Movie Recommendation

Last night I went and watched the wonderful new Pixar movie Up with my wonderful girlfriend. It really is an amazing film and I unreservedly recommend it to everyone. You’ll definitely laugh, you’ll probably see your life in a new light, if only for a moment, and you may even cry.

Admittedly, I am a sucker for Pixar movies. But Up is particularly touching and hilarious. For a movie filled with silliness, it communicates a lot about the human need for companionship, the personal liberation which comes only with genuine acts of selflessness, and the adventure that it can be to befriend, empathise with, and even love, odd and different people/animals. The comparison between the life the protagonist led with his wife, and the life that the evil villan ended up living – alone in some parallel odd world with only his bones and ambition for company – is a great example of the way good film can simply communicate profound insights about the human condition.

I feel like to justify blogging about a children’s movie on my ‘philosophy’ blog I need to include some sort of philosophical reflection on the film. Well, the film involves an act of civil disobedience which would have made Henry David Thoreau and Dr. King smile from ear to ear; it raises metaphysical questions about the existence of possible worlds which David Lewis and perhaps Gottfried Leibniz would find illustrative; it raises the issue of animal ethics and the value of non-human life which would make Peter Singer sing showtunes; and suggests that the most happy life is one filled with activity, not passivity, which would rock Aristotle’s ancient socks.

p.s. This is my 50th blog post!

Against Individualism in Ethics

And so Saint Paul continues, ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging symbol. I may have gifts of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.’ (1 Corinthians 13.1-2, NEB). In reading these familiar words we must be alert to the context of discussion in which they are situated: the greatest achievements which Paul thinks meaningless without love are gifts of the Spirit, vocations, particular callings to which one is summoned individually, which will distinguish this man’s service from his neighbor’s and will mark his history out as a unique and personal history. It is not that Paul deprecates the individual and personally distinctive; it is not that he suspects all striking manifestations of it a secret hypocrisy.

His point is simply that a life considered solely as the fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working-out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’, so the variety of forms of life are unified within a common form of life according to God’s order, the life of love.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 222

Individualism is a pretty attractive idea. We tend to admire people who manage to achieve some sort of individualism against the odds. We admire people who think for themselves, who refuse to be defined by the society or tradition they are a part of. Rogue figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust (or Elizabeth Bennet) insist on not fitting into any predefined role society may have had for them, and of not letting any group, institution or one perspective tell them who they really are, or tell them what they ought to aspire to. As Samuel Coleridge once said, heroes invent the terms and categories by which their life will be judged.

This leads to the question – what is the opposite of individualism? If the Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who leaves and slams the door is a heroic individual, what would we say of the Nora that stayed?

The quote above from O’Donovan suggests that the opposite of individualism need not be ‘conservatism’, ‘submissiveness’, ‘resignation’ or ‘ordinariness’. He suggests that the opposite of individualism is seeing your life not as the subjective expression of a unique take on life, but as the subjective expression of something universal. If individualism is the subjective expression of the particular, the contingent, the unique, the self-constructed then it’s opposite is the subjective expression of the universal, the fixed, the necessary, the received. Construing things this way shows that it is not the moment of subjective ethical expression which is under threat, but the source of this expression.

O’Donovan argues that all Christian ethics needs to be an expression of love. Christians are free to perform ethical action and engage in ethical reasoning and to still call what they are doing Christian so long as it seeks to be an expression of love, particularly the kind of love that God displayed on the cross. The person who speaks in tongues of angels, does so from love. The person who prophesies, does so from love. The person who lives in faith, does so from love. The Christian who buys only Fair Trade chocolate, does so from love. The Christian who befriends someone who is utterly different to them, does so from love. The Christian who takes a position on abortion, war, torture or sexual ethics, does so from love.

This quote from O’Donovan draws attention to an important and unique characteristic of Christian ethics. Christians hold that the ethical life has a certain shape – the life of love. Amongst all the complexity and subjectivity of contemporary life Christians hold that ethical living is living which is built on and shaped by a particular non-negotiable – love. Henry David Thoreau once said that living well, living ethically, is a matter of ‘dwelling as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ Christianity replies, there is only one channel. Life which aspires to fulfill a personal destiny is vacant abstraction, and morally speaking is neither here nor there. Life which attempts to embody something universal, is good.

To many, this idea of subjectively expressing something universal is much more attractive than subjectively expressing something of your own making. Which idea are you more attracted to as the task of ethical living?

Ethics and Reality – Part 2: Thoreau and Paul’s Reply

There is an alternative to Hume’s critique, which is the insistence that we cannot help but be morally affected by the world in which we live, and the more we give ourselves over to feel and see the moral dimensions in life, the more we will see that ethics and reality are inextricably linked. I’ll unpack this response through some obtuse statements from Henry David Thoreau which seems to echo Paul’s ethics of the New Testament. Thoreau wrote:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and the night…It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep…To be awake is to be alive. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Thoreau suggests that there is a particularly spiritual time of day when reality seems closer, or perhaps when we are closer to reality. He calls this morning because it suggests coming out of a darkness; coming out of a state of resignation, non-engagement and withdrawal, to experience reality in a fresh way. New Testament scholar Tom Wright explains the ethical thought of Paul in a similar vein. In explaining Ephesians 5.14 which screams, ‘Awake of sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you life’, Wright says:

In other words: it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the non-heavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor – it’s like being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. What we all need from time to time is for someone to say, ‘It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!’ — Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope (2007), p. 265

The common link between Wright’s remarks on the ethical thought of Paul and Thoreau’s cryptic words is the theme of being awake. They liken acting morally in the world to being awake and experiencing reality, and allowing that reality to affect and change you. It’s interesting to note that this kind of language was employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement – calling Americans to wake up to the immorality around them, to throw off the sleep of the past.

This is not so much a reply to Hume, as offering a different picture of how ethics and reality may be related. But do you find either more compelling? Do you think that a deep knowledge of reality, possibly including a deep knowledge of humanity, society, science and God, would have necessary ethical implications? Or do you think that ethics is something totally separate?

Thoreau on Life

Today is the first day of semester, and I’m reminded of a quote I love from Henry David Thoreau. The quote comes from Walden, a book he wrote over a two year period while living a life of simplicity, reflection, stillness, natural education and isolation in a little cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, Massachusetts (picture above). On explaining why he did this, he writes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear to me; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.  — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

I love that Thoreau has a clear vision of what his life is about; I love his determination to resist that which he thinks is damaging to life; I love his determination to resist the trivial and unimportant, and his courageous aim to come face to face with reality in it’s most basic and pure form and discover whether it be mean or sublime; I love his chest-beating about the sheer importance of all this; and I love his resoluteness to never live that which is not life, since life is so dear to him.

The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, alluding to the caricature of philosophers being on a quest for the meaning of life. Most philosophers get slightly embarrassed when a friend at a party asks them whether they have discovered the meaning of life yet, and proceed to explain what philosophers actually do with their time. But I think Thoreau would have embraced this audacious aspiration, and perhaps remarked that in the woods near Walden Pond he had discovered the meaning of life for himself.

I find his quote to be inspiring when thinking about goal setting, new beginnings and the possibilities of a fresh semester. So at the risk of making philosophers around the world groan – read this quote and ask yourself: What do I live for?