Caveat Emptor

I’m troubled by the ease at which we’ve come to identify ourselves primarily as consumers. To be sure it’s a role we all play, an inescapable one given the capitalist system we live in – the world is our market place and we love to see ourselves perusing the aisles picking up deals and indulgences. We like to express our opinions with our buying power, and even the Supreme Court has ruled that money is a form of speech.

I get the seductive appeal of being a consumer; it allows us to fantasize great wealth and shopping sprees. When we think of ourselves as consumers we naturally think of ourselves as wealthy. On the flip side it makes us resent any restrictions on how we might extend the power of our wealth. “I don’t want MY tax dollars spent on: the homeless, health care, the military, farm subsidies, etc.” We stop thinking about our relationship with others as anything but something transactional, and commoditized.

But consumer is but one identity we share. Most of us are also workers – a role far drearier to be excited about or identify with. It usually causes us to think about ourselves on a lower rung of a hierarchy. Indeed, perhaps one of the only pleasure we indulge ourselves in as workers, is in complaining about our bosses and our jobs. Being a consumer allows one to think of being an entrepreneur, being one’s own boss, having a side hustle where you monetize your hobbies.

An unfortunate victim of the primacy of our consumer identity, seems to be our identity as a citizen. We’d rather not think about what our obligations might be to our community. If anything we start to redefine our communities in terms of our socioeconomic status and try to find ways to exclude others from the shared role a citizen.

At its core to be a citizen is to have a vote, an equal say in how our society should be run. But it is also a call to think outside ourselves, to think about what is best for all of us, the kind of place we want to live in.

As citizens we are the government, as consumers the government is just another provider of products and services. As citizens we are part of a greater good, as a consumer our selfishness is a primary virtue.

As we swap out thinking of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens we start to pervert notions of democracy. We talk of voting with our pocketbooks seldom acknowledging the inequality in the distribution of dollars to vote with. As consumers we are not equals.

Information itself becomes distorted. We talk of the market place of ideas and have this notion of the efficiency of the market place to root out bad ideas and misinformation. And yet marketing and advertising have made information “free” and truth has become more costly than fiction. As consumers we don’t consider the impact of bad information – caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Perhaps that is the lesson we need to heed, as we become consumers instead of citizens. We need to scrutinize this product and understand exactly what we are buying into. Because, as a consumer, no one is looking out for you except yourself.

Women in Philosophy

I’ve been reading and following a lot of women philosophers lately. It’s like a treasure trove of original thought that’s been hidden in plain site. Some 35 years ago when I picked up my BA in philosophy, it was a male dominated discipline. In my 4 years of study – I don’t think I read one page of philosophy written by a woman. What’s worse is that it didn’t seem at all strange to me. I just (wrongly) presumed it to be an unfortunate artifact of the preceding decades if not centuries of male dominated history - women just didn’t have the chance to develop their thinking to the extent men have.

The real criminal thing about my presumption is that I never thought to question it. Philosophers are supposed to be skilled at asking challenging questions. But this one I was blind to. That is the very handicap of privilege – and the very reason why philosophy must belong to a diversity of philosophers.

My current journey started when I stumbled upon Carrie Jenkins’ What Love is. It struck me as something wholly new and original. I was excited that here was clear evidence that there is progress in philosophy. I was envious and found myself regretting that i didn’t pursue that academic career in philosophy. In her book she comments that the topic of “love” is often excluded from philosophy, and yet I distinctly remember at least one classroom discussion on Plato’s retelling of Aristophanes’ story of the two faced, 8 limbed proto-humans cloven by the gods to be forever in search of their other half. Seriously? This is what I got instead of Simone de Beauvoir?

Carrie Jenkin’s work led me to Skye Cleary’s Existentialism and Romantic Love which gave me my first taste of de Beauvoir and the realization that there were serious gaps in knowledge. Hazel Rowley’s Tête-á-Tête quickly followed and then, last year,  I finally picked up the Ethics of Ambiguity. For someone interested in both Ethics and Existentialism, I should have read this text some 30 years ago.

I also picked up Bell Hooks’ The Will to Change and was surprised to learn that she taught at my school 2 years after I graduated. What a sad near miss, how might things be different if I had a chance to sit in on one of her classes? Of course she headed the Women’s Studies department, so why would some white male philosophy student take a class on feminism? Yes, I am complicit in my own ignorance.

