Lovers of Sophia

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by Jason Reza Jorjani


  source of evil. That is something which, if you are virtuous, you

  do not want to be. Otherworldly evils are neither here nor there.

  They aren’t your evils. Your virtuous desire to do good and not

  evil... depends causal y on what you do.15

  These passages are subject to internal contradictions. Note Lewis’s

  usage of these phrases: “you may have it or not” unless “you make

  the wrong decision”, because only if “what you do” is to “actualize evils” will they be “your evils”, ones that depend on your being

  “a causal source of evil”. For Lewis, we are causal “sources” only in the sense that already existing parts of logical space are made

  (indexical y) “actual” through us. I do not see how this non-

  primitive notion of agent causation does not lead to the same

  infinite regress of empirical causes that forced Hume to abandon

  causality and Kant to seek a noumenal basis for personal agency. In

  that case, Lewis does not allow for ‘making’ any real ‘decision’. Our

  ‘choices’ col apse into being merely the discursive “effects” of other empirical causes.

  We see this again in Lewis’s response to an objection raised by

  Mark Johnston to the effect that Lewis’s “egocentric” view of moral

  action is compromised by Lewis having argued (elsewhere) that we

  14 Ibid., 124-125.

  15 Ibid., 127.

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  are not strictly unified in our persistence through time, but are each divisible into temporal parts or stages:

  My present stage wants the book to be finished in the fulfillment

  of its present intentions – there’s the egocentric part – and that will happen only if the proper sort of causal continuity binds

  together my present stage with the one that finishes the book.

  The continuity thus desired is part of the continuity that unifies

  mereological sums of person-stages into persisting people.16

  Lewis is saying that even if your personal intentions to “do” x and y are somehow communicated from person-stage to person-stage,

  “you” (as defined by the sum of your communicated intentions)

  are still the “causal source” of x and y. This is just the kind of intellectual y abstracted notion of causality that James believed to

  have been responsible for Hume’s rejection of causality and Kant’s

  artificial imposition of it as a category of pure reason. Interestingly, Lewis explicitly claims to have “taken a Humean view about laws

  and causation”17 and “used it instead as a thesis about possibility”, though he does not seem to realize the implications of this for agent

  causality. Such a Humean view requires either rejecting causal agency

  altogether, or positing a Kantian noumenon. By contrast, William

  James’s insistence on a phenomenological y primitive notion of

  causation, where agency means the power to effect novel outcomes, the power of individuals to real y create things and events, leads him towards an ontology wherein there is profound contingency and no

  complete logical space:

  The melioristic universe is... a pluralism of independent powers...

  Its destiny thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs – which amounts to saying (in the technical language of logic) that, the world

  being as yet unfinished, its total character can be expressed only

  by hypothetical and not by categorical propositions. (Empiricism, believing in possibilities, is willing to formulate its universe

  16 Ibid., 126.

  17 Ibid., 91.

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  in hypothetical propositions. Rationalism, believing only in

  impossibilities and necessities, insists on the contrary on their

  being categorical.)18

  Lewis’s whole thesis of the plurality of worlds is spun out of the

  premise that philosophical examples involving possibilia ultimately require us to assume that when we speak of what is necessarily true

  we are referring to what already obtains at all possible worlds, that what we say is contingently true refers to what already obtains at some of them and not others, and what is said to be necessarily false

  is false because it has no referent at any possible world. On this view, philosophical inquiries that make use of counterfactuals assume

  the existence of worlds sufficiently similar to our own so as to be

  different in only the ways relevant to the given example. All of this

  involves a false notion of “possibility”. No possibility that already exists in every essential aspect of how it is conceived is any real

  possibility at al . To speak of possibilities in any coherent sense is to allow, as James does, for universal contingency.

  An ontology of universal contingency is not possible if Logic is

  taken to be a real limiting condition on worldhood, as opposed to

  an intellectual abstraction that is useful for coordinating complex projects in the empirical world of experience. In his “Confidences

  of a Psychical Researcher”, James speculated that the paranormal

  phenomena that he spent 25 years researching as a founding member

  of the American Society for Psychical Research, might turn out to be

  empirical evidence for an irreducibly illogical aspect of existence.19

  This “bosh” would be the residue of a primordial ontological chaos

  out of which cosmic order arises only through a long process of

  evolutionary struggle between willing beings with varying degrees

  of emergent consciousness. ‘Laws’ might have evolved in fits and

  starts, as a draw between battling psychical forces, with some of

  them being selected against and others of them being assimilated

  – so that the fabric of the cosmos is as adhoc a patchwork as our

  18 James,

  Writings: 1902–1910, 1099.

  19 Ibid., 1258-1259.

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  DNA (most of which is evolutionary ‘junk’). In Lewis’s terms, this

  would be a battle of story-tellers’ imaginations over how the “book

  of the world” should be written. One would never know what the

  characters will do next, because there is still no single author whose will has prevailed absolutely over the others.

  The persistence of this “bosh” factor, together with emergent

  order, provides just the kind of razor’s edge that is required for

  free will – a tense balance between law-like determinism and real indeterminism. Those of Lewis’s possible worlds that are supposed

  to allow for choosing agents, only feature a rationalist pseudo

  ‘indeterminism’ defined by propensity-profiles of finite entities that demarcate a completed logical space of ‘predetermined possibilities’.

