Sometimes I'm convinced masochism is all that keeps me going

Yeah yeah, "I shall update this blog weekly!" and then vanishing for a couple months. Doesn't actually make any real impact on anything in the big scheme of things darnit.

So what's new? First academic essay of the year went better than I had hoped (I have a policy against publicly announcing my results because people who do that annoy me) which was a good start to my postgrad studies. Second essay... I'm getting it back tomorrow and am prepared for the worst tbh - the first half's actually quite good, the second is unreadable nonsense (which the cynic would say is the point of continental philosophy...) I've submitted the abstract for my self-directed study essay, which will be on the effects of de-ritualisation in the formation of protestant identity. Because why not? Oh and I'm currently working on a research proposal for a PhD, the deadline for which is mid-January.

Yeah, that last bit's the scary one. And not just because I've not even worked out the subject of my masters dissertation yet and I'm already trying to write a detailed proposal for my doctoral thesis! Honestly the hardest part is the nagging feeling of "is this good enough?" I have ideas, but I don't know if I can make them come together as a whole which is worthy of studying at that level. More to the point, I don't have the omniscience required to be sure that I'm not just rehashing someone else's work. I think it's original, but what if it's not? And indeed what happens if my ideas are all great, but nobody anywhere is willing to supervise me? It's a really strange experience.

Basically what I'm thinking of is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about philosophy of performance. More specifically I want to look at theatre, and at acting, and all that good stuff. Beyond that I'm... not exactly sure yet, Deleuze has a lot of ideas that are disturbingly close to what I want to look at but at the same time I'm loathe to abandon the Heideggerian approach. My instinct is to attempt to somehow combine the two - find new connections, create a new point of view but that's a lot easier said than done.

And to top it all off I think I have a cold.

Postgraduate study and other masochisms.

Well, it's been a while since anything was posted here, and perhaps that should change. I'm thinking I'll commit to a minimum of one update per week.

But what shall those updates be on? Well, a lot is new since last we met: Dave and I have both graduated and moved on to the world of postgraduate study - I'm doing a Master of Letters in Continental Philosophy at Dundee whilst Dave has abandoned philosophy to study law at Queens (Boo! Hiss!). My research these days is very much centred around philosophy of performance, with an in-progress essay on ritual and a few fascinating theories which may or may not find their way into my dissertation involving the narrative nature of self-identity and the general phenomenological experience of man. Or maybe I'll do something about Brecht, there's a lot still left unsaid there I feel.

As regards the undergrad dissertation that I gave occasional rantings on, the ambitiously titled Can Roleplaying Games Provide a Source of Understanding Towards Questions of Being? was received well, and although there were definite criticisms that will need addressing should I decide to do anything with it in the future (perhaps the basic argument could be reworked for publication) I have to admit to being somewhat proud of the work.

To that end, my one-or-more-weekly posts shall discuss topics of identity, performance, role-play, and perhaps a little madness. Should be fun.

Bertolt Brecht and Tabletop Roleplay

In his Short Organum For The Theatre, Bertolt Brecht makes the following observation;

If we ensure that our characters on the stage are moved by social impulses and that these differ according to the period, then we make it harder for for our spectator to identify with them. He cannot simply feel: that's how I would act, but can at most say: if I had lived under those circumstances. and if we play works dealing with our own time as though they were historical, then perhaps the circumstances under which he himself acts will strike him as equally odd; and this is where the critical attitude begins.

In many ways, this gets to the heart of the analysis of Role-Playing Games which is currently the focus of my dissertation research. Let's be clear on what is being said: Brecht is putting forth that the characters on stage act not as subjects but as objects, moved by their social conditions. His "critical attitude" is a result of having characters moving as if by the social conditions of today, in a historical setting. This is arguably where the RPG excels - we may play at being characters in fantasy settings, or in real history, or in whatever scenario, but at some point the characters are being played by people influenced by current day social impulses, and those impulses will reflect down onto the characters. A wonderful example is Grey Ranks by Bully Pulpit Games, a game about child soldiers during the 1945 Warsaw uprising, which I have recently had the joy of playing through a full three-session game of. And I do mean joy - it was one of the greatest, most emotional experiences I have ever had whilst roleplaying. But this is where it becomes interesting - I'm not 16-year-old girl from 1940's Warsaw. I don't have the experience of that, and I certainly don't know the social impulses that she would be moved by. My portrayal of that character was through the lense of a 24-year-old male university student from 21st century Scotland. In many ways, the same can be said of any RPG - do I empathise with my characters? Or is it perhaps more true that my representation of them is an untrue one - one which is shaped by who I am, and how I see the world? My thesis is a simple one: that by taking on board an awareness of this, the RPG just as Brecht's epic theatre can be used to harness the so-called critical attitude and to allow a deeper examination of the truth of one's being.