Last year I read Down Girl, by Kate Mann and was once again blown away by such originality of thought. After reading this I could no longer “not see” the systemic misogyny that weaves itself into so many places in our culture including philosophy and the patriarchal cannon of which I was once a student.

I’m trying to fix that now, filling the gaps in my own knowledge. I’ve also contributed to Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting’s project to publish a collection of women philosophers titled, The Philosopher Queens - at least one step to hopefully erode the traditional cannon.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Instagram have made me a student again. Sandy Grant’s posts give me topics to ponder as she explores some of my favorite realms of existentialism, mindfulness, and hedonism - in preparation for a book I can’t wait to read. Myisha Cherry is exploring prejudice and social justice in her podcast (and book). 

It is exciting to see so much happening in philosophy right now and I think the women that are breathing fresh life into this age old discipline.

Let's Dance

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Last night we saw Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, a great retelling of the classic story along with the delightful twists that Matthew Bourne is renown for. Again I was transfixed by the ease in which dance can be some completely narrative – to be sure, staging, set design, and music all played a role in this endeavor but all of them without the use of words.

This got me thinking me thinking again about a few of my recent musings, one being the role of language in Philosophy, the other that of narrative. So often philosophy is steeped in language, and specifically the language of words and definitions, indeed there is even a philosophy of language that strives to eliminate many of the problems of philosophy by creating a precise and unambiguous language. The question this sparks in me is whether philosophy can exist without language – or more precisely, can philosophy exist without words?

So with Matthew Bourne and the ballet fresh in my mind I wonder if one could create a dance version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Furthermore what would that dance look like? I know you can tell a story in dance, is philosophy just another story?

A quick trip to the internet reveals this Ted Talk by John Bohannon, who has encouraged scientists to use dance to express their ideas in a program called Dance your PhD. All I need now I a willing choreographer. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave might be an easy start, or even the Trolley Problem. Perhaps this idea is not so outlandish after all?

Which brings me back to narrative, or more precisely the primacy of narrative. Perhaps language exists in order to tell our stories. That’s probably too broad a stroke; there are things we need to communicate outside a story – presumably. But even if I want to tell someone that it is raining, there is still seems to be a narrative context implied: you should prepare yourself by taking an umbrella, that your picnic is now ruined, that you’ll have to stay indoors.

Perhaps it's just a neurological quirk of our brains, that while we can focus on a fact, it rarely does so without placing it in a context of how we might use it, fight it, hide it, or otherwise use it to our advantage in advancing our own personal narratives. Those are thoughts for another day.

Let’s Dance

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

   - Friedrich Nietzsche

Telling a Good Story

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Lately I’ve been thinking about narrative, particularly the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our own lives. I’ve started thinking about narrative as a sort of third level of reality – and in fact, the level of reality in which we truly engage the world as "real."

Very quickly the first 2 levels of reality being 1) that metaphysical reality that exists beyond our perceptions or knowledge – we know (presume) such a reality must exist but only can talk about it in the most generalized (and unsubstantiated) ways. Perhaps the world of Mathematics occupy this space. 2) The phenomenological reality, that reality we experience and know directly through our senses. We understand the phenomenological space has some inherent flaws (e.g. optical illusions, bad science) but it is a world that we can begin to discover and know more about -  or at least make some accurate predictions.

Narrative though, seems to be to be a necessary next layer. Narrative provides reason to act, it sorts through our perceptions, identifies objects, concepts, and intentions, and places them into categories: good, bad, table, chair, friend, foe, etc. Without narrative there would be no reason to move beyond our perceptions. There are no threats or problems to solve, without narrative even the passage of time may be absent. Perhaps this is the realm meditation delivers, pure perception without our internal dialogue deconstructing it into its parts, rather leaving it a whole “one” of the now. The future and past only come into meaningful existence by virtue of narrative.

Since I’ve started thought experiment a few things have fallen in place for me. I’ve always been sympathetic to the existentialist view that our lives are aesthetic projects – viewing them now as narrative, and exploring their narrative structure provides a new lens to examine one's life. We are the heroes of our own journeys; we engage in our quests, as we look for problems that we can solve. We hope for happy endings, that our story arc shows how we've grown and become better - or that we've vanquished our enemies.

