Many mathematicians, when pressed,
admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that
mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which
we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is
true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?
This may strike you as very
unlikely. But the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more
likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in
theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many
of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than
nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be
living in a simulated world than the real one.
With the question of absolution, Critchley and Webster usher
Hegel’s Romantic philosophy of the Absolute onto the stage. Hegel sees
Shakespeare’s characters as “free artists of their own selves,” choosing who
they are. In consequence, Shakespeare’s characters lack an absolute moral
framework to justify their choices, leaving them existentially indecisive, torn
by “a twofold passion which drives them from one decision or one deed to
another simultaneously.” Hamlet ends by happenstance, a series of accidental
deaths by poison, so while Hegel’s philosophy sees existence developing
steadily toward the Absolute, a form of divine unity, Hamlet remains trapped in
a contingent, fallen world. With this, we glimpse the “Hamlet Doctrine,” the
melancholic knowledge of brute reality that smothers all will to act.
Knowledge kills action;
action requires the veils of illusion — that is the Hamlet Doctrine, not that
cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an
excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no —
true knowledge, the insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for
action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. […]
“Existence seems
to us ever more screened and distanced,” Critchley and Webster write, “an empty
empathy for a suffering that we do nothing to stop and everything to abet in
our passivity, dispersal, and narcissism. None of us is free of this. Maybe
art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens.”
Robert Anton Wilson described ego as
social fiction with a qualification
How does one live antiartistically, like Ophelia, in the modern
world? Do we have to go suicidally insane? Rend ourselves at the “limit between
life and death”? Critchley and Webster never say. But Nietzsche, the madman
they pair with Ophelia, might help us see the way. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes that believing in
illusions is of “the highest value for all life.” “Untruth,” Nietzsche says, is
“a condition of life.” We recall Hamlet’s call to the Ghost, “Stay illusion,”
alongside Nietzsche’s claim that “action requires the veils of illusion.” If
art is “a saving sorceress,” “the affirmation of life” after we peer into the
abyss of our violent world, then art both rends the veil of illusions,
revealing “true knowledge,” and weaves the veil back into place, replacing our
illusions and thus enabling us to act.
"All
claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all
claims made by those who affect merely a 'spiritual' influence deserve a doubly
critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they
seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naivete
and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no
politics like anti-politics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with
ostentatious anti-materialism."- Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary
Position
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