E-Mail This Article to a Friend What’s the big idea? Sometimes it takes a non-philosopher to spell out the discipline’s deepest daily meaning BY RUTH TOBIAS
	More head books to ponder NOW THAT WE’VE got you started, here’s a highly selective (okay — downright arbitrary) list of works, from a range of disciplines and genres, to help you put contemporary life into philosophical perspective: Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 1983; $12). You want some sex with that Zen? Barthes’s classic provides a semiotic foray into Japanese culture that, if too quick to insist on difference, is rich with sensual observation, keenly eroticizing the everyday of elsewhere. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, by David Foster Wallace (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003; $23.95). The title, natch, says it all — not least about Wallace’s continually brave, and generally beautiful and brilliant, attempts to do the same. The Matrix, by Joshua Clover (British Film Institute, 2004; $13.95). Before you object that you already read the Lawrence book and didn’t like the movie in the first place (and we sympathize), consider that Clover views it from a far more radical angle, one that speaks urgently to the current American socioeconomic condition — and does so with an inimitable wit that almost belies its own ferocity. Mr. Palomar, by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver (Harvest Books, 1985; $13). Or Cosmicomics, take your pick. Both works of fiction contain a series of vignettes (one featuring the world’s most obsessive onlooker, the other starring, well, stuff: particulate matter, geometric forms, and so on) that confront and ultimately affirm the joy of process without end: exploration, evolution, and the eternal unraveling of mystery. — RT

Americans are not, by nature, philosophers. Etymologically, the word means "lovers of knowledge"; we, by contrast, are lovers of sheer energy, of gung-ho get-up-and-go. Indeed, if any studied precept can be said to underlie or justify our will to action, it’s an anti-philosophy, a slogan: "Just do it!"

As even sweatshop-owning Nike CEOs must now realize, however, actions do have consequences. For instance, it’s our very tendency to act before we think that has garnered us our current role on the world stage — that of the villainous fool — and we’re fast being typecast as such, facing a future splattered with rotten tomatoes rather than showered with roses and applause. So perhaps we owe it to our future selves, as well as to the rest of the world, to take five, sit back, and think. About what? Well, for starters, about thought itself, and its relation to meaning; about what it is to mean what we think we mean, in every sense of the phrase, as individuals and as citizens. Since we won’t be the first to do so, we might begin by simply following the lines of logical, ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological argument philosophers have already mapped out from ancient Greece to cyberspace.

But can we? Even if we admit that in principle philosophy matters, how practical is it for today’s lay reader to engage in this notoriously arcane discipline? By picking up a few contemporary works, we found out. Three in particular proved that, somewhere between Chicken Soup for the Soul and postdoc esoterica, there is in fact a place for us to ponder.

Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong?, edited by Mark Conard and Aeon Skoble (Open Court, $17.95). This new release is the latest in a series that aims to expose the MTV generation to philosophy through its manifestations in pop culture (including Seinfeld and The Sopranos). In Allen, whose best work as a writer and a filmmaker often invokes his understanding of a range of schools of philosophical thought (existentialism in particular), the editors have a prime case for study. Which isn’t to say an open-and-shut one. Indeed, if there’s overlap among Allen the philosopher, the parodist, the public persona, and the character actor, there are also plenty of gaps. Filling them is beyond the purported scope of the volume; hence, especially for our purposes, the best essays simply use his work to explain or illustrate a given philosophy, rather than the other way around.

Take "Inauthenticity and Personal Identity in Zelig" by David Detmer, which outlines some of the basic tenets of existentialism as demonstrated in Allen’s mock-documentary of a human chameleon, who with "no personality of his own ... takes on the characteristics of the people around him." He is thus a living example of Jean Paul Sartre’s belief that "what makes me me is not my body, my soul, my memory ... but rather my choices" (in Detmer’s words; Sartre put it more elegantly: "existence precedes essence"). That Zelig’s choices are predicated on "conformity" further allows Detmer to explore both the Sartrean notion of "authenticity" and Heidegger’s related concept of "Dasein" — the former a matter of recognizing and accepting responsibility for one’s free agency, the latter a function of conscious being, of absolute selfhood. The way that Detmer, via Allen and the existentialists, reveals the implications of inauthenticity (or "bad faith," to use another Sartrean term) for fascism underscores the real-world applications of philosophy.

