There's a quote I recall from the introduction to Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest in the Norton Anthology the first time I encountered the play years ago as a college undergraduate in an English Literature survey class. Something to effect:
Oscar Wilde's play held a mirror up to Victorian society and it died laughing at itself.
One way I've conceptualized comedy, especially satire, is as a kind of soft cultural version of Karl Popper's falsification principle. When applied successfully, it can change the way you look at the world by leading you to reject, or at least question, the status quo.
I was expecting this article to suggest something similar. It maybe halfway does?
According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.
Reaffirming who we are and making sense of the world in new ways sounds somewhat paradoxical. I suppose it implies a gradualist model of intellectual growth.
Of course, comedy and ridicule can also be deployed to reaffirm the status quo. But I've always found subversive humor more intellectually engaging.
Camus famously said that the only serious philosophical question is that of suicide. My impression is that some people see existentialism and the absurdist core of it as an almost nihilistic outlook on life, but I don't agree. Accepting that life is absurd, built on chance and completely lacks reason has for me been the only secular help to accept the random winds of fate that knocks your life over every now and then.
One of Camus best texts in my opinion, not only because of the beliefs expressed but only because of it's welcome brevity and concrete language compared to some other philosophers, is "The Myth of Sisyphus". Instead of painting Sisyphus as a suffering prisoner, he paints him as an absurdist hero with ideals that every human should aspire to.
Like the obsessive cleaning of surfaces in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", Camus states that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy": the struggle in itself is the meaning. And to my understanding, there's the core of existentialist belief: lacking any God-given, external purpose, we must accept our absurd position, and our individual responsibility to push our stones up the hill, and find happiness doing it.
"Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
I read this when I was very young and had something like a pre puberty existential crisis. Like you, this book and the thoughts expressed therein resonated with me and it is a view of the world that I have held dearly ever since. I always liked it particularly, because it makes life a comedy instead of a drama. Nihilism is much darker and feels very depressive to me. Existentialism is meaninglessness too, but with a smile.
Skimmed the piece but it reminds me: it seems there is a thin line between a psychotic and a mystic. But yes, once you expose yourself to a certain level of crazy and/or you come to see how everything appears insane and/or you see the mirage of necessity of it all, the rest of life feels like a gentle breeze. From here on out: detachment, joy, and peace. Nothing hinders you. Even more so: Your capacity to ground yourself in what-you-are - meaning, the unconditioned you, as gooey as that may sound - is proportional to the capacity that you can play life with lightness and humor. Although, that's not to say you won't suffer, you certainly will. But your conceptualization of suffering will be reconfigured and be understood as a sort of "good" thing - a necessary process for the evolution of your consciousness, if you will. As naive as all the above may sound.
I’ve found a good mix of Markus Aurelius and Soren Kierkegaard has equipped me quite well for most of what life could throw at me. I’m never particularly bothered by things beyond my control, and I’m typically quite happy with being in charge of those things I can control.
I can see how those two philosophers can well-equip you with a good metaphysical framework for life. I haven't read Aurelius's Meditations but it's lying around somewhere - in due time, I suppose. I failed an existentialism course not too long ago and it partly focused on Kierkegaard. The particular books I like from him are Works of Love and Fear and Trembling. If you are interested in more of his thinking, you might like the Danish drama film entitled Ordet (1955). Also, if you want to know more about his personal life, I liked this read: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeper-loves-flame-regin...
Thanks, I’ll give that movie a watch. Personally I think Either/Or is more significant than Fear and Trembling, but Fear and Trembling was ultimately more influential. Personally I see stoicism and leap-of-faith style absurdism as being quite complimentary. I find the leap of faith to be the most appealing resolution to the absurd, but I don’t think the existentialists were particularly successful in addressing anguish. The stoics on the other hand, excelled in this regard.
One of the questions I was thinking about when I took that course on existentialism is why might religious existentialism be superior, for lack of a better word, than vanilla existentialism. Research on that question led me to an essay titled "The Other Side of Despair" by Thomas Merton [1]. It's a really good read that I think you'll like. I like the reference and analysis of Kierkegaard's idea of "leveling" - a process "by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind" - which is a lot like "alienation" in modern day. Which also reminds me, I should check out Kierkegaard's The Present Age.
I’ve always thought it was because living a life with meaning requires faith in one way or another, and the Christian existentialists were simply more comfortable with the concept. The involvement of Christian theology really just muddies the waters imo, because the broader topic is really just about faith, and any effort to impart your own meaning (whether religious or otherwise) to your own life is naturally an act of faith. Kierkegaard was a Christian, but his philosophy revolves primarily around the concept of faith (believing something you can’t prove). Nietzsche was an atheist, but his Death of God was a rejection of faith in general as the basis for providing any meaning to life.
The leap of faith as a philosophical concept is not about religion. It’s the concept that a person can provide their own life with meaning, without any rational proof to support such a conclusion. If you find the work of Christian existentialists to be superior, it’s likely because you find the leap of faith to be the superior response to the absurd.
