The apple just is

A reader commented on my post about Sarte's novel La Nausée, and since I had forgotten about the post I figured I'd do a follow up. The original post was about my discovery that Sarte wrote the book -- a book that had a huge influence in promoting existentialism -- after a bad mescaline trip. I wondered if the book would have had a more uplifting tone had his reportedly one-time drug experience been a good one.

Wow, that is incredible insight. Indeed people who are famous have wrote incredible works through what society calls illegitimate means. La Nausee is probably a "bad trip", however, most people don't want to think of that angle. That life is pointless is a dark way to look at life but there is comfort in that fact as well.

First, thanks for recognizing my brilliance : ) Seriously, though, it is interesting. Both camps, the mystics and the existentialists, say pretty similar things, that dissolving buffers will present a direct encounter with existence. I've heard this explained (forget where) as the difficulty in describing "appleness". You can never really convey the is-ness of an apple because in doing so you automatically remove yourself from the direct experience of the apple. You can say the apple is red, or the apple is juicy, or the apple is sweet, but those are all signifiers. You fill the description with symbols meant to represent the apple, but of course that's not the apple itself. The symbols are at least one step back from the apple.

Mystics and existentialists alike figure that if you can get past these obstacles you encounter pure and true reality. After this agreement, they then part ways. The mystic walks away with a sense of nondual connectedness and meaning, and the existentialist walks away seeing no connections beyond those created outside of the pure awareness.

In Sarte's book the lack of connections was viewed with anxiety and -- hence the title -- nausea. I didn't realize before then that this negative view of existence was prompted by a bad drug trip -- something that by all accounts (never taken mescaline myself) gets the adrenaline flowing, causing anxiety. That's the exact experience portrayed in the novel, that when presented with pure existence, the protagonist felt anxious and partly horrified.

This is not to say existentialism is all bad, or negative by itself sans-Sarte. It is primarily concerned with finding individual meaning, not jettisoning meaning altogether. It's just a more depressing view than the mystics' who hold that everything is interconnected. Ahem, a mystic would look at all the interconnected events that led up to Sarte taking mescaline in 1935, and all the events thereafter, including the growth of existentialism itself, and the fine-lines between good experiences and bad ones, and call the complete story inspired. Then again, the existentialist would view those apparent connections as an inspired choice.

Basically, for a bad drug trip to have been one of the sparks of the movement is surprising because many report pleasurable mescaline trips. It could have gone either direction. In a way it makes you wonder if true existentialism isn't somehow betrayed by Sarte's book. Strictly speaking, "good" and "bad" are themselves signifiers removed from any direct experience. Adjectives are never direct. Peyote may be good or bad. The apple just is.

Poignant guides to computer languages

So RTFM stands for "Read the Fucking Manual," implying that not many do. Can you blame them? Most manuals and computer books are ultra-stuffy and boring. Well, here's one you'll actually enjoy reading. It's poignant. The freely available book, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, is part programming manual, part comic book, part journal, and all art. I've never seen a computer book like this, but I hope I'll see a lot more of them in the future. In-depth coverage of the Ruby programming language coupled with an almost punk zine story telling.

Check it out, it's free!

Excerpt:

My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accomodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

Le nausée ou la bonheur?

One of the most depressing books I've read is La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sarte (1938). It's not the ideas in the book that depress me. It's the tone. As the story unfolds, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin begins to feel a "sweetish sickness" emanating from mundane objects — a crumpled piece of paper, a rock on the beach, a man's tie — and this nauseous feeling begins to overshadow everything he once enjoyed. Over time, he begins to realize that he has somehow pierced the veil and is seeing objects in their pure being. They no longer have qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all descriptors are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure existence.

Roquentin is immediately repulsed. He feels contempt for what he has discovered; he feels a pure disgust towards existence.

Sounds uplifiting, doesn't it?

Like I said, it's not the idea that depresses me. The idea is the central idea of Existentialism, which isn't so bad or depressing in itself. In fact, La Nausée is one of the canonical works of Existentialism and helped to foster it's growth. No, it's completely the tone. When reading, you identify with Antoine Roquentin. You begin to feel the nausea yourself. You begin to feel a repulsion towards existence wondering why something instead of nothing? You see, purely existential objects are devoid of the connections that cause meaning. In fact, existentialists feel that in human existence there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at its core. Finding a way to counter this nothingness, find meaning by embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of Existentialism.

