You’re existentialists on the precipice, man.https://www.annotatedmst.com/episodes/49/Earth_vs._the_Spider
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic work of existential philosophy Being and Nothingness (1943), he discusses the familiar feeling of vertigo you get when you “stand at the edge of a precipice and look down.” Sartre famously argues that the feeling stems not from a fear of falling but from a fear that you might jump—that your real fear is of freedom, because in truth there is nothing preventing you from jumping, and nothing forcing you to jump. It is entirely up to you, and it is your anguish over your own free will, your fear of your own freedom, that causes the feeling we characterize as vertigo.
So strangely I was just thinking of this book right before I watched this movie! Actually I didn't watch most of the movie as I was mainly just reading the annotations and listening to the riffs.
So my "best friend" in high school, James T. Hong (lecture vid), was impressed by my dad's library collection that featured a big tome, "Being and Nothingness." James went on to major in philosophy and even was awarded the best "senior thesis" at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (50,000 students, top research school) for his paper on Heidegger (another existentialist). Wow - I just discovered James T. Hong has a paper published on Sarte in 1991 - two years after we graduated.
Being and Nothingness | work by Sartre | Britannica
Apr 11, 2020 - L'Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness) that Sartre ... The existentialists expressed this by stating that “existence precedes essence.
"The Pure Ego and Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego" by James T. Honghttps://dafilms.com/director/7964-james-t-hong
In this exploration piece, the author attempts to present a clear picture of Husserlian and (pre-Critique of Dialectical Reason) Sartrean phenomenology via a critique of Sartre’s theory of the transcendent ego. Is there is need for a unifying I, or does Sartre’s formulation of consciousness as primordial read more compellingly? Is the ego built by states and actions and vice versa, or does Sartre have the better answer with the ego being constituted through states constituted by consciousnesses? The author points out that Sartre’s positions lead to the problem of consciousness unification. Plus, Sartre’s criticisms of Husserl can be nullified. Furthermore, Sartre’s desire for individual freedom actually betrays him in his response to the supposed hampering of consciousness caused by the pure ego. What’s really at stake is a clear description of the self: the ego’s relation to consciousness.
The list of his films leaves out his early work, "The Thing Which Thinks" - I always thought that was his best but I've not seen most of his films anyway. Yet James has returned to this subject in a recent essay....Wow - reading that summary of his Sartre article makes me realize the strong influence of Buddhist philosophy. James had given me a talisman from a Buddhist Temple in Taiwan when he returned back from there... it had the backwards swastika in the red and gold colors. Maybe this was the temple:
My dad had minored in philosophy at Macalester College and later he was on their "board of trustees." In fact Maclester had wanted to do a feature alumni story on my dad but an interview was not possible as he was no longer functioning well, near to his death. And when he died then my friend James (in a rare email response to me - as he stopped responding to my emails soon after that) then stated how he had "liked" my dad and respected him. He said they had gone on a smoke break together during my senior year high school classical piano concert.
So this is funny since I literally always listened to the Rach number 2 on cassette - and so James must have known that. At that time (I listened to it at Ghost Ranch on the Walkman as I wandered the desert trails) I thought I was the ONLY one my age of whom I knew who was listening to that piece so much. So James must have known this about me - I'm sure I would have mentioned it to him. I realize I probably blogged on that paper before but I had not read it so closely before.
OK I read his paper closely. It's pretty funny how his Western math training (his double major in math) also influences his philosophy analysis (or I should say Western math in general strongly guides Western philosophy - the two are interwoven). So his view of reality is quite different than mine was due to my intensive music training. For example the idea of the ego for me was very weak - this sounds strange for me to admit. I simply did not think of what others would think of me. I think a good example is when I was on a committee at church and we developed a partnership with a black church. The black church said their biggest problem was crack dealers in the neighborhood. They wanted a neighborhood watch from our church. I was all gungho but I was very young - 16 years old? - and most of our church members were veering towards retirement if not retired - and they were shocked at even considering the idea - WAY too dangerous - if not totally suicidal. Yes I suppose they were correct? Kind of like international Peace Brigade that my coworker was part of - the idea being that a Western white person acts as a buffer with the hopes that any violence is mitigated due to the bad publicity and outrage it would engender.
Yes I had another high school friend tell me that they assumed I was a big stoner - cuz I was always laughing all the time! No - it was just music bliss! I was definitely BLISSED OUT in high school and so I did play music with James and we did some absurd performances. But otherwise he veered off to hang out with more "ego" oriented males who had career goals. He said that our friendship had been based on his mom saying that since I had gotten good grades then I would be a good friend. haha. But I was not very concerned with grades at all.... and James and I did do some rebellious stuff together at his instigation.