Certainly the piece compensates for the shockingly facile opening essay — by one of the editors, no less — which endlessly reiterates the notion that "because everything is impermanent and fleeting ... there is no ultimate value or meaning." Such sophomoric nihilism is never explained logically, much less tested exegetically (quoting characters does not amount to interpreting works). By contrast, another credit to the collection is Jerold Abrams’s "Art and Voyeurism in the Films of Woody Allen," whose account of Allen’s nihilism is convincingly grounded in the theories of Nietzsche and Foucault. Abrams links Allen’s meta-cinematic preoccupations — whereby films like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Play It Again, Sam are themselves partly about film — to Foucault’s delineation of "surveillance society." Its "atmosphere of total exposure, paranoia, and ultimately ... confession" rings familiar to us in our world of image and information overload. Abrams does us a real service in presenting the existentialist solution to our oppressive lives within the all-seeing "panopticon." Namely, it is to first "accept the modern institutional house of mirrors for what it is ... [and then] give style to one’s constructed character within its millionfold reflections," fitting "all the strengths and weaknesses of [one’s] nature ... into an artistic plan." As Abrams reveals how the fortunes of Allen’s characters rest on their ability to live that way, he reminds us that despite the postmodern condition — "loss of internal, private space" — self-realization, rather than self-renunciation, is not only possible but the sole "ethical" response. Timely, insightful essays such as this one eclipse the few clunkers in this collection, and make it a worthwhile read for the novice philosopher.

Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy, by Matt Lawrence (Blackwell, $17.95). Matt Lawrence’s similar attempt to tackle a range of key philosophical concepts in the Matrix franchise proves much more consistently satisfying. The book is exceptionally well-organized: Lawrence has done a remarkable job of isolating the salient issues and examining them systematically, one by one, chapter by chapter, in a colloquial, witty style that enhances the accessibility of his method. Questions central to the films concerning the nature of reality and our limited ability to grasp it invite discussions of Cartesian skepticism, Kantian phenomenalism, and more recent theories of mind, as well as of the relation between biological and artificial intelligence. Logical assumptions regarding cause and effect give way to more complex, sometimes paradoxical, formulations of "tensed" versus "tenseless" time — a function of Einstein’s time-space continuum, in which "time is ‘laid out’ before us in both directions" and which already "contains all the choices and actions [we are] going to make." From there arise questions of morality (religious or no) and ethics (political or no) that demand in turn a number of considerations. Lawrence elucidates the differences between determinism and free will, as well as between "moral objectivism" and the "three varieties of moral non-objectivism," namely nihilism, subjectivism, and cultural relativism; the relative claims to goodness of hedonists, utilitarians, and rationalists like Kant; and the forms of faith itself, from Kierkegaardian "fear and trembling" to the aforementioned existentialist "good faith" or "authenticity." Finally, Lawrence gracefully places the Matrix trilogy in a Taoist framework. All this and no Keanu Reeves — now that’s a Matrix most of us yearn to enter.

Doubt, a History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, by Jennifer Michael Hecht (HarperSanFrancisco, $27.95). Although this 500-plus-page tome is a work of philosophical and theological history, not of philosophy per se, the speculation it offers is rich and moving. First, Hecht walks readers through ancient Greece in order to clear up modern misconceptions about such pillars of doubt as the Cynics (who weren’t pessimistic so much as resigned to "the meaninglessness of the universe" to an "astoundingly liberating" degree), the Epicureans (who weren’t hedonistic so much as "deep[ly] appreciati[ve] of modest pleasures" like "peace of mind"), and the Skeptics (who weren’t prone to negativity so much as to indeterminacy). She takes us to ancient India and China to witness the development of Jainism and Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism — "atheist religion[s]" all (at least initially), variously involving such principles as naturalism, compassion, and selflessness, i.e., "oneness," not abnegation. She reflects on Christianity and the centrality of doubt to its very existence: "its central figure was" himself "wracked with [it]," and "forever after, we have had an image of agonizing doubt as part of our model of a religious life," the necessary converse of impassioned faith, such as that of Saint Paul. And so on: through the Dark Ages and the Scientific Revolution, the Victorian and modern eras, Hecht argues deftly for a conceptualization of doubt that’s virtually synonymous with thought itself. Doubt, she claims, "open[s] up conversation" and evinces a "sometimes ruthless commitment to demonstrative truth" even as it proposes that "if you create your own desires and model them after what you actually experience, you can be happy." Hecht’s book, then, is ultimately the thinking person’s self-help guide.

Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthtobias@earthlink.net