a picture held us captive

One way of approaching this is to say that a certain way of thinking treats something as a symptom that you cannot, in practice, treat as such.

You can obviously analyse life as a function of something else – brains or evolution or the universe as a whole. It is just that as a living person, it is impossible to actually treat as that.

You just simply cannot treat your own life as a mere outcome or expression of something else. It is your life, your everything, your start, middle and end.

Obviously you can think you can treat your own life as a symptom. But because you can’t actually do that, what you end up doing is something else – you make life different in some way, not irrelevant.

But what if your life really is a symptom, what if it is really brain processes, or genes expressing?

The really is the problem. The really is a symptom of a prior decision about the kind of investigation. The kind of investigation which finds life is really something else has no use for us.

The question is about the relationship between thought and word and deed. Can you be right in thinking something you cannot act on? Is it not courageous to value truth above all else?

If courage happens it happens in this life we share. If truth means anything it means it here.

All I really want to say is that if something is impossible, it needs to be uprooted all the way down, as painful as that might be.

Life comes first. It is important not to tell the funniest joke in the world, even if it is really funny. 

Academic philosophers treat the problems of philosophy as playthings, as things that have no effect, that do not matter. I could doubt the existence of others, I could think this all a dream, I could suggest that we are not free, or that life is meaningless – no bother, they are just arguments and we must stand by their outcome.

But how can you think you are asking a genuine question when the negative answer is utterly incompatible with life?

You are forced to try and prove the existence of something which we cannot doubt. Life cannot be a dream, we cannot be unfree, life cannot be meaningless, we are not alone.

Fantasising about the non-existence of obvious things is not just a fun misconception that keeps academics in jobs.

It is harmful because it traps the arguments in the binary state – either value, freedom, meaning, exist or they don’t. Like a persistent pesky child constantly asking why, you can’t get very far.

The actual answers, however, are a question of degree.

Life is not a dream, but experience is reliant on brains, and shared concepts on language, and we are a long way from figuring out how these things are best used.

Other people exist, but you are never going to experience what it is like being them, so empathy is an imaginative feat that must be learned and encouraged.

We are free, but only if we learn to be, only if we encourage courage.

Our lives are meaningful, but that meaning can be a bad or boring one.

It makes sense to say that you can only start on the rational debate if you have already figured out that it is a good thing to do. The ethical question comes first.

Philosophers labour under the assumption of their own irrelevance.

The worst is the existence of free will argument. It acts as a binary dam,  prevents us figuring out what human freedom is actually like.

The question – how should I live knowing that determinism is true? – makes the whole thing fall apart. Whatever you think about the tiny, technical argument, you still have to decide what to do with its outcome.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no melodramatic existentialist. We are obviously not absolutely free. We make decisions within what we know, we have a certain kind of will, a certain imaginative ability. At every step there is the context of our lives, our family, our education, our biological tendencies.

No question, freedom is a question of degree – some of us are freer than others. Some of us make better decisions, have more imagination, have greater courage and more certainty and all the rest of the abilities that make up human freedom.

But that is not what philosophers try to figure out. They try to figure out how to reconcile the picture of causal determinism with what life is actually like.

But this causal argument is so profoundly pointless. A toothless cog if ever there was one.

If an idea makes our entire lives look like a fantasy, surely we would do better calling the idea a fantasy rather than all of life.

Philosophers make themselves irrelevant by entertaining thoughts that make life irrelevant.

We should embrace human freedom, with all its complexities, pitfalls, uncertainties and ambiguities. We will be more free if we believe we are. What is there to lose?

The glorious sousaphone. Like a lower-lower-intestine of brass. Hugged in it’s funky flatulence, fat men across the world vibrate beautifully.

I defy you to find someone playing a sousaphone in a cynical or jaded way.

I want to try and point to a difference between tight jean cool, and sousaphone cool. The one is a cold cool, the other a warm one.

Like vampires and garlic, the cold cool will be repulsed by susy.

Off the scale, cold cool wise,  is that my recommended music for suzy is jazz-hip-hop-rock, as practiced by the above Youngblood Brass Band [spotify / website], as well as Hypnotic Brass [spotify / website]. It’s down there with fusion and 80s prog rock as a genre.

There’s a temptation when you’ve got a susy and a big brass section to not rock so much as swing, like they do in New Orleans, I guess, which I don’t find quite as awesome. Or to delve into hip-hop, which also kind of ruins it for me.

Still Hot 8 Brass Band, Jack Brass Band and Samenakoa seem pretty good, then headed out, towards the dark rocks of umpah, are Labrassbanda. The search continues.

This blog is about things and thoughts that make life better, that’ll enthuse.

Life is so ambiguous in the abstract, so overlapping and connected, that saying anything for certain is nigh on impossible.

All you can do is try to do the better thing, and so long as you’re trying to do that, all you need is enthusiasm.

But saying that, it’s not going to be like self-help. Not like religion at all. Just ideas, hopefully, and stuff other people are doing.

The thing is, there is all sorts of cultural stuff that is genuinely creative and exciting and somehow positive, without being cheesy or tacky or shallow. There is such a thing as the satisfied Socrates, I’m sure of it. The disjunction is a reflection of a cultural bias. Thoughtful people = dissatisfied people. Why though? As if being interested in things were some kind of dysfunction.

All these cynics and miserablists and academics want you to believe that there is just complexity and analysis and cleverness and scepticism and sadness and suffering. Or idiots dancing merrily in the shadow of illusion.

But it’s not true. There are people and things making life better in all sorts of bright and marvelous ways.