The thing about narratives though, is that they are almost always fiction. That’s where things get both troublesome and interesting. As much as we’d like to believe our stories as true, they seldom are. Our memories are often demonstrably false, and our futures seldom turn out as expected. We survive through the shorthand of stories, the generalizations of what is good and bad, the filters of our prejudice, our retroactive justifications for our acts, and the nonexistent problems we try to solve.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provide a menu of problems to be solved, the bottom tiers, physiology and safety clearly articulate our need for food and shelter, the basic problem of survival. But as we climb the pyramid – to self-actualization – is that really a problem that can be solved? Is inauthenticity real? Or is it a problem of our restlessness, a need to resolve the inconsistent stories about ourselves? Philosophers condemn the unexamined life, but isn't that too is a fiction?

Of course there is science; if the scientific method does not reveal truth, it at least takes us to some place of verisimilitude. At the very least science offers an ability to make reliable predictions based on presumed cause and effect. Science however, is also told in stories. Occam’s razor is evoked giving preference to the "simpler" explanation as "true." A theory prevails until it meets a case it cannot properly describe. There are always outliers, and we have to decide if it’s the science or the experiment that is bad. Our stories carry a bias that make us cling to our preexisting beliefs – In our recollections they have lead to previous successes, so clearly they are true(er).

This leads me to thinking of narrative in our political differences. The more complex things become, the more we have to place our trust in others, for doing the proper science, investigation, or fact checking. Who we trust is then also colored by who the heroes and villains are in our stories. We are forced to make a leap of faith in deciding what story we tell, to justify our past actions, and plan our future actions. As sides become polarized the stories clash. Even when we agree on the facts, their meanings are subject to the interpretations of our stories.

In a way this is just a restatement of existentialism. Life has no objective meaning so we are forced to create one. Viewing this from the lens of narrative though reveals  the dilemma of competing narratives, but also provides a different way of thinking about living an authentic life as telling a good story.

Adventures in Hedonism - The Nelken Line

1996  - twenty-one years ago was the first time I saw Pina Bausch and it forever changed the way I saw Dance. I’m not even sure how I got there in the first place. Probably read something in the calendar section of the LA Times (I was still reading newspapers in 1996) and came across triggering key words like “German “ “contemporary” and “experimental” but I picked up a cheap ticket to the Dorthy Chandler Pavillion and ended up seeing Nur Du, a commission 3 1/2 hour extravaganza that at one point had a chorus line of dancers washing and ironing their clothes, turning the mundane repetition of chores into mesmerizing beauty. 

I was instantly hooked. And when Pina returned in 1999 to reprise Nelken at UCLA, I bought tickets as soon as they were available. Watching the dancers construct and deconstruct the stage again mesmerized me, and seeing the famed Nelken March, completely charmed me. 

I was there again in 2005, when Pina retuned to UCLA to perform Ten Chi. I had already vowed to see every performance I could whenever the Wuppertal Dance Company came to town. Little did I know, this one was going to be the last.

I grieved hard when Pina passed in 2009 - no choreographer had ever inspired me so much. The ray of hope was the knowledge that Wim Wenders was working on a film about Pina Bausch - I was there for its opening and again charmed that the Nelken Dance was featured, a piece of such simplicity and elegance that reminds me about what I love about her work, seeing the beautiful in the ordinary. The dance plays out in four simple movements, each capturing the progress of the seasons:

• Spring, the grass is small
• Summer, the grass grows tall and the sun shines
• Autumn, the leaves fall from the trees
• Winter, a shiver of cold

It repeats as the seasons do, one following the other as the years advance. A perfect line, a time line, leaving the marks of nature. 

Thankfully the Wuppertal Tanz Theater Continues, and with it, the call of the Nelken Line. Last year, tributes to Pina Bausch were being performed sponsored by the Pina Bausch Foundation as groups around the world picked up and started to perform their own variations of the Nelken Line and sharing  them on website 

I discovered that the Intrepid Dance Project was formulating its own tribute to add to the collection, and more importantly, invited to join along. 

So, here it is the Intrepid Dance Company’s tribute to Pina Bausch and her Nelken Line - traditional and circus. It’s unfortunate that Pina will not be creating any new works, but I hope

You enjoy this one, and fall a bit into her rabbit hole with me. 

Intrepid Dance Project Pina Bausch's Nelkin Line Circus Style! from Pina Bausch Foundation on Vimeo.