The odd thing is that mystics also concern themselves with dissolving descriptors to get at pure existence. That is, mystics maintain that pure being is neither bad nor good, it just is. It's literally a nondual awareness beyond anything that can be described.

That's what prompted this post, riding on earlier posts talking about the work of Ken Wilber, arguably a mystic. Upon encountering pure being, existentialists walk away repulsed, horrified, and disgusted. Mystics walk away engaged. Why such polemic reactions to the same pureness? Well, my own feeling is that mystics build up to pure awareness, and that there is positive meaning in that process, where existentialists reduce to pure awareness, jettisoning anything that could be considered postive. And then...

There's something I didn't know before today. Years ago when I read that depressing book I didn't realize why it suggested pure existential awareness is something to recoil from. Don't get me wrong, it could be. It could be horrifying. What I'm arguing, though, is that there are at least two ways to react when encountering it. Apparently Sarte's was a bad trip.

Thomas Riedlinger, a contributing author to Charles Grob's book Hallucinogens, writes:

"Although awareness of the use of hallucinogens by prominent individuals in society is generally restricted to the period of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, these compounds were available earlier in the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre, renowned French philosopher and a founder of Existentialism, had a single mescaline experience in 1935. He encountered a nightmarish vision, which clung to him for months after and became the inspiration for his acclaimed novel Nausea."

Nice. One of the most influential philosophical movements of the twentieth century and it was inspired at least in part by a bad mescaline trip. It makes you wonder what Sarte's tone would have been had it been a good trip. La Bonheur?

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy

I'm re-reading two books by Ken Wilber. The first is One Taste, his personal journal kept over the course of a year (1997), and the second is The Marriage of Sense and Soul, which is his attempt to integrate, or at least find common ground between, the often at odds realms of science and religion. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I all that scientific. I am always interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, however, and have more than a passing interest in how we actually come to know or believe in things. I don't think religion corners the market on that, and neither does science since it's always in process. Free thought is what I'm about, but in coming up with a consensual reality there has to be some agreement on what's valid ways of knowing something.

Typically in science a valid idea is one that has been put through the scientific method and arrived unscathed on the other side. It's been tested and confirmed to be true. That's an extremely simplified version of events, however. There's actually a lot of debate in the epistemology of science over what makes up the scientific method and what things can actually be tested. This is a pretty good question if we're setting out to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How do you test ideas that on the surface seem entirely subjective?

Wilber says it has a lot to do with having an injunction, an idea he borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). An injunction, as Wilber uses it, is some type of action that one can perform to test an idea. As he puts it: If you do this, you get that. I should point out that Ken Wilber is widely considered to be one of the leading philosophers of our age, working on what he describes as an Integral Theory of Everything. In the case of science testing spiritual beliefs, the injunction Wilber suggests is meditation. If you perform meditation or contemplative awareness, you get X. X, he feels can be confirmed by anyone who performs the injunction. In other words, something seemingly subjective becomes objective by comparing the results of the injunction with the experience of peers who have also performed the injunction. This technically satisfies the testability part of the scientific method (the injunction is the observation), and the repeatablity part of the scientific method (the confirmation of peers who have also performed the injunction). He explains it much better than I in The Marriage of Sense and Soul. It's not half as crazy as it sounds.

Hey, maybe it is a bridge between science and religion. If nothing else, it at least hooks sense and soul up for a one night stand, even if it doesn't go so far as marry the two. Sadly, though, it's unlikely to be adopted anytime soon. Those two camps have been at each other's throats since around the Middle Ages. If they were actually a couple, Dr. Phil would have advised them to part company long ago. The other problem is that most practitioners of contemplative awareness generally agree that you need to spend at least twenty years of daily reflection to see any major payoff. Buddhist monks shun the world for years at a time. What scientist is going to go through all of that on a hunch?

I like the stuff that doesn't suck

When people list books that they like, they usually talk about the fictional ones. That makes sense. There's a lot of nonfiction books that I feel approach a subject well, but they're still more boring than books with a good story. No one but mad dogs and Englishmen list the textbooks that influence them.

Some might be surprised that I don't actually read many tech books. Watson was surprised to find that Sherlock Holmes didn't know or didn't care that the earth revolves around the sun. He considered it useless information, which it sort of is to a detective in Victorian London. Likewise code books and whatnot are pretty useless because tech changes rapidly. It's all, like, sooo last week. You do better reading magazines and gleaning snippets from the web than whole books. And boring!

