Heidegger and Monty Python

After reading the section from Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking and listening to the class discussion on meditative versus calculative thinking, one of the first things I thought of was this Monty Python skit,


In this skit, the German and Greek philosophers team up to compete with each other. After the whistle blows though, neither team takes any action and every philosophy is immediately immersed in their thoughts. For almost the entire game the ball is not touched, as the philosophers wander around the field thinking. Finally, Archimedes gets an idea, enlivens the Greek team, and Socrates scores to beat the Germans.

In regards to what we read and discussed today, I think that this skit is a goofy but clever caricature of what Heidegger calls meditative and calculative thought. With the two teams, Monty Python paints a stereotypical portrait of philosophy. All of the famous philosophers have their heads in the clouds, thinking on thinking, expounding great philosophical principles and theories, but with nothing at all to show for it. The soccer match is boring because philosophers are shown to be good for nothing except thinking, while even their thinking is just a fruitless waste of time. Heidegger explicitly addressed this portrayal of philosophical, or meditative, thinking when he wrote that one perspective is that “mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware above reality. It loses touch. It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs.” Monty Python further drives this point home, that the meditative thinking of philosophy has no practical outcome, by including Archimedes on the Greek team. A mathematician, Archimedes alone has the kind of thoughts that actually do something in the world, and as a result it is Archimedes whose ideas alone carry enough weight in the practical confines of the game to move the rest of the Greek team behind him. As a result, this skit brings out the contrast between calculative and meditative thinking by showing calculative thoughts to have practical results for the world we live in, while meditative is empty of any meaning at all and a waste of time.

Like we discussed in class though, a caricature of meditative and calculative thought does not capture the fullness of them in Heidegger’s perspective. Meditative thought is not worthless or even impractical: as Heidegger claims, “at times it requires a greater effort...more practice...[and] in need of more delicate care than any other genuine craft” (152). While it is easy to lampoon the philosophers as doing nothing that has any relevance for the world in which they live, the ideas of philosophers have had huge impacts on all sorts of issues and have come out in very tangible results.

Maybe another approach from the Monty Python skit, though, is questioning if the study of philosophy is necessary for meditative thoughts. On the one hand, philosophy deals directly with the meditative thoughts and seeks to answer many of the basic and profound questions of existence. On the other hand, it is possible to have these thoughts without studying or majoring in philosophy at all. Philosophy has also been lampooned as a study for the privileged, for the people who are well off enough to have time to spend speculating and theorizing instead of actually doing work. While Heidegger would argue that people who do not care about issues of their Being are this way because there is no language to speak of Being, no practice at this thought, with the result being a though-poor population, another response might be that the people who do care about Being are only people who have enough free time and money to worry about it. Even though philosophers traditionally have not been very well off in regards to wealth, I think it is still an interesting argument that those who can practice philosophy have a certain level of comfort and freedom above some of those who are thought-poor, who do not think about their existence, perhaps as a result of actually being caught up in an every day struggle to continuing existing, without having the time or concern to think about it.

Being-Towards-Life?

As we were going over Heidegger's Being-towards-death the other day, I began to ask myself what motivates me to act in a certain way. Heidegger would say it is the realization of my own finitude actualized in my death. I would disagree. I would say it is the desire to enjoy or experience things in my life future. I do not go to college because I think I must make something of myself before I die--I do it because I want to enjoy a higher quality of life. Am I misreading my motivation?

On the Existence of God

It seems to me that when one sets out to prove or disprove the existence of God, he often first attempts to define God. While this is logical protocol in most philosophical inquiries, it does not apply in this case. Most definitions cite an all-powerful, all-knowing, and possibly all good being. This is a fairly generic representation that is pretty well accepted, regardless whether it is actually believed or not.

Let us consider what such qualities entail. An all-knowing God knows how many hairs are on your head. An all-knowing God knows how and why chemicals react to each other. An all-knowing God knows how many times you have sneezed. An all-powerful God makes it rain and stop raining. An all-powerful God created life. An all-powerful God can answer any question.

Now, regardless whether there is a God or not, there is still a set and knowable amount of hairs on your head. There are properties that make chemicals react the way they do. You have sneezed a certain number of times, even though neither you nor anyone else knows how many this is. It rains and stops. There is life. There is an answer to any question, regardless if any human knows it or not.

Therefore, whether we believe in God or not, all that we attribute to him is still present. One thing we do not explicitly attribute to God (though it has perhaps wrongly been implied) is self-awareness. I propose that the question is not ‘is there a God?’ but rather, ‘does he perceive himself or not?’ All knowledge exists whether or not it is know to anybody. This is evident in math that we have not yet discovered. In the same token, nature is governed by some force.

