Friday, May 11, 2007

Knowing and not Believing

I know I am going to die some time in the future. I cannot, however, conceive of me dying in any manner. And so, I cannot believe that I am going to die. I think this is true of my psychology, and I also think it is true generally, of a good number of other humans. I think, furthermore, that this falsifies the traditional theory of knowledge in terms of justified belief, and that it also contradicts traditional views of moral inconsistency.

Call whatever it is that I know, but cannot believe, ‘a content’. For the former case to be so, it must be possible for humans to hold some contents as known without, therefore, holding them as believed. If this is so, it seems that knowledge is not belief at all, whatsoever. So it cannot either be a justified belief, whatever.

Here is another example. I know that my family is dead. I cannot, however, conceive of them dying in any manner whatsoever. I cannot, for that matter, convince myself that they are dead. And so, I cannot believe that they are dead. I think this is true of my psychology, and I am confident it is also true of most (if not all) cases of grief.

Just like before, this seems to require some independence between holding a content as known and holding it as believed. The best way to understand this, I think, is to take the knowledge-belief relation in similar ways as we understand the belief-desire relation. The three of them, I propose, are, up to some degree, independent of each other. I cannot, it is true, know something without having any belief whatsoever. Just like I cannot have any desire without having any belief whatsoever. It seems, however, that I can have the desire to be able to fly, without having the belief that I can fly. Likewise goes for knowledge, I think. I can know something, and still not believe in it.

To hold this degree of independence between knowledge and belief allows us to understand, also, the otherwise problematic phenomenon of inconsistency. I haven’t met any perfectly consistent person, much less any perfectly consistent moral philosopher, which is able to do what their moral views tell them to. The traditional way to account for this is to criminalize the inconsistency. Some think we should punish the moral philosopher for never acting according to their theories. I think this is just a misunderstanding.

I hereby present a different story. A moral philosopher, and for that matter, any human being, will be able to have a theory, and know what to do, and still do something else, without thereby committing a crime. The reason this is so is not because the subject is inconsistent. Rather, persons are such that they can know something (or, better, hold some content as known) without thereby desiring, believing, or even conceiving it. There is no crime here. That’s just how we are.

We should perhaps not demand impossible tasks from our fellow humans.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Bergman and Kim-Ki-Duk

In the past few days we saw a couple of movies: Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” and Kim-Ki-Duk’s “Address Unknown”. They share many different characteristics. They are products of highly famous Film Directors. They are beautifully shot. They are both able to either make you cry, shy away, or get mad. My case is the latter one. I think both films also share another central characteristic: they lost their sense of their own limits after the first forty minutes. I call this last feature “arrogance”, and I will not defend this practice here for matters of space.

Suffice it to say that both movies are boundless. Bergman’s is a fairly recent piece where he never, ever, stops making use of the same resources. Take Bergmann’s thesis that human beings are all actors, since they are all Personas, and we already know (thanks to him) that Personas are actors. This is an interesting claim of Bergmann’s, not an original claim of his, though, but an interesting one. It was good enough for him to make “Persona”. But why does he keep bringing it up once again? In “Fanny and Alexander” he takes a bit more than three hours (with a film-made intermission, I must say) to let you know that we are all Hamlet, or not. The same thing goes on and on, anguish, courage, control, and desperateness. Now we even have a bishop explicitly claiming that he has one mask only, that he cannot take off. Interesting claim, as I said, but we do not need three hours of the same thing over and over again. For two reasons: we are not stupid, and we get fed up. That’s how this boundlessness becomes arrogance. When the director does not realize where is the limit to what he can say, and even worse, he does not even realize there is a limit.

Kim-Ki-Duk’s is fairly similar. Unlike Bergman’s we are not dealing with Personas, nor actors, but misery: boundless misery. From the very first shot until the very last one, Kim-Ki-Duk is not shy to deliver “exactly the same miserable content”. The movie starts with a kid carving out a toy gun from an empty wooden box. He adds a metal cylinder, a few straps, and gun pellet. He then goes on to try his toy by shooting at an empty can placed above his sister’s head. The shot goes wrong and hits her eye. For the rest of the movie (except for a few very miserable moments) the girl looses that eye. Nice beginning! The movie ends up with a soldier finding a letter that was lost by someone else. The letter came too late to save a woman and her kid. The woman kills herself by burning the bus where she used to live. What goes in between these two pieces of story just is the same. This is really, “really”, disturbing and in a bad way. As with Bergman, one should say that Kim-Ki-Duk does not even realize there is a limit. Like Bergman and his Persona, Kim-Ki-Duk seems to be screaming every five minutes, while hammering his fist on the table, “Human Life is Miserable!”, “Human Life is Miserable!”, “Human Life is Miserable!”. We heard pretty well the very first time Sir. We were watching the movie. Remember?

