Derivation
Okay, what I am about to say may unsettle some people. If you find yourself dismissing this as philosophical babble, please do so without posting anything negative, or at least give me the benefit of the doubt that my views may possibly be right. If you find yourself relating to it, or even opposed to it, please give some feedback.
Well, I think I’ve always had some sort of connection to this idea I’m about to talk about, but I’ve only really begun to ponder about it these past three weeks. It began with reading Walker Percy’s Moviegoer in English class. It’s about this guy, Binx, who undergoes a search for the meaning / purpose of life but, in the end, gives up the search. After reading the ending, I gave deliberate thought to the many themes presented in the book: primarily, the distinction between science and romanticism. I like to think that Binx was caught between the two and was searching for a higher truth on a level above either one: I summed him up as a “romanticist by emotion, an analyst by nature [since he was always analyzing everything], and an Anyone by choice [since he decides to abandon his search at the end and submits to convention].” What attracted me to Moviegoer was the fact that I found Binx so much of a resemblance of myself. I shared his romanticist / analyst dual personality and was as much of an atheist as he was (owing to an incapability of intimacy). This was when I collected my preliminary thoughts for the idea, though I thought of myself as merely exercising my brain at the time.
Fast forward one week past Thanksgiving break. In English, we are now reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeannette Winterson. It’s a highly autobiographical novel about a girl coming to terms with her sexuality and rejecting the religious life imposed by her mother. There’s a huge amount of religious analogy, allusion, and symbolism in the book, and so at first, being the atheist that I am, I found the religious content a boring turn-off. This led me to attempt to repudiate religion as a whole. I couldn’t find any means of doing it, needless to say, but I did arrive at an interesting insight which helped formulate my idea. It went something like this. When one thinks religiously, he is using his senses of emotion. When one thinks scientifically, he is using his senses of reason. I claim no expertise in neuro-science, but I’m pretty sure that when you think emotionally versus when you think rationally, you use two different parts of your brain. This is the difference between emotionalism and rationalism. Therefore, religion and science are just merely two different methods of thinking; neither one is right or wrong - they are merely different. And to believe in either one, you must first accept a series of postulates, and based on those postulates, everything that follows constitutes what we call ‘religion’ and ‘science.’
What followed was a barrage of questions I struggled to answer. The first came from pondering about my relationship with my parents (a.k.a. my dad and my stepmom). I’m not very close to them, they hardly know me, and I (although I hate to admit it) don’t feel very much devotion to them. This made me question the origin, meaning, and significance of obligation. I worked out that obligation was something one perceives to be a necessary action / feeling to take / have. I figured out that it may arise from emotional or rational thought, though this clarity only came after re-thinking certain cases. I reasoned that one has an “obligation” to his government simply because government is a man-made institution: man designed government to protect himself and, thus, shares an obligation toward government by default. This is only untrue if an individual is totally independent of government, which is pretty damn hard. I reasoned that one holds an “obligation” towards his society because, like government, man created an order called society to protect himself (strength in numbers outweighed the strength of one) and, thus, held an obligation to it in return for that protection. For both cases, that of government and society, I explained obligation in terms of rational terms. I even went as far as using rational thought to justify obligation towards others (non-family members). What one perceives as a “friend” may only be an individual he uses in order to provide for his own happiness and well-being. But when I tried to rationalize obligation towards one’s parents, I hit a brick wall. And it dawned upon me: obligation must also come from love, or feelings of emotion, and in cases like these, rationalization fails to justify it. The bricks on the wall suddenly hit my head as I wondered what this meant for my own relationship with my parents. My parents loved me, had provided so much for me, and felt obligated to do so; yet where was my sense of obligation?
I started to question the validity of social conventions. What was wrong with murder? There was no absolute law in the universe that labeled murder as a “wrong.” I came to a temporary conclusion that standards such as social conventions were merely to impose order onto society. They were for “un-enlightened” people who didn’t know better, not for those like me who possessed a greater understanding of the world.
Math class also provided me with a funny parallel. In my BC Calculus class, I brought up a question involving complex numbers, which I had shown plenty of interest in (some may call it obsession, since I managed to integrate exponential / sinusoidal functions by substituting in imaginary numbers). My teacher proceeded to give a short proof of why it was impossible to impose order on imaginary numbers, unlike with the real number system. Back in my room, I came up with the following. Rationalism is thinking on the real number line, while emotionalism is thinking on the imaginary number line. Both are linear progressions of thought, and if one were to think either entirely rationally or entirely emotionally, he would be able to impose order in his own world. Add the two together, and you get the complex thought system, an order-less world involving two components, a rational variable and an emotional variable. This is my greatest parallel to date.