No, I like nonfiction books that think about thinking rather than those that think about ____. I figure that if I have a pretty good mode of thought, I can apply that to any subject, or as Holmes would say, it's more useful than a specific fact. Along those lines, I read a lot of books that talk about how to mash-up different ideas, even those that might seem polar opposites like science and religion, into something you can use. Integrating two subjects that didn't seem to have a connection is a great approach to operate under, and it's no surprise that the basic concept is being applied to life everywhere and, sure, tech too.

That's the boring stuff : ) Let's talk fiction!

I love stories! I love any and all stories because something, anything, is happening. There's always something unfolding. We may not know what it is at first, but by the end of the book we can look back and say something happened, and we can even say it all happened for a reason. You know, a meaning. I mean, even ideas about how meaningless everything is still have meaning when they're put into a story because, if anything, it's a series of events that show there is no meaning. The meaning of the series of events is that there is no meaning. It's great! There's always a meaning when it's put into a story book.

I don't really have the time, nor am I obsessed with, staying on top of the literary world and knowing what's the best of the best, or what different literary movements are coming about, or anything like that. But speaking generally I like the books that have a perennial message. In other words, it doesn't matter what context the story is put in, the message of the story is the same whether it was written 400 years ago or if it's a new release. Old, old classics that I like are still relevant in our times. They've drifted up through the years, and though in many ways are out of touch with today's culture, the message, meaning, or whatever still applies. It's perennial.

That's not to say it's all been done or all been written. New ideas come all the time. But those, or rather the good ones that I like, either have stood the test of time as well or can be expected to stand the test of time. Plus new voices have new perspectives on old ideas and that's new too.

So, to recap, I like nonfiction books that think about thinking, fictional books that have a plot, and like fictional books that are relevant more than those that aren't. Guess I really narrowed that down, huh? : )

What can I say, I love everything. Do I discriminate at all? Sure. I don't like the stuff that sucks.

Here's a specific: I absolutely love-love On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

As the indifferent children of the earth

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two of the most underdeveloped characters in literature. This is surprising because they come from Shakespeare's Hamlet, one of the world's most widely recognized literary works. In Hamlet, the two are little more than plot devices, schoolmates of Prince Hamlet summoned by King Claudius to spy on him and discover why he is behaving so strangely.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Claudius was Hamlet's uncle, who married Gertrude (Hamlet's mother) soon after the King (Hamlet's father and Claudius's brother) died under mysterious circumstances. It is revealed that Claudius was the one who killed Hamlet's father so he could get with Gertrude. In those days, marriage to the brother of one's deceased husband was considered incest by the Church. Not to mention, all of this was revealed to Hamlet by the King's own ghost. No wonder Hamlet was a little upset. Talk about drama.

Back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Claudius and Gertrude summon the old school chums to figure out what's up with Hamlet. They do some talking, blah, blah, plot skip and later they are ordered to escort Hamlet from the kingdom and to his execution. Hamlet discovers the plot and escapes it by engineering the death of the duo instead. Bluntly we hear later from an ambassador;

"That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."

Almost no character development of the two throughout the story. In fact, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are referred to interchangeably with no distinction of who's who. They're also, always, the two/one, much like Lenny and Carl from the Simpsons. It's always Lenny and Carl, and it's always Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, inseparable.

Let me back track to where Hamlet first sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because it shows what seems to be a deliberate downplay of the characters — almost as if Shakespeare is saying: Don't care about these two. They're just here for plot.

When they first meet, Hamlet asks how they're doing, to which one replies (it doesn't matter which as they are interchangeable):

"As the indifferent children of the earth."

The other says:

"Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune's cap we are not the very button."

Hamlet: "Nor the soles of her shoe?"

Rosencrantz or Guildenstern: "Neither, my lord."

When asked how they're doing they reply, eh, so-so. We're happy that we're not too happy. We're indifferent. Not the top of the cap nor the sole of the shoes. Shakespeare is pretty much saying, let me skip over these guys and get to the good part.

Speaking of which, the next part I'd be remiss as a guy if I left it out, though it really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it's not the cap, nor the shoes, it's...

"Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?" asks Hamlet.

"'Faith, her privates we," says Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

Faith, her privates we. Nice.

Back to the point. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in one of the most recognized stories ever. You can't tell one from the other, and because they were never actually developed as characters, you can't even describe them beyond "schoolmate".

So why am I mentioning them? Good question. I'll come back to that later.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. Discuss.

- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard