inertia

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the characters identified as ‘some maidens’ ask and answer the question of what is wisdom:

What else is wisdom? To stand from fear set free: To stand and wait.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, the narrator asks and answers what the normal state is for a man who is conscious enough to question the nature of things:

After all, the direct, legitimate, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia.

I am going to pull back a bit. I am not convinced that the next step from existence is anything active at all. Perhaps it is simply to react. It’s a thought I have had before. I have been down this road. What determines how one puts one foot in front of the other?

If it is habit then it is a terrible thing. If it is curiosity and wonder, then that’s the antithesis of boredom. Perhaps that is enough. Then there is no grand enquiry into ‘Who am I?’ There is instead an appreciation of the rhythm of the day.

In Camus’ The Outsider’, when the principal character shoots the man on the beach he says of himself:

’I knew in that moment that I had broken the balance of the day.’

Is that enough, simply to appreciate? Must we accept that we are discontented with that state, that it is not enough, or that it simply does not apply to us? Are we so deep into metaphysics that we cannot regain that Eden? It’s a problem, and not one I am going to solve today.

Project 100,000

There’s a scene in the film Full Metal Jacket where a raw recruit joins the platoon and is instructed not to leave the path. He is of limited ability and unable to follow instructions. No sooner does he join the platoon than he leaves the path and is skewered in a Vietcong man trap.

In Apocalypse Now there’s a scene where the young soldier, hardly able to follow any orders, wasted on dope, starts shooting wildly. He is out of control, as much a terrified observer as an active combatant.

And in Forrest Gump the hero joins the army and miraculously manages to survive and do well despite being odd and below average in IQ. The way things work out well for him are fantastical. That’s a device used repeatedly in the film.

The war in Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Forrest Gump is the Vietnam War.

You might wonder how men of below average IQ ever got into the army. I knew that people from poor backgrounds, disproportionately black, were most likely to be drafted, but I didn’t wonder at all beyond that. I just watched the films.

Hamilton Gregory

But today I watched a talk by Hamilton Gregory, a man who volunteered for service in Vietnam. He was a college graduate, so he could well have avoided the draft. Many middle class young men did. They didn’t have to try hard; there were exemptions of which they could take advantage.

But Mr Gregory volunteered and as chance would have it, he was ordered to escort another recruit to Fort Benning in Georgia. That recruit was educationally subnormal. He didn’t know that America was at war. He didn’t know in which state he had been born.

Hundreds of thousands of men like him were drafted under Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000. That was the project under which young men of poor IQ were inducted each year.

Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defence, so it was his call. The army couldn’t get people to go to Vietnam, So McNamara lowered the IQ requirement. He said that the army was one of the world’s best educators, and it could raise the IQs of the draftees. So people who were previously unfit to server were now fit.

In battle they were too slow to react, too slow to understand what was going on, two slow to formulate a plan. They were poor marksmen, erratic and a danger to themselves and their fellow soldiers. And they died in Vietnam at three times the rate other soldiers were killed.

Unofficially, the soldiers in McNamara’s Project 100,000 were called McNamara’s Morons.

Hamilton Gregory was so appalled by Project 100,000 that after the war he gathered evidence and wrote McNamara’s Folly: The Use Of Low IQ Troops In The Vietnam War. And that is what he was talking about in the video I watched.

So now I wonder whether the makers of Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Forrest Gump knew about Project 100,000 and whether they were making a reference to it?

Escape In The Mind

I didn’t really like Forrest Gump that much. I know there was some homegrown wisdom peeking out of that character, some humanity that would not be denied. But I wasn’t fond of the fantastical element because I knew that being saved and prospering is not what generally happens to people like Forrest Gump.

Sure, it has to happen by random chance to someone, even to a person with limited abilities. But still, it seemed like a cop-out, a way of making the audience think that things are good, when in truth they are not.

Reality

In contrast, there’s the film Brazil. It’s fantastical in that the world depicted in the film is odd, odd like in a Kafka novel, but yet near enough for us to be able to recognise it. Life could be like that with just a bit of a shift sideways.

There are the scenes in Brazil where a ninja appears out of nowhere to save the main character. He does so repeatedly. He sweeps in just when things look bad. But in the final scenes, in the end we see that these rescues were an illusion, an attempt by the main character to escape mentally from the horror of torture.