I don't understand this, can you help me understand? I can give you a uniformly random byte. I can also give you a byte distributed from normal distribution such that ~127 is more likely than 0 and 255. They'll both be a byte (same bits of information) but getting 0 in one of them will be be a lot more surprising than the other. How is unpredictability a measure of message's information content?
Hmm I believe you're correct. The answer to my problem above seems to be that even though information is encoded in 8 bits in both cases, one of them is a lot of more dense.
Predictability and compressibility are the same thing. For large enough quantities of bytes from that distribution, it'd be more efficient to transmit a compression scheme that mirrors the distribution of data you have to send, matching up shorter words on-the-wire with more common bytes.
Yeah, it feels like this can be expanded to explain a lot of things about nationalism and tribalism. And, perhaps a path to move people out of the narrow confines of that way of thinking.
Hmm, can’t relate to that and I think I’m exactly that category given that I also live abroad. If anything, I’ve never been more convinced of the uselessness of nationality.
Psychological experiments typically seem to feature really small sample sizes (often composing readily available students) and yet have what seems like a lot of unearned significance attached to their results, compared to what claims about drugs have to undergo before they are taken seriously.
Interesting view. It raises the question: What takes in each domain to be taken seriously? How do the prices of admission compare on each level (from deserving of attention to established theory)?
Anyone knows of a cross disciplinary study that benchmarks this?
>According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.
This paragraph reminds me of the famous quote from Agent Smith in first Matrix movie:
> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.
I think it’s successful as a practical joke in an emporer’s-new-clothes vein. Professional film critics can’t even agree on what the actual story told in the movie is, let alone any symbolism or allegory. David Lynch won’t give away the game that there is no narrative, no meaning. Thus the movie, and all criticism of it - including this comment - become a self-indulgent intellectual pissing contest where the only limit to what one can read into the movie is his or her own brilliance.
So? Movies are not just story (the curse of mainstream US cinema) but also mood, photography, aesthetic, poetical expression, and tons of other things besides. You can have all those things without the others...
And allegory is a pretty cheap trick in art. You don't need that either...
You wouldn't ask what an instrumental music piece "is about". Why ask it for a movie?
Yeah but there is a good way to pull it off, and there is a bad way to do it. E.g. the Room also has the premise that it is SO much more about than what is on the surface, but we all know that's a delusion and that the Room is a shallow piece of movie. M. Drive doesn't give that impression, we're left with "wait... what was this about?" feeling which, to me, means it's a great movie. If I left the movie with "this doesn't make any sense, someone must have had a stroke editing this movie" then it would be bad. I think Predestination is an example of movie that is done in a similar vein but is significantly worse (than M. Drive) as in if you hold it to some scrutiny it's clear there is no deeper meaning and it's just intended to be "mind-blowing" or whatever it means.
Another example is David Fincher's 1997 movie The Game.
Many directors tried this, yet none pulled it off like David Lynch. IMHO.
I'm not sure about The Room, I felt the same way when I saw it, but after briefly interacting with Tommy Wiseau it seems plausible to me that he's a bizarre satirist with a strange sense of humor playing the long game.
I agree that Mulholland Drive is art, though I don't think it's particularly good art and I don't like it much. What did you think of "David Lynch Interviews a Monkey?" AKA "What Did Jack Do?"
I have no opinion about Mulholland Drive (it's been literally 15 years since I saw it), but this reminds a bit of a friend who keeps telling me "Lost in Translation" is a bad movie because it's story is not very compelling. In that case, I think it's completely missing the point, since the story is really about the least that makes me like Lost in Translation so much.
I realize I'm arguing against a straw-man here. The point is: A movie is not just its story.
The older I get, the more I appreciate these kinds of movies. Lost in Translation and Chugking Express are some of my favorites, but I’d be hard-pressed to sell their plots to anyone elevator-pitch style.
7 months ago I would had agreed with you, but after watching (and enjoying!) this 4:30hs pretty plausible imo explanation of what Twin Peaks is about [1], I'm open to believe that other works of Lynch may actually have some idea or meaning behind :-)
I think you can enjoy the movie for what it is without getting into, as you put it, a "self-indulgent intellectual pissing context" - it's absurd, doesn't quite make a whole lot of sense, but that doesn't mean people can't enjoy it and think that it's good.
David Lynch truly is the most successful troll of all time, ironically achieving artistic depths through deliberate obfuscation and random ramblings.
I think it says far more about people, and what they are willing to accept as profound (or unwilling to discard as meaningless), than about David Lynch.
Oscar Wilde's play held a mirror up to Victorian society and it died laughing at itself.
One way I've conceptualized comedy, especially satire, is as a kind of soft cultural version of Karl Popper's falsification principle. When applied successfully, it can change the way you look at the world by leading you to reject, or at least question, the status quo.
I was expecting this article to suggest something similar. It maybe halfway does?
According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.
Reaffirming who we are and making sense of the world in new ways sounds somewhat paradoxical. I suppose it implies a gradualist model of intellectual growth.
Of course, comedy and ridicule can also be deployed to reaffirm the status quo. But I've always found subversive humor more intellectually engaging.