And all this, just because I love to watch movies.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

De las desventajas de no ser hormiga

Mujeres, hormigas y hombres hacen ambientes por igual. Pero no sólo, también son igualmente cosmopolitas. Hay hormigueros por todo el mundo. Quizás más y mejor distribuidos que las ciudades, los pueblos y las chozas. Hormigas, hombres y mujeres también, no se puede negar, son patéticamente frágiles de manera individual. Ningún hormiguero y, por lo tanto, ningún recoveco de cueva alguna de cualquier hormiguero, está hecho por las antenas y mandíbulas de una sola hormiga ni de su contraparte sexual. Igualmente, ni hombres ni mujeres, ni las contrapartes sexuales de esos hombres y mujeres, han hecho esquina alguna, de cuarto alguno, de edificio alguno del mundo. Patéticamente inútiles como individuos. En esto el marcador es parejo. Hombres, mujeres y hormigas son igualmente patéticos.

Aún así, patetismo de por medio, tanto hormigas como mujeres (hombres en menor cantidad) viven en cuartos, tienen recovecos, recelan sus esquinas y hacen y deshacen hormigueros. En proyectos megalómanos seguimos con el marcador en ceros.

Hay, sin embargo, una diferencia de magnitud industrial. Y es que mujeres y hombres, por igual, pero no hormigas, se dedican a concebir tal megalomanía. Esto resulta en una diferencia enorme contra mujeres, hombres y contrapartes (sexuales o no). Pues concebir lo que sea es la mejor manera de no hacerlo. Pasan los días pensando, soñando e imaginando, pero no haciendo. Y es que concebir no les sirve de mucho. Imaginan el proyecto acabado, pero no los pelos y señas necesarios para lograrlo. El resultado es una cantidad de frustración directamente proporcional al número de hombres, mujeres, contrapartes, sexos y asexos capaces de concebir sin hacer, que pueblan el mundo entero. En suma, unos cinco punto nueve billones de infelices. Demasiada. Insoportable. Frustración.

Los hormigueros se hacen de granos de tierra. Los edificios, de arena. Pero la imaginación hace edificios duros, acabados, de concreto cubicular, ergonómico, antropomorfo, comfortiforme, con conexiones de banda ancha y energía eléctrica. Pero el mundo no tiene concreto cubicular comfortiforme. El mundo tiene granos de tierra y cantidades industriales de arena. ¡De nada sirve imaginar sino se tiene la alquimia necesaria para convertir la arena en un chile en nogada, en una bicicleta de acero o en un poema de Fierro¡

De ahí que mi elección, entre humano y hormiga, lleve a las desventajas de no ser hormiga.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Silencio (10)

Desde hace tiempo me pregunto qué sentido tiene este afán de dar sentido a las cosas.

En algún momento entre los dieciséis y dieciocho comencé a desmoronar las creencias religiosas que Mamá inculcaba. Todas ellas, en conjunto, me parecen cada vez más estúpidas. Cada vez más días parecen traer consigo cada vez más evidencia. Supongo que por eso Mamá dejó de tenerlas.

Papá nunca tuvo la paciencia. En el fondo, creo, Papá nunca tuvo siquiera las creencias. Nunca lo vi rezar. Nunca lo vi temer. Nunca llorar. Supongo que era difícil creer en tanta tontería cuando, como en su caso, se tiene por padre a una máquina de golpes. Así era el abuelo y nunca supe por qué. Y supongo que Papá tampoco. Supongo que absorví esta nostalgia sempiterna de Papá.

Desde entonces me pregunto qué sentido tiene este afán de dar sentido a las cosas.

Ahora tomo este procesador de emociones, de palabras, para ver a mi hermana en una foto de fondo. Duermo casi siempre con enfado por no hacer algo que no sé bien a bien qué es. Pienso en mi Padre e imagino un futuro distante, sin poder siquiera concebir cómo habré de llegar a él. Pienso en mi Hermana y me lleno de una misantrópica pasión por quemarlo todo. Todo. Mamá me da la fuerza necesaria, sin limitaciones. Para llegar a un futuro quemándolo todo. Todo.

Ellos, sin embargo, no se preguntaban por el sentido de este afán. Quizás por eso les resultaba tan útil. He resuelto, por consiguiente, eliminarme por completo, dejar atrás estas preguntas tan idiotas y vivir con encono la insensatez del afán. ¡Mira que se necesita ser estúpido (o Platónico) para buscarle sentido al sentido!

Seguiré durmiendo con molestia. Porque si un día no es suficiente para una vida, menos será para tres. Cobraré, una a una, las sonrisas de mi hermana y llevaré, paso a paso, los viajes de Papá. El éxito está garantizado siempre que siga Mamá a la cabeza.

Desde entonces ya no me pregunto qué sentido tiene este afán de dar sentido a las cosas. Me sigo preguntando, eso sí, qué tan estúpido puede llegar a ser uno mismo.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Aging with the city

I am growing old with Ann Arbor. Since I have been here, there are two new apartment buildings, one new School of Public Policy complex, and the Business School and Museum of Art are on the path of getting their new structures. That’s just form the side of the new. The central thing is really a different one. I am worried about the old.

One of my very first graduate seminars took place at the Frieze Building, the old Art School/Department of Linguistics/Film School building. As of now, there is no more Frieze Building. Time has taken it away.

I have been in Ann Arbor long enough to learn from a building that does not exist anymore. I have been here long enough. I am aging with Ann Arbor.