At this point of my existence, I have three lives: an academic life, a social life, and a love life. I knew that the first was one entirely ruled by rational thought, the third was emotion-oriented, and the second was an intermediate point in between them. I had figured out the year before that my academic life was stimulated whenever I had a love interest in mind. This was also a point Binx makes in Moviegoer. I believed that, at least for me, work and love held a symbiotic, a mutually beneficial relationship. But I was also a heavy rationalist. “I’d love to be in a relationship, but would opening myself to emotional, or irrational, thought, then, be dangerous?” I thought to myself. After all, there would be the danger of emotional thought overpowering my ability to reason, something I was proud to be adept at. I then arrived at the possibility that maybe love wouldn’t totally overthrow my senses of reason, as long as I kept it in control. Love would simply allow me to venture into territory otherwise inaccessible if I stuck with reason. Instead of regarding it as an absolute good or an absolute bad, I saw that it would only serve as the second variable in my decisions (the first being rational thought), not to mention a more influential one. Love can quickly and effectively dictate a person’s actions. In very few cases is reason the driving motivation behind a course of action. One of the few examples I can think of is George Washington, one of the most impartial presidents the United States has had - he discouraged the rise of biased national parties and acted out of the good of the nation, never once judging or acting out of his own personal convictions or prejudices.
This denial of absolutes was something I had taught myself to do a while ago. But a revelation came to me in the form of the chapter “Leviticus” in Oranges. Inside is a parable about a prince who searches for perfection and thinks he finds it when he encounters a beautiful lady. The lady tells him that he is mistaken for people do not search for perfection; rather they seek harmony, a balance of weights and counterweights. Now this idea, for some strange reason, had never occurred to me until now. I had always steered away from thinking in terms of absolutes, but my logic was that absolutes were meaningless if you tried to exterminate one and retain its opposite. For example, if you attempted to create a perfect ‘good’ world, how would you know it was ‘good’ if you didn’t have anything ‘bad’ to compare it to. After all, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are all relative. My theory of Adam and Eve was that: their eating the apple didn’t throw them into a state of sin - it merely started man (and woman) at a neutral “zero” point and gave him the choice to decide between good and bad. I had never considered, though, that paradise may indeed exist when an equilibrium between two extremes is reached. This realization of harmony was soon to come into play in the entire scheme of my idea.
On the plane back to California, in fact, yesterday, I was caught in contemplation again, though I do not remember exactly what about it was. I figure I must have been trying to piece together everything I had discovered during the past three weeks. And today, I finally found the answer - if not the answer, than an answer. My stepmom was complaining to me this afternoon about how I was showing no devotion to my dad or her, that I should call them more often and keep them informed about my daily life otherwise we would become total strangers by the time I entered college, and that I should keep in closer touch with my cousins because relatives would always be there - they were permanent, unlike friends who would come and go. During the three hours I spent in the car today, I realized how self-centered I was in determining my philosophies. Rationalism was perfect if you felt no need to connect with other individuals (which, by the way, is the purpose of art, as Jeannette Winterson claims in an essay on art). Yes, I could fake a bond with my cousins if I felt the need for security, in case I had no one left, yet that idea held little substance to me. Was I selfish because I had chosen to be selfish? Maybe I felt little or no obligation toward my parents because I chose to feel so. Yes, I am the way I am because I choose to be so. I may define myself as I please, and this freedom comes from my own selfishness. I had debated between religion and science, between rationalism and emotionalism, and contemplated how each could benefit or harm me. I felt no sense of obligation unless it was for my own good because the objects of my concern were not the subjects whom I directed my obligation towards but me. I questioned standards, society, and order. But why? Because I cared about nobody but me. The search for harmony - if I ever do find it, the only person that will benefit is me. By embracing this selfishness and obsessing over my own welfare, I had embraced human nature, human selfishness. “But what did this idea remind me of? I am because I choose so …I don’t know much about it but this really does seem like …
And, thus, had I derived the fundamentals of existentialism.
