hell is other people

Huis Clos (i think "through the keyhole") translated to No Exit and In Camera in English is Sartre's most famous novel, "Hell is other people" contained therein. I much prefer Sartre's style in his plays, perhaps because he is forced to "show and not tell" if that's the rule.

This little scene of hell is used to demonstrate the philosophical idea of Mauvaise Foi (Bad Faith) - Sartre's main component of his moral philosophy. There are two aspects shown in these characters: 1) they cannot convince themselves of their own authenticity and 2) they cannot convince the others. "Hell is other people" then articulates the idea that as long as other people are around, we're not ever going to be able to convince ourselves that we're okay. One is in Bad faith when one relegates a moral decision to some form that exists outside ourselves: e.g. I can't steal that bread because I'm a Christian. The tenet is one then that stems from Nietzschean directives to reinvent one's values. The three characters crimes are thus: Garcin - flees conscription, claiming to be a pacifist, he now tries to convince the others and himself that he is not a cowaard, Estelle - commits matricide, driving a lover to commit suicide, her bad faith is then a denial that she held any responsibility toward her man or her child, and Ines - A Lesbian who is killed by her female lover in a double suicide after they conspired to kill the lover's husband, again, she seems to blame her actions on "who she is" rather than accepting her absolute freedom.

Sartre's characters are never particularly likable, but this play carries so much interest - trying to find out what happened, how they will react to each other etc. - that it is enthralling. As a side-note, it does seem like the first job of any new moral philosophy requires accepted moral rights and wrongs to find a place within its framework - always is interesting though! At one point Camus was going to act as Garcin in this play, but I think it ended up falling through - it's a part of how their friendship started.

Cogito Ergo Sum

I am obliged to respect Descartes for his mathematical innovations (Cartesian co-ordinates allowing the marriage of geometry and algebra, index representation of powers, and others), and of course, "I think, therefore I am" is an important step in the philosophies of identity and epistemology (although I'm not sure everyone who refers to it knows how it's intended). His philosophical discourse in this book is one of those that spends a lot of time trying to reconcile notions of God, heaven, the soul etc., with logical sense. On this account, I think it fails - however, it is quite delightful to read the writings of such a pompous and arrogant man. He is so preoccupied with hes greatness, quite oblivious to the ridiculous impression he makes. I guess there's something typically French about it, which makes it entertaining rather than boring - he reminds me of the cousin in the BBC pride and prejudice, Mr. Collins (hopefully more charismatic... dressed up in his 17th century fashionable French attire).

An interesting side-note of this book is that Descartes self-censored some of his ideas, given the controversy surrounding Galileo in the preceding years. Galileo's ridiculous idea that the Earth might revolve around the Sun earned him a spot on the Heretics for Burning List, and some of Descartes ideas about the origins of mind and knowledge could have landed him in similar strife.

A brave new unconscious civilisation

I read John Ralston Saul's Unconscious Civilisation when I was trying to get into politics. I'd recently purchased the Oxford Companion to World Politics in order to better understand the US election process, and my brother-in-law recommended Unconscious Civilisation because it was about where he stood. Since then I have seen Ralston Saul give a lecture on his book The Collapse of Globalism, and he's quite an interesting speaker.

He comes from an economics background, and has ideas that are probably centre-left - which is good because it's progressive but realistic. It's one of those books (indeed, he's one of those writers/speakers) that looks at conventions of today and questions their necessity. Of note, intellectual property laws that stopped a condom maker from making "Stealth Condoms" because the shape of the stealth bomber is patented, and the elitist culture where leaders drive public interest rather than respond to it as per democracy. Obviously there's some room for debate here - perhaps one of the reasons most of us have hope in Obama is that he's likely to orient the public toward "better" interests, but when stakeholders and the elite get together things can go wrong.

A most interesting line in this book is his mention of 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Huxley's book I think came out in the 30s, a decade or so before 1984, but I guess they are roughly written around the same time in our unconscious - what Ralston Saul points out is that we have been so preoccupied with warning against the bleak 1984 future, and virtually no mention is made of Brave New World - even though it's much closer to where our society is headed and probably far more dangerous.