So yes just literally a day or two before I watched "Earth vs. Spider" I had been thinking about that big book, "Being and Nothingness" and wondering if it had been worth reading or not. Why? Because my mom informed me about how my cousin's daughter just graduated from a school also with a minor in philosophy (and major in political science) - the same combo my dad chose. Sure enough she also is planning on law school, just as my dad had gotten a full ride scholarship to NYU Law School. My dad told me he had been accepted into Harvard Law School but he didn't get the scholarship.
Anyway so after law school - which included a summer studying at University College in London - and also pursuing a Ph.D. in Sweden (funded by a CIA routed international Ford Foundation grant), my dad was offered a right wing Wall St. think tank job. Instead he chose to move back to Minnesota since he wanted to raise a family in a place that was closer to Nature. And when I was born, as the third and final child, my dad was so thrilled that he snow plowed both of our neighbor's sidewalks (my mom tells me). haha. Yes we had a snow storm but not a blizzard.
So then just as Macalester College was part of the Presbyterian Church (and my dad's father had been a Presbyterian minister), so then did my dad take us down to Ghost Ranch New Mexico every summer for our family vacations (where Georgia O'Keefe did her infamous paintings). And it is there that I had my definitive existential experience.
I had no idea - until last night when I read the sublime kernal secret of "Being and Nothingness" that I had actually experienced this at an early age at Ghost Ranch! I had kept this secret to myself since I was not sure how anyone would interpret it! So we had hiked up to Kitchen Mesa (a huge mesa above the dining room). My buddy from Texas, same age as me, got heat stroke and he was in bad shape! I could not believe this as Texas is also hot compared to me being from Minnesota. But there he was - barely able to breath and about to pass out.
But what had really spooked me about the trip is when we finally got to the top of the Mesa and I stood at the very edge of the Mesa and looked out. My fear of the height was mainly because of my overwhelming urge to feel like what it would be to fly off the edge of that mesa! I was really shocked at how I had to hold myself back from wanting to feel that sensation.
And so I kept that to myself as I slowly backed away and promised myself I would NEVER go close to a high edge anymore in my life. That was enough for me! And also my personal motto (although I hardly ever remind myself) is that I don't trust myself. haha. But more so - why should I limit my Self?
So in high school - since I had transferred to a private Christian Swedish evangelical school - where my dad's aunt had been a Latin teacher and my dad's sister had graduated from - I had taken Latin in middle school and studied Greek mythology in Latin. Then when my Bible Teacher (whom we called Rabbi due to his bald head and big white beard) - he also taught philosophy - and so when he taught Socratic philosophy, the idea of "To Know Thy Self" struck me particularly hard.
When I had met James it was due to our last names being next to each other but also because when I had transferred to the private school I was literally shocked at two things - the hallways were carpeted and everyone was so nice it was like a cult and the second thing - where were all the black people? I was literally shocked at the lack of nonwhite students. James (who was the first to tell me he preferred the term nonwhite - in his typical ironic sense) - he was complaining about how the school did not have air conditioning! I found this hilarious as I had never even noticed it before - and he insisted on wearing black as his ONLY choice of clothing color. Again little did I know that in Chinese culture it's the color white that means ghost and death - NOT black (which in Western culture means death).
So actually my best friend in first grade had been an adopted student from South Korea (and since we were only six years old - I'm not sure at what age he had been adopted). And we used to play chess every day at school and he always got his lunch from Tao Foods (which I found fascinating). What was the Tao I had wondered? And I got bored with chess in first grade because I realized it has closed parameters and so the choices were not infinite. And so I stopped playing chess and my best friend - Caleb Cushing was has given name - his favorite shake at Burger King was the strawberry shake (that was the high light of my birthday party - to discover that about Caleb). And I didn't see him after first grade - his family moved back to Korea maybe for a while? And then years later I swore he was playing against me in soccer - when I was 14 years old - and I kept calling his name. Of course he didn't reply as it was most likely not him but I thought maybe it was because he was just too serious of a competitor.
So I could not take sports competition seriously - it seemed too one dimensional and boring. Instead I considered music to be much more fascinating but on a philosophical level. For example why did my mom seem her happiest as she played music at the piano? And then my best friend before I had met James - my best friend had been a parakeet! He used to sit on our music books as we played piano and the parakeet loved to sing along to the piano music - in the same bliss as us. This fascinated me as well.
So then when I went off to Hampshire College for my first year - James and I kept corresponding and he was sending me text in logic symbols - symbols I did not understand as I never took a formal logic class. To me it seemed tawdry and mechanical but actually my advisor at Hampshire College was a philosophy professor who also specialized in Heidegger! https://www.morgan.edu/college_of_liberal_arts/departments/philosophy_and_religious_studies/faculty_and_staff/tsenay_serequeberhan.html
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Oh wow - he's actually from Eritrea! Strange - I had thought he was from Kenya. I had been close friends with a man from Eritrea in Minneapolis - Beraki.