Only it’s much easier to be miserable, when everything’s going that way. It’s much easier to critical than risk self-expression, much harder to let things that you don’t like slip by and encourage the things you think have value. Anger, aggression and rebellion have always been stronger forces than joy and creativity.

I’m not saying this doesn’t stick in my throat sometimes. I love miserable music, miserable films and miserable books. But I know, deep down, that you are what you eat. That I listen to miserable music when I’m feeling miserable, and the enjoyment of it is of a confirmation of a feeling that’s only good if things are really, really bad.

Obviously I’m not proposing some kind of constant manic joy-state – walking about with some nasty grin all the time.

Just to encourage good, intelligent, positive things, and fight as best you can the things that make us depressed.

We have it in our heads that language is a certain size. Approximately word size, word length. We think of the duration of language as that of reading or hearing words.

This makes us miss all the language in our world which is not word sized, seeing only tips of huge conceptual icebergs.

An example is mood. We think of moods as being word sized. I am happy, sad, joyful, angry.

But these moods cover up something much larger. The specific mood is not sad, but a specific sad. The sad of the death of this person who meant this to you.The happiness of experiencing this event with these people.

The specificity of the mood is felt at that time, in the present. The feeling is different to another mood amid other situations.

But because it doesn’t feel like something immediate can possibly be a sentence or narrative, must somehow be a word sized, we get a little confused, and some of the emotional richness of life is ignored.

Likewise a face. Likewise a work of art. Likewise a situation. We think that because we understand spoken and written language in a linear way, because we get confused if two people speak at once, that that is how all language works. But understanding is not like that.

We immediately react to complex situations in complex ways, because our world is a complex conceptual thing. Complex and ambiguous.

“In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

From David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address

I have never quite been able to understand how people are able to entertain the thought that life is meaningless. It probably shows a of lack of willingness to entertain drama on my part.

Nihilism seems to me not just melodramatic, but down right false – and obviously so.

There’s no need for a clever argument, i hope, just a simple pointing out of the fact that language is so completely embedded in life that you can’t possibly extricate yourself from it. So as long as you’ve learned a language, you’re good to go, life is meaningful.

It is easy to separate language from  the world for a brief moment. Just do like Sartre and repeat a word over and over until it becomes just a sound. This is not a condition under which your entire whole world could labour.

Life being meaningless would be not being able to understand life at all, which would make you impossible to talk to, for a start.

Of course, it also doesn’t make any sense to say you know exactly what the meaning of life is.

The meaning of a long sentence is hard enough to talk about and the meaning of a film or a novel near impossible. That’s not to say they are meaningless, of course. They have a meaning, it’s just very, very complex, and gets understood differently from different angles. You might have to read the book or watch the film to understand it.  So it is with life, except you can’t live someone elses life. Do you believe there is such a thing as a final biography of a person’s life? I don’t.

But the utter ambiguity, the ever expanding complexity of the narrative of our lives, means no more than – there is no scientific answer to the meaning of life.

Making sense of our human endeavours is always open to argument, to interpretation, to change. Understanding it is an art, a question of describing and discussing, not of discovering something final.

This is, in many ways, the dullest idea known to man. Everyone knows that this is not what nihilists are talking about. They’re talking about the non-existence of a pre-existant narrative, the knowledge of which will make your life more meaningful. Or they’re talking about a narrative which they’re telling, about the conditions under which life would have a meaning beyond that which already exists, which aren’t met.

The solution to the question about the meaning of life is that what your looking for is not a factual answer, but an idea that helps you make your life more meaningful.

But,because you already have a concept of more meaningful and less meaningful, you don’t necessarily need any more ideas. Just search out more meaningful things, and spurn less meaningful.

Of course some big idea might help you out here. But just keep in mind what you’re looking for, and the fact you already know what it is.

There is reason to be joyful. Your life is not meaningless. It might just have an ambiguous meaning, or a sad meaning, or just a very, very faint meaning. But it is not meaningless.

The picture that holds us captive is a picture of how language and the world are related, but it’s such a massive idea that it’s really hard to talk about.

The premise of this blog is basically that we’ve got really stupid about our abstract concepts, and it is leading to some serious cultural problems. Concepts like life, science, reality, faith, meaning, freedom, happiness. So just the little, unimportant stuff.

The basic idea comes in two parts.

1. Our actual use of language can’t be explained, only described. So as far as reductive science is concerned, language is irreducible, but it still exists. Therefore there is something that exists which science can’t explain, and it’s not god (although god is obviously a concept).

A word or concept is a whole thing, and you don’t get any closer to finding out what it means by taking it apart into the letters or sounds, only by describing how it is used, what concepts and words are connected to it and so on. Language isn’t grounded in anything like physics. It’s grounded in our being able to understand and be understood -  a self-supporting system if you like.

2. We vastly underestimate the relationship between language and our lives. Language is not just in writing and speaking, but also in seeing and hearing and feeling – is riven through every aspect of life. You can’t understand a book from just the chemistry of ink, you can’t understand a spoken word from just the physics of vibrating air, that much is obvious. But you also can’t understand emotion or thought from just neurons and you can’t understand everything in the world (think of the painting) using just the natural sciences.

Because language is in everything human and can only be described, we need a completely different way of thinking about almost everything human. It’s a really wierd thing to say, but we don’t really accept language as real.  Because of that, we end up getting really confused about psychological things like depression, about narrative cultural things like religion, about the meaning of life, relationships, experience, value… about pretty much everything that matters.

I’ll admit it, it’s a bit of an epic mission that this blog is on. But it’s well meaning at least. You see, the most important thing about language is that it is communal, shared. Because language is seared through the world, that means life is fundamentally shared, and fundamentally ours. That must be worth wanging on about.

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” LW