What is the difference between God being all knowing and him being the embodiment of all knowledge? Or what is the difference between him being all-powerful and the laws that govern the universe? It seems to me that the only difference is whether or not the body of knowledge and governing force of nature acknowledges itself as God or not.

But this is foolish because there is no way that we can understand what God’s perspective is like. Personally, I highly doubt God perceives himself as God in the same sense that we perceive him.

Thus, God exists as the body of all knowledge and governing force in the universe. Any further attempts to define him (such as his perception or morality) cannot be anymore than stipulation.

Heidegger

Something that is very surprising for me, I find myself not being as confused by Heidegger as I thought I would have continued to be after both class today and a very helpful Precis. (I kind of laugh when I type this part) I think for once, my tendency to lean towards not thinking too hard or trying to be somewhat of a reductionist has helped me out (lazy mental processes basically); although, I may in fact be wrong with everything that I am about to say but, moving on. So in class today, at least for it to make sense in my head, I looked at the ontological Being as somewhat of a separate entity altogether from the ontic being...at first anyway. In class we talked about how the site of disclosure of an ontological Being is by a particular ontic being. When we discussed this in class I looked at ontological Beings as those entities that occupy ontic beings but their "is" is not that of an ontic being. It's kind of like the "spirit" and the "body" whereas many people believe that they are themselves a physical body that houses a spirit. The spirit (the ontological Being) enters (the ontic being) at birth and the ontological Being leaves the ontic at death. That is why the Ontological Being cannot experience its on death because it has left the ontic being. But, discussing this subject, I would like to look at things yet again from another perspective of techonology (as I did with my last blog). Back in the times of Heidegger, I'm sure there were not machines that had the ability to revive victims who doctors believed were not fully gone. I could not find the actual video that I was looking for but I found one similar. It discusses an after death experience where he "so called" experiences his death and comes back to tell of the experience. This resembles somewhat of the teological suspension of the ethical in a sense to where who is to say that an individual was not talked to directly by God, in the same sense for us to say that an individual cannot have an after death experience and be able to come back and tell about their experience of death. Here's the link to the video that I was not thinking of exactly but it serves the same purpose:

Teleological Suspension of the Universe

Teleological Suspension of the Universe

In our first class topics, we extensively discussed Kierkegaard’s concept of the idiosyncratic individual in relation to the universal ethical and the absolute. The idea that I am only separated from God by an unintentional and archaic sense of ethics and morality infinitely bothered me, so in class I suggested that perhaps it is our flawed systems in being human that should be attributed to the paradoxes in experience that create the particular rather than some profound interaction with the absolute. Professor Johnson then owned me in the face by saying, “Perhaps it is only our idea of truth that is flawed” (or something to that effect). At the time, my only response was “damn” because I had just been destroyed by our teacher. However, I began to think more about our system of truth being flawed and spoke more to Professor Johnson about my ideas and incorporated her statement into further ideas about our flawed human perception.

As an amateur and in writing a four hundred word blog post, clearly this will be a less than half-baked (almost raw) theory, but I hope to convey this concept at least partially. I am attempting to apply Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of the Ethical in relation to our mediation with God to our mediation in understanding the universe and reality. So everyone has heard the argument that maybe green for me looks entirely different than what is green to everyone else, and so on (this can also be attributed to sensations—what pain feels like to me could be completely different for others). Thus, it is fair to say that this indicates such idiosyncrasies in our everyday perception of reality, indicating relativity in the way the individual experiences the universe. We only possess certain methods of relaying these experiences to others. The methods of explaining the phenomena are physics and math. Both of these systems would seem flawed because there are paradoxes in both math and physics. For example, quantum mechanics and special relativity both possess mathematical and experiential evidence in their favor, but it would seem that they contradict one another. So, what I am suggesting is that this does not indicate a flaw in our math or scientific systems, but rather, a flaw in our ability to perceive. A clear example of our flawed ability to perceive would be that of our perception of time. Time is inextricably linked with space in a fabric—time and space, spacetime, the spacetime continuum and other such jazzy terms. So this would make time equal as a spatial dimension (t) that we should theoretically be able to perceive in experiencing reality; however, we can only perceive the “present” (I pretentiously put present in quotes because, if you want to get technical, we can only perceive the past because of the slow speed at which our brains process what is happening to us, placing an absolute reality even more shamefully into the distance). So this system of math and perception would be the universal ethical which separates us from observing the absolute universe. As hard enough as it is to accept and grasp just that part of the argument, I have even more difficulty determining what would in fact be the absolute universe or the God aspect of the model.