So right away he cites Heidegger's 1927 book "Being and Time." So Sarte's book must have been based on that same book title.
I would have never guessed at my first year of Hampshire College that I would finish my master's degree doing a self-directed research class through the African Studies Department at University of Minnesota, chaired by Dr. Rose Brewer, as my qigong meditation training based on Pre-Socratic philosophy!
explores Heidegger’s analysis of existence as it converges with Marx’s critique of alienation.http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6110-existence-and-heritage.aspx
A review of his most recent book (2015)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/existence-and-heritage-hermeneutic-explorations-in-african-and-continental-philosophy/
The increased, though still pitiful, diversity of philosophy has not been good for Kant's reputation. Renewed attention to his Anthropology has raised the question of how much its racism infects the rest of his philosophy. Serequeberhan takes up "Perpetual Peace" to suggest that while it offers us an outline for international peace it remains flawed by the same assumptions of European preeminence. Indeed, it is written from the point of view of the same powerful states it seeks to rein in.
Serequeberhan takes up the aspects of Marx and Heidegger -- specifically their concern with what Césaire call chosification -- that Serequeberhan thinks are relevant to Africa's post-colonial situation. Here he focuses on the similarities between Marx's conception of alienation and Heidegger's account of das Man and, moreover, between the economic process that Marx describes in which humans are reduced to things and the everyday process in the modern world that Heidegger describes in which the being of human existence is reduced to the present-at-hand. Serequeberhan attributes insight into these similarities to Kostas Axelos, although others have obviously explored them as well. In Serequeberhan's view, Marx and Heidegger also supplement each other: Marx fails to uncover the ontological presuppositions of alienation while Heidegger fails to "give us an inkling as to how we are to 'prepare . . . a transformed abode of man in the world'" (110). Yet the fundamental exigency for post-colonial Africa is just this: given the gap between its "deplorable actuality" and "the promise of independence" (116), how does it transform its abode?This is quite interesting because very recently I had made the verbal claim that "people should not be commodified by their jobs" - and this term was a shock to the person who heard it - "people are not commodified by their jobs!" was the response. To which I replied in equal shock - without even thinking about it - yes people are definitely commodified by their jobs! Later I had to check myself by actually thinking about it! I had spoken from my existential experience before I had thought about it. But then the idea that someone could not even be aware of this concept of the commodification of people - which of course was epitomized by the African slave trade to the New World - this shocked me even more.
So then in returning to the sublime kernal of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" book - it was only through my self-directed research in the African Studies Department as intensive Pre-Socratic Qigong Meditation (using music theory as the commonality) was I able to - without of course expecting this at all - experience a literal spacetime vortex as the Emptiness itself - NOT just a dizziness from being drunk (as I had explained to myself). No when I had this experience during full lotus meditation - I came out of it realizing to my core that I was neither my body nor my mind! And yet I had still been confused by it - as Chunyi Lin explained to me. And later when I restudied the book Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality it also explained that at the first enlightenment experience there is also a sense of deep confusion.
What was that line? (pdf link)
nope not that...
Here it is!!
page 95
So we can see from here that as a person advances in meditation then the energy also accelerates! And the practice quickly becomes more dangerous yet also more powerful.
So I had recently reviewed the traditional shamanic training in the Amazon rainforest - requiring 120 days of fasting and in West Africa there is similarly a tradition of forest meditation requiring 100 days of fasting in silence. Daoist also requires the same to achieve this deep serenity state.
Why is that? Because as the book states - do not mistake this for death and yet it truly is a re-birth to make contact with your Soul that existed before death - your immortal soul. This is why when my young relative asks me my age I tell her I am immortal. She now claims I am a wizard and last I saw her she was sitting in full lotus meditation - as I had taught her to visualize rainbow light for developing healing energy. She had asked me how long it would take? I said 100 days of about an hour or two of practice a day. She was excited to try this out as she had been trying to developing healing methods recently for the pandemic.
And so what really caused my dizziness from my African Studies nonwestern philosophy training? How is it connected back to the Vertigo secret of Sarte's "Being and Nothingness"?
p. 118
That was the cause of my dizziness - my soul as a spacetime vortex as the Emptiness - as eternal motion!
Then one time the original qigong master whom I trained from - he explained that one time he overused his energy too fast from healing and so he experienced dizziness - and so he had to have his advanced students teach his Level 3 class while he meditated to restore his energy. So that was the same dizziness I had experienced also.
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