On Philosophy and Science

An argument which is familiar to most philosophy students these days is one that goes "philosophy is of no use nowadays, we have science!" It's one that I've ended up arguing with several people about over the last few weeks, and ones which I often struggle to think up a reasonable response to.
Well, I've thought of it now, and I have an essay to procrastinate so here it is!

Essentially, whilst I think science is a fantastic subject and provides great incite into the workings of the natural world, what the issue boils down to is this: ignorance of science does not prevent me from seeing the beauty in the world, and yet without an understanding of ethics and aesthetics, an education in science is worthless. It is out ability to appreciate the aesthetic that makes us human, our struggle with issues of morality that puts us above the animals.
Someone recently, in response to a comment that science doesn't address the truly important issues, pointed out to me that it is science that gives us medicine. Medicines that preserve life and heal physical ills. This is true, but what good is it to preserve a life that is not worth living? As Plato rightly notes, the unexamined life is just such a life. And that is what I mean when I talk of importance: those things that are critical to human existence are not the theories and hypotheses and facts listed by test-tube washers and men in white coats. Rather they are the big questions: how should we treat others? What is beauty? What is love? What is it to be authentic? How then should we live?  These are things that the natural sciences cannot tell us. And yet they are what defines our existence.

Kinds Of Authenticity.

Right, so Auntie Stephen has been nagging sufficiently for me to finally give in and write a blog post. I can't promise it'll be interesting, I'm having a bit of a mindblank these days but I shall do my best. Stephen's last post enquired about what it means to be "authentic". This is more his subject area than mine, but I shall attempt to add something to the discussion.

The common-sense idea of "authentic" is something that is "real" or "genuine", but rather than playing around with synonyms, I want to see if I can set out some preliminary qualifiers for something being authentic.

1. Scientific/Empirical authenticity. This one is pretty self-explanatory, and has been the foundation of science since the days of Francis Bacon- what we can prove by experiment is "authentic" everything is is to be relegated to less than "authentic"- to the murky world of philosophical squabblings if you like. Probably the most important proponent of this view was WVO Quine. The problem with this is that it is just too narrow-minded, of course the scientific method can give us amazing results about facts, truths about objects in the world; but it can tell us nothing about moral truths or existential truths(it may give us some interesting data about moral and existential semantics, but says nothing about ontology). The second problem- the one I can't get around is that it cannot prove the truth of it's own claims. When one applies Descartes' scepticism it becomes clear that we must remain entirely agnostic about the power of science to give us results that are actually true. As Einstein said, the only unintelligible thing about the universe is that it is intelligible. I don't agree entirely with this statement, but I think it illustrates my point nicely.
2. Dogmatic authenticity. This one is my own invention, and I think it's important to realise the power it has when one considers questions of this kind. Dogmatic authenticity takes as it's qualifier one particular thing or aspect of human life- whether that is the Bible, the Qur'an, Marxism, Hegelianism, etc... What I mean is that authenticity is judged by how it fits into a particular worldview. Take for example certain strains of Zionism, for these people, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was an event not just in history, but it was a part of their "prophetic calendar". This gives certain events, people, documents or beliefs a kind of authenticity which is not extended to others as it does not fit in with a certain belief system. For an excellent critique of this kind of "authenticity" see Karl Popper's The Open Society And It's Enemies and The Poverty Of Historicism. I am talking about this primarily in a political way, but it has ramifications beyond the political sphere.
3. Existentialist Authenticity. Stephen can now finish huffing because I am now going to talk about existentialism and continental philosophy and all that. For an existentialist, having an authentic relationship between your Daesin and the world means that you are not relying on anything empty or illusory or transient. For example, consider the many people who gave their lives fighting for the ideal of communism, they devoted and sacrificed their lives for something they believed was greater than themselves(that's what Daniel Dennett- my hero, whom I love; but often criticise- says is the 'meaning of life': "to find something greater than yourself and devote your life to it.") but now we can see that Communism is a failed utopia, therefore these people, according to someone like Sartre, have lived their lives in "bad faith". So can we ever have "good faith"? Well, that's a question that I doubt philosophers will ever agree upon. I've written on this elsewhere and my own opinion is that to have "good faith" one must become irrational. I mean irrational in the sense that you must make a decision informed by faith, and not by deductive evidence. With any decision like this there is always an element of risk, there will always remain several "what if" questions, but it is the only way to avoid despair according to thinkers like Kierkegaard and Sartre. 