Brazil is depressing. The baddies win and there is no redemption. It’s 1984 in film. But I can live with that more easily than being fed a diet of heroism from characters that were three times more likely to die in war than their fellow soldiers.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia is nearing completion. Egypt wants a say in how quickly the dam fills and how much is released and when.

It is easy to see why Egypt would want that control. Egypt has a dam of its own. The Aswan Dam in Egypt, completed in 1970, enables Egypt to even out the water that reaches the land in the Nile Delta. But the Nile in Egypt is downstream, so it doesn’t matter how efficiently the Aswan Dam is managed if not enough water reaches it.

In a word, if Ethiopia holds back on the water it allows down the Nile, It will damage Egypt’s fortunes.

Ethiopia has accused Egypt of hydrological colonialism for trying to control how Ethiopia manages the flow from its new dam.

Egypt says that water that flows through more than one country is an international resource. As such, it must be governed by all the concerned parties.

Electricity

As well as controlling water for agriculture, the turbines powered by the dam’s water outflow will provide electrical power for Ethiopia.

And Ethiopia plans to sell the excess electricity generated to neighbouring countries. The power lines are already going in.

But it is not just Ethiopia, Egypt and water. There may be another player in the game.

Who Financed The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia funded the dam by issuing bonds to nationals in Ethiopia and Ethiopians abroad. It said is was forced to take that route because Egypt pressured international funders to refuse to back the project.

What is not clear is who financed the turbines. The turbines are a big part of the project and the most technical. They are Chinese built, but who paid for them? China?

There’s a statement in Wikpedia, but no source given:

“the turbines and associated electrical equipment of the hydropower plants costing about US$1.8 billion are reportedly financed by Chinese banks“.

If that statement is true, then it’s perhaps another example of external finance leading to control when the debtor country cannot repay the debt.

China has been accused of it before. And it is, of course, not the only country accused of that.

So maybe it is a race that Ethiopia has to run. It has to increase agricultural production. It has to encourage new projects within the country that consume that electricity. And it has to make money from selling electricity to neighbouring countries.

And to do so while keeping up payments for the turbines.

Last week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

map showing the location of the aswan dam and the grand ethiopian renaissance dam

Judy: Film Review

What did I think of the film? It was depressing. It’s the story of Judy Garland. It’s the story of a woman with a wonderful voice who was starstruck with her own stardom. It’s the story of a Hollywood mogul who gave her a tough time when she tried to break out of the straitjacket existence in the movies that she signed up for.

It’s the story of a woman who loved her children but would not seek help to get off the pills she had been on since a teenager. The pills were forced on her by her mother. She had pills to keep her thin, pills to get her up, and pills to get her to sleep.

So give her a break, she was messed up.

Yes, OK. I give her a break. But it wasn’t enough for a film. It was a dramatised documentary. And it was all about her, except for the scenes with the gay couple in their flat trying to make a meal for them and her and enjoying the poignancy of each others’ company. That was nice.

When one of them falls asleep on the sofa late at night, his partner talks about how his partner was in prison for homosexuality, and says ironically and knowingly and wistfully that since the change in the law it appears they didn’t do anything wrong all along. Nice social commentary.

Renee Zellweger was very impressive near the end when she moved around the stage. I mean she was impressive irrespective of what character she was supposed to be playing.

And she captured some ‘Judy Garland looks’ and those almost black eyes. But, it didn’t amount to a film. And if it did, it was depressing. No redeeming end, just a very British bit of cake in a cafe with Bernard Delfont’s uptight personal assistant and a nervous band leader.

The worst part of the film were the credits, the credits in gold sparkle against a black background. They seem designed by someone who thought that we the audience would be so stricken by the emotional intensity of the film that we would stare spellbound at the names as they came up sparkle by sparkle and then faded, slowly.

Except that the snail’s pace at which the sparkles sparked and faded was not emotionally charged; it was ponderous.

The names of the producers and the associate producers in sparkles just had me wondering when the lights would go up in the cinema. In fact, I thought, did someone associated with the film insist that venues keep the lights down until those names had passed and the rest of the credits could begin?