I am not a piano key

This video clip comes from the movie, The Truman Show, which critiques a man’s human existence. In the movie, Truman (played by Jim Carey) stars in his own reality television show, yet he doesn’t realize he’s even playing a role. Since he was a baby, a camera has secretly followed Truman’s every action till his current state of a middle age man. The people of the community played the part of supporting actors, while the producers set up scenes that have shaped his life. A few examples include losing his father in a boating accident, where he works, the wife that he married etc. Finally, Truman begins to catch onto the role-playing and the seemingly odd coincidences that occur.

In this scene, his actions seem to parallel our discussion on Dostoevsky. Throughout Truman’s life, he has been played like a piano key. He has followed the exact life that has been placed before him. Once he begins to realize, he is not the one actually making his decisions, but rather they are being made with an audience in mind, he finds a way to not let that happen by employing the most advantages advantage- free will. It is a moment of recognition that he is no longer going to play by the rules, but rather act according to his own motives.

I feel this movie offers a good visual of the exact thing Dostoevsky was trying to defy. What stayed in my mind even after class discussion was his quote from the book, “I am not a piano key.” How often do we act according to how we are suppose to act rather than what we want to do? For Truman, this had been a life experience and when he looked around he realized that is exactly what everyone had done as well. When he begins to go against everyone else, he becomes the only real human throughout the movie. He will not be the calculable object. The remaining part of the movie follows a little like the beginning of the scene- driving in a circle, making a turn, and being stopped in a traffic jam, yet he fights against the grain.

This movie made me first question how often do we experience this kind of realization that things are not as they always appear? How often do we go about doing things, because we feel we are supposed to? Finally, what does it take for us to realize we are making our decisions based on universal truth rather than our own free will?

"Human, All Too Human" (BBC Documentary about Nietzsche)

Here's a short documentary produced by the BBC in 1999. Of course, it only serves as an "introduction" to Nietzsche's many and varied writings... but it's a pretty good introduction.

The Rationality of Irrational Behavior

In the selection of Notes from the Underground that we read, Dostoevsky argues that man will act irrationally because in doing so he proves his own free will. He states that it is the most “advantageous advantage” for man to prove that he is not an organism that can be reduced to mere mathematics, that he is unpredictable and at times illogical. This argument makes a lot of sense to me: humans engage in illogical activities because in doing so they validate their freedom to choose and therefore not definable by an algorithm. A good example of this willingness to behave unpredictably merely to validate one’s own free will seems, to me, to be an activity such as skydiving. This has to be the pinnacle of crazy acts, flinging one’s self out of an airplane of your own accord in non-emergency situations and yet a large number of people do it every year. Despite all the danger people still choose to engage in such activities and it is the fact that they “choose” that is most important. The choice is what separates humans from every other organism and object, we can choose to be stupid, and we can choose to put our lives in danger for no good reason at all. People who skydive know that doing so is stupid, it is asinine in every possible way, yet still they do it because doing so proves they can choose even the most dangerous activity if they wish, there is no mathematical algorithm that binds their decisions stating that they will only choose the activity which results the best for them. It’s the ability to behave foolishly that proves freewill. There are numerous examples of irrational acts that people engage in everyday and it would be impossible to map the infinite possibilities of the way in which people act to a simple algorithm as due to mans ability to choose it is impossible to accurately guess how every individual would react. My one problem with his argument is if acting irrationally proves we have free will and we desire free will such that it is in our best interest to prove we have free will, would it not follow that it is rational to try and prove our freewill and therefore it is rational to behave irrationally. I feel I could be wrong about this it just seems that his argument makes irrationality rational.

Insanity

I stumbled upon this article, which reminded me of our previous discussion about circumventing the ethical and jumping to the absolute. While this guy did not have a divine revelation, on the simple fact that there was no earthquake, it did stir a few thoughts and questions in my mind. I wondered specifically about the motives of this man and why he would subject himself to jail time, public humiliation, and speculation about his mental sanity. Could he be a victim of Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with asserting one’s free will at the expense of one’s own well being? I don’t think so, because he mentioned it was God’s message that he was relaying to the world. So, he must actually believe he had divine contact, or else he wouldn’t comment or maybe he would if he was acting irrationally.