I hadn’t covered all the basics of the philosophy, as I discovered at home upon visiting some websites talking about existentialism. I had conceived some form of subjectivity - man defining himself and his morals by deciding who he is - but had not realized the consequence of such a decision, that man is responsible for his decision, his definition, and where it leads. I also missed that, even though man may define himself, his environment limits his actions. And there are a few existentialist views that I disagree with. One is this: some believe that religion, specifically Christianity, is “the only commitment that can save one from despair,” but I think that devoting yourself to one train of thought - rationalism or, as in this case, emotionalism - is simply an easy, cowardly way out, just a way to avoid dealing with despair. Second: the insider perspective of one experiencing something is more valid than any outside one. I have always lived by a code of open-mindedness and lack of bias. I have taken that to imply that outsider perspectives are more impartial, and, therefore, valid, than insider ones. Evidently (and based on the principles of existentialism), I may be wrong. After all, the bias of a person may be his own definition of himself and, therefore, the most legitimate of all.
I find it interesting that the human race should challenge its current situation and arrive back at where it started. We all take for granted that having a bias is a bad thing, that being impartial is the noble thing to do. But where do we arrive after existentialism? Exactly where we started, this crazy high regard for personal bias. We take devotion to religion and science to be everyday facts. There are religiously devout individuals and scientists alike. Yet when we try to search for something beyond rationalism and emotionalism, a nonexistent set of universal ideals which we may follow in order to impose order on our lives, we arrive at existentialism, and we find ourselves, as impossible as it is due to human nature (or condition, as existentialists say), trying to sacrifice one and fully embrace the other, all as a desperate attempt to find order. I do believe though that there is a concept of which existentialism is a part of. Existentialism and special relativity are two concepts that were based on an impossibility of uniform perspective. But just as general relativity provides a more general answer than mere special relativity, there should be a "general existentialism" inclusive of the "special existentialism" that exists today.
But, regardless, where do I go now? I know I have to find the right balance, the perfect harmony, between rationalism and romanticism. I know that I have to redefine my ideals, my morals, yet I’m afraid that if I do, I shall be limiting myself. Yet if I fail to do so, I risk losing my family, and I shall be left in this state of emptiness, no morals, nothing to live by, nothing to live for. Right now, I am in a state of, I guess what they term it as, anxiety: I am confronted with “nothingness and the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices I must make.” What the fuck. Existentialism is scary. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll put this aside for after college applications. And winter term, I’ll try to switch from my Zen Buddhism class to Existentialism, and I’ll settle whatever remaining questions linger. Existentialism is scary. My advice is not to confront it if you don’t have to.
Well, I think I’ve always had some sort of connection to this idea I’m about to talk about, but I’ve only really begun to ponder about it these past three weeks. It began with reading Walker Percy’s Moviegoer in English class. It’s about this guy, Binx, who undergoes a search for the meaning / purpose of life but, in the end, gives up the search. After reading the ending, I gave deliberate thought to the many themes presented in the book: primarily, the distinction between science and romanticism. I like to think that Binx was caught between the two and was searching for a higher truth on a level above either one: I summed him up as a “romanticist by emotion, an analyst by nature [since he was always analyzing everything], and an Anyone by choice [since he decides to abandon his search at the end and submits to convention].” What attracted me to Moviegoer was the fact that I found Binx so much of a resemblance of myself. I shared his romanticist / analyst dual personality and was as much of an atheist as he was (owing to an incapability of intimacy). This was when I collected my preliminary thoughts for the idea, though I thought of myself as merely exercising my brain at the time.
Fast forward one week past Thanksgiving break. In English, we are now reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeannette Winterson. It’s a highly autobiographical novel about a girl coming to terms with her sexuality and rejecting the religious life imposed by her mother. There’s a huge amount of religious analogy, allusion, and symbolism in the book, and so at first, being the atheist that I am, I found the religious content a boring turn-off. This led me to attempt to repudiate religion as a whole. I couldn’t find any means of doing it, needless to say, but I did arrive at an interesting insight which helped formulate my idea. It went something like this. When one thinks religiously, he is using his senses of emotion. When one thinks scientifically, he is using his senses of reason. I claim no expertise in neuro-science, but I’m pretty sure that when you think emotionally versus when you think rationally, you use two different parts of your brain. This is the difference between emotionalism and rationalism. Therefore, religion and science are just merely two different methods of thinking; neither one is right or wrong - they are merely different. And to believe in either one, you must first accept a series of postulates, and based on those postulates, everything that follows constitutes what we call ‘religion’ and ‘science.’