In conclusion I would stress that in seeking the third kind of authenticity, one must get beyond the limiting scope of the first kind but also avoid going so far as the second kind. I think that humans are a peculiar mixture of rational and irrational, and that rather than seeking to get beyond this, we should learn to live with it, and the first step in doing so is in understanding the human condition. Stephen will hopefully clean up the absolute dog's dinner I've made of trying to explain this.... 

Dave.

A thing that thinks thinks about thinking.

The other day I found a fantastic picture on Facebook, ironically enough on a group with the wonderfully vulgar title of "I f***ing" love science. Personally I can't work out what point exactly the artist is trying to make but it's a good opener for a few comments that will lay a groundwork for the promised dialogue between Dave and myself.

"I am a thing that thinks," as Descartes so famously observed.This, indeed, is what separates us as humans from the animals - we think. More importantly, we think about thinking - we have a self-awareness, a driving force that allows us to ask, "what's it all about?" We are not driven simply by the instinctive drive to survive long enough to pass on our genetic code. Dasein (our specifically human being-in-Being) is unique in its awareness of itself, and further an awareness of and a relationship with its own end that allows the existence of concepts such as temporality.

This matters. Our perception of and relationship to the world is entirely based on Dasein's interaction with other beings. Despair arises when that interaction is an inauthentic relationship, and in an authentic relationship we have a theoretical escape from despair. But what is authentic? That's going to be our subject of discussion.

Some musings on the subject of performance

I was originally intending to start a dialogue on this very blog with Dave regarding... something. I don't exactly remember. That however will have to wait, as I have a new subject that I want to write down some concrete ideas on - namely, my honours dissertation. The current title I'm considering is, because I do love referencing Shakespeare and using incomprehensible words, "The World as Stage: The Phenomenology of Collaborative Improvised Performance."  This is about as easy to pin down a subject as one might expect, unfortunately.

The question of course is what is meant by "collaborative improvised performance", and it's this which I'm going to rant on for the next few paragraphs. The vital word is of course performance. OED as always gives us a good starting point;

An instance of performing a play, piece of music, etc., in front of an audience; an occasion on which such a work is presented; a public appearance by a performing artist or artists of any kind. Also: an individual performer's or group's rendering or interpretation of a work, part, role, etc. In extended use: a pretence, a sham.

 But this is still too limited, I feel, for the true understanding of performance. However, the idea of "an instance of performing in front of an audience" is a useful base concept. What does it mean to perform? Etymologically, performance has its root in the old french par-fornir - to completely provide. Performance then carries the connotations of a task carried out and finished in its entirety. A performance is a complete act contained with in itself - and yet paradoxically one with the potential to live beyond itself to the audience! Moving on, let us examine the idea of a performance as "an individual performer's or group's rendering or interpretation of a work, part, role, etc." The question may be asked, from this definition, if an audience is still required and this is a point which I believe to be of importance. I intend to propose that that in any given performance, the performer is his or her own audience -to borrow a word from Augusto Boal, a "spect-actor"- at least inasmuch as the performance is an authentic one. The idea of authenticity and inauthenticity in performance will require a further discussion which I do not have time to delve into here.

So we see that performance will be defined roughly as a self-contained activity of limited duration in which a performer or group renders an interpretation of work, part, role, or -an addition which may seem odd but which I intend to be crucial- an idea to an audience which may or may not be limited to the performers. Our work of defining is, however, only half completed - we need now understand what is meant by "collaborative improvisation."

This is simpler, right? We're discussing simply two or more people working together to make something up on the spot, aren't we? Sort of. Remember that this is in the context of performance - an interpretation of an idea. It may be improvised, but it is not without structure. It has purpose - the examination of the idea - and it has an audience - be it the people in the stalls at an improvised theatre performance or simply the participants themselves in a roleplaying game.

The sharp-eyed may be questioning the limited scope of my observations - I've steered rather clear of discussion of improvised music, for instance, a fact which may be glaringly obvious to jazz or blues fans. Although an area that fascinates me, I admit that I fear biting off more than I can chew. Whether such ideas will find their way into my dissertation is currently debatable.

I'm also concerned about rabbiting on and boring people, so I shall wrap up now. Does my definition line up with your own thoughts on the subject? If not, where do you think I've gone wrong? Look out for a follow-up later on when I've done a lot more research on this stuff...