We tend to dismiss people that do something bizarre as mentally unstable, but only when they do something to catch the attention of many. But not everyone who is mentally unstable engages in behavior based on their impulses. So why would this pastor jeopardize his life in this manner. If his job was just to warn people, shouldn’t there have been further instructions? What are people supposed to do with just a mere warning?

While the story of Abraham is understandable given the premise of God speaking to Abraham, this story is not, because God told him to warn people, not ruin his life. Wasn’t there a way a better way for this guy to follow God’s supposed instructions? Perhaps this man is just that mentally unstable, but to me it is not making sense. Furthermore, this isn’t the first incident of this kind, apparently another man who was classified as mentally challenged hijacked a plane in a similar fashion, which makes me wonder how these 3 realms apply to people with a mental disorder. Are they skewed or do they follow an entirely different pattern. After all, people with mental handicaps can often times make rational choices that sane people make, but a few large scale irrational choice classify an individual as insane. I guess the big question I am trying to get at is, why is it that we as humans are confined to asserting our free will in very controlled and unnoticeable manners? Doesn’t that essentially limit us and confine us to society’s norms and expectations that only allows for a rather small window of actions that are irrational?

Freedom, Expression, and Deadlines. Oh my!

A few classes ago we discussed Kierkegaard’s focus on the relationship between freedom and anxiety. We talked about how taking singularities and moving them to the universal tends to limit one’s freedom. However, this limitation of freedom also limits anxiety, therefore this sacrifice appears acceptable and even advantageous to many, who choose to make distinctions and assumptions relating to the universal realm, remaining complacent with their limited freedom. One thing we did not discuss, however, was the way in which the decisions of individuals limit the freedom of others rather than their own freedom. Is there an unlimited amount of freedom for everyone to express or is there a finite amount, a large pot of “freedom” from which everyone draws, like a cauldron of soup or some other vaguely irrelevant and imperfect simile that serves no purpose other than to draw this blog post ever closer (at an agonizingly slow rate, I might add) to the magic number of four-hundred on the word count tool? Is everyone completely free to maximize their own freedom even if it infringes upon the freedom of others? Being undeniably awake and substantially attentive, I pondered these and other equally substantive thought before definitively concluding that in my opinion, whether or not there is a set or infinite amount of freedom is irrelevant. Either way people are always going to infringe upon and limit the freedom of others, even if it does nothing to maximize or increase their own. For example, I exercise my freedom by playing “Purple Rain” obnoxiously loudly at 4 in the morning with open windows and a cranked volume knob, angrily waking a large portion of the inhabitants of second-floor Robb. In maximizing my freedom, I severely limit that of many others in an incredibly disproportionate fashion. And, in retaliation, the disgruntled, half-awake mob exercise their freedom beat the ever-loving crap out of me (and therefore exercise their freedom to sleep peacefully through the night). This pits my freedom against that of others, an extremely common occurrence. If my freedom is to be truly stretched and increased to its full potential, others will suffer a loss of freedom.
In another example of a different sort (yet still completely hypothetical in its nature), Professor Johnson exercises her freedom by assigning blog posts to be submitted by the end of the week to her class, granting her the freedom to keep her class and assignments on schedule and, to an extent, keep the rampant procrastination of her students in check. However, this limits the freedom of the completely hypothetical students to procrastinate to their hearts’ contents. Such inequalities of the expression of freedom and the limits it creates for others is so common that many of us see it as merely a part of human interaction.

possibilities

I really enjoyed our end of class discussion the other day, that sent everyone out with the questions: "How invested are you in making your life easier? How much are you willing to limit your belief in possibility?" I found an interesting new article that brought this into an interesting focus in regards to how teachers view the potential of their students, and its effects on education.

Just running on this educational focus for a little, I've heard a rumor that applicants applying to Teach for America are asked the question "Do you think a teacher alone can help a student succeed?" This seems a very Kierkegaardian question in regards to the limiting of possibilities. TFA wants teachers who sincerely believe that all students have the potential to be other than what they are at face value -- poor students,in poor schools, from low income families, with statistically poor chances of doing well in the classroom -- and not teachers who have already formed assumptions and blocked off possibilities on how much their students will be able to achieve. Even though this is just what I've heard, and probably not true then, if the teacher candidate answers the question up above saying "No, I think that educational environment, family, home-life,...are all very important to a student's education as well" the result is that they will not get a position.

More generally, while I understand Kierkegaard's claim that limiting our expectations of other people's possibilities is in a way limiting their freedom to become anything other than we expect them to be, I wonder at what point our subjective truths become objective, or when it is ok to assume possibilities closed.