What followed was a barrage of questions I struggled to answer. The first came from pondering about my relationship with my parents (a.k.a. my dad and my stepmom). I’m not very close to them, they hardly know me, and I (although I hate to admit it) don’t feel very much devotion to them. This made me question the origin, meaning, and significance of obligation. I worked out that obligation was something one perceives to be a necessary action / feeling to take / have. I figured out that it may arise from emotional or rational thought, though this clarity only came after re-thinking certain cases. I reasoned that one has an “obligation” to his government simply because government is a man-made institution: man designed government to protect himself and, thus, shares an obligation toward government by default. This is only untrue if an individual is totally independent of government, which is pretty damn hard. I reasoned that one holds an “obligation” towards his society because, like government, man created an order called society to protect himself (strength in numbers outweighed the strength of one) and, thus, held an obligation to it in return for that protection. For both cases, that of government and society, I explained obligation in terms of rational terms. I even went as far as using rational thought to justify obligation towards others (non-family members). What one perceives as a “friend” may only be an individual he uses in order to provide for his own happiness and well-being. But when I tried to rationalize obligation towards one’s parents, I hit a brick wall. And it dawned upon me: obligation must also come from love, or feelings of emotion, and in cases like these, rationalization fails to justify it. The bricks on the wall suddenly hit my head as I wondered what this meant for my own relationship with my parents. My parents loved me, had provided so much for me, and felt obligated to do so; yet where was my sense of obligation?
I started to question the validity of social conventions. What was wrong with murder? There was no absolute law in the universe that labeled murder as a “wrong.” I came to a temporary conclusion that standards such as social conventions were merely to impose order onto society. They were for “un-enlightened” people who didn’t know better, not for those like me who possessed a greater understanding of the world.
Math class also provided me with a funny parallel. In my BC Calculus class, I brought up a question involving complex numbers, which I had shown plenty of interest in (some may call it obsession, since I managed to integrate exponential / sinusoidal functions by substituting in imaginary numbers). My teacher proceeded to give a short proof of why it was impossible to impose order on imaginary numbers, unlike with the real number system. Back in my room, I came up with the following. Rationalism is thinking on the real number line, while emotionalism is thinking on the imaginary number line. Both are linear progressions of thought, and if one were to think either entirely rationally or entirely emotionally, he would be able to impose order in his own world. Add the two together, and you get the complex thought system, an order-less world involving two components, a rational variable and an emotional variable. This is my greatest parallel to date.
At this point of my existence, I have three lives: an academic life, a social life, and a love life. I knew that the first was one entirely ruled by rational thought, the third was emotion-oriented, and the second was an intermediate point in between them. I had figured out the year before that my academic life was stimulated whenever I had a love interest in mind. This was also a point Binx makes in Moviegoer. I believed that, at least for me, work and love held a symbiotic, a mutually beneficial relationship. But I was also a heavy rationalist. “I’d love to be in a relationship, but would opening myself to emotional, or irrational, thought, then, be dangerous?” I thought to myself. After all, there would be the danger of emotional thought overpowering my ability to reason, something I was proud to be adept at. I then arrived at the possibility that maybe love wouldn’t totally overthrow my senses of reason, as long as I kept it in control. Love would simply allow me to venture into territory otherwise inaccessible if I stuck with reason. Instead of regarding it as an absolute good or an absolute bad, I saw that it would only serve as the second variable in my decisions (the first being rational thought), not to mention a more influential one. Love can quickly and effectively dictate a person’s actions. In very few cases is reason the driving motivation behind a course of action. One of the few examples I can think of is George Washington, one of the most impartial presidents the United States has had - he discouraged the rise of biased national parties and acted out of the good of the nation, never once judging or acting out of his own personal convictions or prejudices.
This denial of absolutes was something I had taught myself to do a while ago. But a revelation came to me in the form of the chapter “Leviticus” in Oranges. Inside is a parable about a prince who searches for perfection and thinks he finds it when he encounters a beautiful lady. The lady tells him that he is mistaken for people do not search for perfection; rather they seek harmony, a balance of weights and counterweights. Now this idea, for some strange reason, had never occurred to me until now. I had always steered away from thinking in terms of absolutes, but my logic was that absolutes were meaningless if you tried to exterminate one and retain its opposite. For example, if you attempted to create a perfect ‘good’ world, how would you know it was ‘good’ if you didn’t have anything ‘bad’ to compare it to. After all, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are all relative. My theory of Adam and Eve was that: their eating the apple didn’t throw them into a state of sin - it merely started man (and woman) at a neutral “zero” point and gave him the choice to decide between good and bad. I had never considered, though, that paradise may indeed exist when an equilibrium between two extremes is reached. This realization of harmony was soon to come into play in the entire scheme of my idea.