Brave New World manufactures 5 classes of citizens by adding a little alcohol to the test-tube babies in different doses, and inculcating the societal roles from a young age. Sex is no longer needed to reproduce, so partnership becomes redundant and indicative of an unhealthy lifestyle. Once again, the point isn't to predict "hey, we might become this test-tube society - isn't that strange and terrible?", but rather every aspect of the society is somehow related to our own. We are brought up culturally to recognise tiers of society, keep to our own limitations and not try to upset the order, and we get plenty of messages from government and advertising companies that reinforce this, even if we don't really think it should be the case.

Oh yeah, plus the THC drug in it, rad stuff.

1984 and v for vendetta

People (that I talk to) seem to respond differently to Orwell's 1984. One friend seemed to think that it was not a masterpiece like Animal Farm. Others find it morbid and depressing. Some focus on the big brother aspect - perhaps having watched big brother but not having read the book... Indeed, future fiction will always be tied to the issue of its prediction accuracy - like how people seem to like saying "Stem-cell research - it'll be just like Gattaca" or "CCTV cameras - it's just like 1984" - that sort of stuff.

I felt like Animal Farm set the blueprint, and then 1984 really fleshed out the ideas, making it far more intense. I don't see it as a "look what might happen if..."-book because most of its central themes are relevant and tangible to current, everyday life. I find myself repeatedly thinking of the lines "underneath the chestnut tree, i sold you and you sold me". I think the love-story here, and the issue of what it means to betray someone, is one of the lasting impressions of the book - this concept exists outside all the futuristic themes of the book. Sometimes things we thought we'd never relinquish just aren't worth holding on to.

The exploration of newspeak also is philosophically brilliant (i'm pretty sure it gets its own entry in the Oxford companion to philosophy), and is psychologically and linguistically thought provoking.

I find it funny that the movie with John Hurt is not more renowned. Despite its age I think it captures the world pretty perfectly - I must watch it again. On a related note, I found V for Vendetta surprisingly good - like a 1984 world with a superhero. John Hurt plays the big brother character in this which i'm sure must have been deliberate - crazy that they got away with speeches about the "significance of blowing up a building", so soon after Sep 11 (well... 5 years... but still). Anyway, that impressed me.

Simon Heselev uses Vonnegut

Interestingly, I probably owe much of my reading enjoyment today to Simon Heselev (a melbourne music guy). He released a song called Tock Tick, a nice jazzy, post rock type track, which has Kurt Vonnegut reading a section from Slaughterhouse 5 (I had, of course, heard about Slaughterhouse 5 and its classic-ness from the movie Footloose, "classic in any time!"). Anyway, so I went to read it, and it was the first novel I'd read in about 6 years. Before that, I'd read David Eddings books, and other than skimming year 11 and 12 texts I hadn't really touched literature. So yes, Simon Heselev, and whoever it is that wrote that lovely anti-american-policy book "Rogue State" got me into reading - and Slaughterhouse 5 can hence be considered a sort of "first book".

Vonnegut's style is one of dry humour, with observations throughout that just make you think "wasn't it nice to notice that?!". I see Slaughterhouse 5, really, as a consolation to the human condition. It is proclaimed by Vonnegut himself as his "anti-war" book, centralising around the firebombing of Dresden (although the story goes most places in space and time). The repetitions throughout of the serenity prayer and the resolve "and so it goes" whenever anything dies (including the Champagne), I think portray an almost melancollie acceptance concerning the meaningless disappointments and trials of life. The aliens who visit Billy Pilgrim see time all-at-once (not linearly), so someone dying isn't sad, because it's already happened and they still exist at all those moments where they were alive. Billy looks at his life, and says, all-at-once, it's okay. I do like this philosophy, and I think it's one that has stayed with me since I read this.

I have conflicting feelings of loving Kurt Vonnegut, and simultaneously recognising that he may not be that great an author. After I read Breakfast of Champions, I thought perhaps I didn't need any more Vonnegut - although this particular Vonnegut does have the awesome consciousness given to a character who recognises that he is being controlled by a narrator, who decides to visit him in a cafe during the book... "Stranger than Fiction" may have borrowed from here, or there could be an heirarchical superatom.

I reneged on the idea to discount Vonnegut on my reading list to read his final rant, Man without a country. I wrote a letter after this, to which he replied (although perhaps not individually), but he has nice sentiments... if this isn't good I don't know what is!