What are the benefits of allowing everyone we meet the possibilities that they could be or become an infinite number of things, when doing so only increases our anxiety? Unlike TFA, that encourages teachers to look for the best in all of the students, actually being open to all possibilities would mean assuming people could be better than we think they are, but also recognizing that everything might be worse than we can imagine. How much hope would this give to a TFA teacher, though? In their case,if that evaluation question is true, the teachers are people who are encouraged to only think the best, and deny themselves the possibility of the worst, which I think is denying a lot.

For example, if I am going to let myself believe in possibility, I would have as much reason to believe that the people I see could kill me as they could be my friends, could yell at me or pass me by completely. This would provide good reason to be anxious, if these are the possibilities that exist. An alternative might be the middle approach of accepting people as they are without passing any judgment or being anxious, which isn't an alternative that existentialism would be 100% happy with admitting as it rubs against the idea that everyone has the possibility to be anything.

I guess my problem with the idea of opening ourselves up to possibilities, to anxiety, is that the freedom it signifies sounds like a good thing, but it comes at a miserable cost. Opening up to possibilities seems to take away from prospects for happiness, leaving a person warily approaching life conscious that any given moment or person could be either kind or dangerous. Why would anyone want to think of these possibilities, if by instead of denying possibilities to others they may misjudge people entirely, either with good or bad results, but have a lot to gain as far as preserving their personal happiness and well being is concerned? It also seems like the individual who truly accepted the call to be open to all possibilities in others would be the quintessential individual. Anxious, not knowing what to expect of the people and world around them, they would also be very alone since the only thing they could really know and not be anxious about would be their own individuality and nothing else.

The Existential Fall of Man

In Feodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground the protagonist argues that man will on occasion act in a manner that seems for all practical purposes against his best interests. Scientists, he says, will try to dismiss this behavior as committed out of ignorance. However, the underground man claims, “man may purposely, consciously, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have that right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire what is rational” (45). In other words, man may act contrary to all reason for the sole advantage of not being subject to reason. In this way, man may demonstrate to himself that he is free and his choices, however wise or unwise they may be, are the product of his will and nothing else.

The most prominent example I can think of for the rationality of irrationality comes from the book of Genesis. God made only one request of Adam: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2.27). Such a warning from such a being should be sufficient evidence for Adam and Eve to know that eating the fruit is not in their best interest. However, as we all know, Adam and Eve disregard this warning and succumb to temptation.

God provided everything for Adam and Eve; yet instead of being content with this, they knowingly ate of the forbidden fruit. For this reason, I argue that the fall of man is to some extent the direct the consequence of his desire, not to do what is rationally advantageous, but to demonstrate his freedom of will.

In this sense it seems that part of the knowledge of the fruit of good and evil bestowed upon Adam and Eve was, if only indirectly, the conformation of their own free will. Through their blatant disobedience to God’s will they are demonstrating their own. Thus, man’s fall from grace of his own accord seems completely in tune with the underground man’s supposition that “one’s own free unfettered choice” is valued as the “most advantageous advantage” (43).

It is true that the serpent is partially to blame for Adam and Eve’s transgression. However, because God punishes Adam and Eve as well as the serpent, and because God is just, we can assume Adam and Eve are accountable to some degree. They are accountable because, as they learned the hard way, they have the free will to make their own decisions and suffer their own consequences.

Deciphering Nietzsche

Before I begin, let me preface my post by declaring that I know about as much about Philosophy as a four-year-old knows about how to split an atom. This class is the first Philosophy course I’ve ever taken, therefore I have no knowledge of the principles and conventions upholding the discipline. As such, it takes me a bit longer than your average Philosophy whiz to absorb and understand all this information, and even longer to think of constructive ways to criticize it. So, if anything I say in the next few paragraphs sounds like the incoherent ramblings of a drunken maniac, you know why.

In the excerpt from “On The Genealogy of Morality,” Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that the origin of our understanding of the word “good” stems from an aristocratic projection of what he calls the “pathos of nobility,” (79) meaning that it was the lords and dukes and barons of times past who deemed everything they did and enjoyed as “good” while condemning everything else to the realm of “bad.” To support his argument, Nietzsche offers examples taken from various languages and demonstrates the implicit association within these words with “the common,” or “bad,” such as the correlation he draws between the German word for “bad” (schleclt) and “plain” (schlicht) given their one-letter difference (80). Although such a similarity warrants debate and investigation, it seems illogical to use such a connection as the entire grounds for debasing our understanding of a word.