On the plane back to California, in fact, yesterday, I was caught in contemplation again, though I do not remember exactly what about it was. I figure I must have been trying to piece together everything I had discovered during the past three weeks. And today, I finally found the answer - if not the answer, than an answer. My stepmom was complaining to me this afternoon about how I was showing no devotion to my dad or her, that I should call them more often and keep them informed about my daily life otherwise we would become total strangers by the time I entered college, and that I should keep in closer touch with my cousins because relatives would always be there - they were permanent, unlike friends who would come and go. During the three hours I spent in the car today, I realized how self-centered I was in determining my philosophies. Rationalism was perfect if you felt no need to connect with other individuals (which, by the way, is the purpose of art, as Jeannette Winterson claims in an essay on art). Yes, I could fake a bond with my cousins if I felt the need for security, in case I had no one left, yet that idea held little substance to me. Was I selfish because I had chosen to be selfish? Maybe I felt little or no obligation toward my parents because I chose to feel so. Yes, I am the way I am because I choose to be so. I may define myself as I please, and this freedom comes from my own selfishness. I had debated between religion and science, between rationalism and emotionalism, and contemplated how each could benefit or harm me. I felt no sense of obligation unless it was for my own good because the objects of my concern were not the subjects whom I directed my obligation towards but me. I questioned standards, society, and order. But why? Because I cared about nobody but me. The search for harmony - if I ever do find it, the only person that will benefit is me. By embracing this selfishness and obsessing over my own welfare, I had embraced human nature, human selfishness. “But what did this idea remind me of? I am because I choose so …I don’t know much about it but this really does seem like …
And, thus, had I derived the fundamentals of existentialism.
I hadn’t covered all the basics of the philosophy, as I discovered at home upon visiting some websites talking about existentialism. I had conceived some form of subjectivity - man defining himself and his morals by deciding who he is - but had not realized the consequence of such a decision, that man is responsible for his decision, his definition, and where it leads. I also missed that, even though man may define himself, his environment limits his actions. And there are a few existentialist views that I disagree with. One is this: some believe that religion, specifically Christianity, is “the only commitment that can save one from despair,” but I think that devoting yourself to one train of thought - rationalism or, as in this case, emotionalism - is simply an easy, cowardly way out, just a way to avoid dealing with despair. Second: the insider perspective of one experiencing something is more valid than any outside one. I have always lived by a code of open-mindedness and lack of bias. I have taken that to imply that outsider perspectives are more impartial, and, therefore, valid, than insider ones. Evidently (and based on the principles of existentialism), I may be wrong. After all, the bias of a person may be his own definition of himself and, therefore, the most legitimate of all.
I find it interesting that the human race should challenge its current situation and arrive back at where it started. We all take for granted that having a bias is a bad thing, that being impartial is the noble thing to do. But where do we arrive after existentialism? Exactly where we started, this crazy high regard for personal bias. We take devotion to religion and science to be everyday facts. There are religiously devout individuals and scientists alike. Yet when we try to search for something beyond rationalism and emotionalism, a nonexistent set of universal ideals which we may follow in order to impose order on our lives, we arrive at existentialism, and we find ourselves, as impossible as it is due to human nature (or condition, as existentialists say), trying to sacrifice one and fully embrace the other, all as a desperate attempt to find order. I do believe though that there is a concept of which existentialism is a part of. Existentialism and special relativity are two concepts that were based on an impossibility of uniform perspective. But just as general relativity provides a more general answer than mere special relativity, there should be a "general existentialism" inclusive of the "special existentialism" that exists today.
But, regardless, where do I go now? I know I have to find the right balance, the perfect harmony, between rationalism and romanticism. I know that I have to redefine my ideals, my morals, yet I’m afraid that if I do, I shall be limiting myself. Yet if I fail to do so, I risk losing my family, and I shall be left in this state of emptiness, no morals, nothing to live by, nothing to live for. Right now, I am in a state of, I guess what they term it as, anxiety: I am confronted with “nothingness and the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices I must make.” What the fuck. Existentialism is scary. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll put this aside for after college applications. And winter term, I’ll try to switch from my Zen Buddhism class to Existentialism, and I’ll settle whatever remaining questions linger. Existentialism is scary. My advice is not to confront it if you don’t have to.