Take, for example, the words “sea” and “see.” The first refers to a body of water while the latter indicates the act of comprehending the visual world. But to use Nietzsche’s reasoning, their near identical spelling indicates that these words share an inextricable etymological connection, right? Of course not. Although Nietzsche has more than enough fodder to purport a philosophical relationship between the ruling class and the development of the word “good,” his attempts to provide concrete evidence of this etymological evolution are questionable at best.

But nit-picky details aside, the overall course of Nietzsche’s argument seems to take an entire amusement park’s worth of twists and turns between point A and point B. Later on in the excerpt, Nietzsche unpacks the concept he terms “slave-morality” (82) where the low, common, and oppressed attempt to reclaim what it means to be “bad” by defining it in terms of everything their oppressors represent. In this sense, slave-morality is nothing more than an inversion of the patrician understanding of the good but from the opposite side of the fence. But such an act of reversal, in Nietzsche’s understanding, is entirely egregious, self-serving, and nothing more than a passive attempt at revenge. “[I]n order to come into being,” Nietzsche writes, “slave-morality always needs an opposite. . . it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to order to be able to act at all,--its action is, from the ground up, reaction” (82). On those grounds, Nietzsche dismisses slave-morality as base and unproductive, serving no purpose other than to offer an outlet for the hate-filled powerless.

Wait, hold on. Now here’s where he’s lost me.

At the beginning of the excerpt, Nietzsche argues the aristocratic understanding of “good” as downright “wrong” (79) because the ruling class simply deemed everything they are as “good” and everything they are not as “bad.” As we’ve already deduced, slave-morality employs the same process. But yet, when discussing slave-morality, the nobility suddenly become “triumphant” (82) and filled with “life and passion” (82) while the weak and oppressed are the antagonists, the “most evil enemies” (81) worthy of scorn and contempt. Where did that switch happen? On what grounds does Nietzsche suddenly flip his argument in the opposite direction? Maybe these are some of life’s unanswerable questions, like who in the world thought it was a good idea to create 8 a.m. classes. Or maybe the answer’s staring up from the page at me, but I just don’t have the right perspective to recognize it. Either way, I hope my ramblings haven’t bored you too much and that I’ve instigated some sort of reflection of your part, even if only slightly.

Existentialism in Office Space.

The fact that freedom and choice do not maximize advantages (like we said) and choosing to be irrational makes us human reminded me of the movie Office Space. The beginning of the movie starts with Peter Gibbons following orders within his office and relationships. He is prey to his bosses’ orders, requests, and demands. He seems almost numbed by his mundane life, yet doesn’t know how to break free of the cycle. He goes to a hypnotist at his girlfriend’s request, and the hypnotist suddenly dies, coincidentally, before he can break Peter of the hypnosis. Peter continues life in this relaxed-state hypnosis, and breaks himself of the life that he hates by choosing to do what he wants, when he wants.
While the hypnosis is definitely cinematic serendipity, I think it’s applicable to existentialism and our discussion on Thursday. The average American goes around appearing to “live the American dream,” which is a checklist of a job, a girlfriend, a suburban house, and money; but, the American dream does not factor in happiness. It appears most disgruntled Americans are happy complaining about their desk jobs, while not really realizing the fact that there is more to life than the checklist. Peter, via hypnosis, realizes his unhappiness and makes amends- and chaos- while doing so. He chooses to be a single individual within the universal entity his unhappiness stems from, the company Initech. Peter and his two co-workers, Samir and Michael, completely destroy a fax machine, which they were previously enslaved to- the machine never worked, they constantly complained about it but did not have the power to do anything to fix it, save telling their bosses, who didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Peter somewhat gains the mentality of the underground man. He wants to prove that he’s an individual. He doesn’t want to go with the company’s grain and grind anymore. While this is disadvantageous to fulfilling the “American dream,” it appears that Peter has already tasted the dream and found it unsatisfying. In the beginning of the movie, he follows all the rules, and is unhappy, bored, and looking for something more. By the end, he chooses to do nothing, and has never been happier. The problem with the underground man is that while he knows that going with the grain gets him closer to truth, happiness, and self-respect, he halts before he finds what path will make him happiest; he is content with living in squalor and pointing out what is wrong with humanity. It seems as if Peter continues along the path; at the end of the movie he is working with a construction crew and still friendly. It would seem a difference between Peter and the underground man is companionship. The underground man alienates everyone he comes across; Peter has friends of like mind who are supportive of his disgruntlement and helped him through his “crisis.”