  It is beyond the scope of this essay to argue against Lewis’s ontology and in favor of something like James’s pluralistic universe (where

  “uni verse” properly means the one and only reality). All I have been concerned to suggest is that whatever other merits it may have, the

  Lewisian ontology does not allow for the kind of free will that defeats an indifference objection. Fundamental and comprehensive logical

  determination, on the one hand, and allowance for a creativity that

  makes for meaningful y active engagement in life, on the other, are

  contradictory demands to make of one and the same ontology.

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  REWRITING GOD’S PLAN

  George Nolfi’s 2011 cinematic adaptation of the 1954 short

  story “Adjustment Team” by Philip K
. Dick explores

  the concept of human freedom in a way that seamlessly

  intertwines the metaphysical and the metapolitical. The

  Adjustment Bureau is essential y a retelling of Jacob’s wrestling match with the unsportsmanlike angel. Not since Franz Kafka penned The

  Trial has there been a more poignant allegory about the struggle between Man and God.

  The members of the Adjustment Bureau are angels and their

  chairman is the Lord. This is made fairly clear at several points in the film. From the very first meeting that David Norris (Matt Damon)

  has with a member of the Bureau, namely Richardson, it is impressed

  upon him that the Bureau is there to make sure that everything goes

  according to plan. This leaves us asking who’s plan it is that they are enforcing. Richardson also tel s him that he has just seen behind

  a curtain that he was not even supposed to know existed and that

  very few humans have ever looked behind. This sets up the author

  of The Plan as some kind of Wizard of Oz figure – the man behind

  the curtain, as it were – but even more than that, since the remark

  about “very few humans” suggests that the Bureau’s members are

  not as “human” as they appear. Then, in the bar, Harry explains to

  David that they cannot reset people without authorization from “the

  chairman” whereupon David, appalled and exasperated, asks: “The

  chairman?” Harry elaborates in these revealing terms: “That’s just a

  name we use. You use many other names.”

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  lovers of sophia

  What other names is he al uding to? Zeus. Jupiter. Jehovah.

  Al ah. Indra. This becomes clearer on the boat ride that they take

  together. David asks Harry point blank, “Are you an angel?” Harry,

  somewhat flattered, replies: “We’ve been called that. We’re more

  like case officers, who live a lot longer than humans.” Thompson

  leaves us with no doubt. He explains to David how these ‘angels’

  have controlled human civilizations throughout history on behalf

  of the chairman, stepping back during two periods wherein they

  attempted to allow humans to exercise their free will with what he

  claims were disastrous consequences: the dark ages and then the

  epoch from World War I to the near destruction of the earth in the

  Cuban Missile Crisis. Thompson equates the Bureau’s enforcement

  of The Plan with the power of Fate.

  Taking this key revelation as our point of departure, what is most

  fascinating about the film is the way in which it depicts the very finite and fallible character of the divine bureaucracy. Just as the Bible

  and religious texts of other traditions present us with a hierarchy of angels or gods in service of the highest god or Lord of the gods, in the Adjustment Bureau there is a clear hierarchy – a word, by the way,

  whose literal meaning is “holy order.” The lower echelons have very

  limited knowledge. David discovers that Richardson cannot tell him

  why he is not supposed to be with Elise Sel as (Emily Blunt) because

  neither Richardson nor his assistants are privy to that information.

  They have to compensate for their lack of knowledge by resorting to

  bul ying tactics and to outright deception.

  Harry explains to David that Richardson was “just trying to scare”

  him when he said that the Bureau members can read everything in

  his mind, and that he was exaggerating about the effects of a “reset.”

  To read minds, they have to setup thought processes that weigh

  options and can be mapped out as clear decision trees. Water –

  whether in the form of rain or bodies of water – limits their abilities to “adjust” people and events. Harry even admits that Thompson lied

  to David when he claimed that the reason he cannot be with Elise is

  that she brings out his reckless side. When Richardson goes in to see

  Donaldson, a point is made of the fact that Richardson has never

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  been in the Archive Room that they enter together: “Have you been

  in here before. No, of course not.” After learning that The Plan is an il usion and that there have actual y been multiple plans rewritten

  a dozen times or more, leaving messy fragments from older plans

  in place, he confesses to Harry that he has no idea how The Plan

  can “just change like that” because, as he puts it: “It’s above my pay grade.” At the end, we see that “Even Thompson”, the “hammer” to

  whom the case is kicked up, “has a boss.”

  The ‘angel’ in whom we see the finitude and fallibility of the Lord’s

  entire bureaucracy most clearly reflected is Harry. When Richardson

  causes a car accident in which a cabbie and another driver are

  injured, we see that they are willing to hurt people pretty seriously

  to accomplish their ends. Of course, they also cause Elise to sprain

  her ankle. But it is in the case of Harry that we learn that outright

  murder is also part of their modus operandi. He is responsible for the death of David’s father and brother. Both of them had the potential

  to become great men, but The Plan did not call for it. Together with

  the death of his mother in the 6th grade – which Harry claims was

  “just chance” – David is famous for having overcome these losses on

  his way to becoming the youngest congressman elected to the House

  of Representatives. Harry feels guilt over these murders that he

  presided over (one of which was made to look like a drug overdose)

  even though he is not supposed to, and he feels as if he owes David.

  He admits to David that Bureau members do have emotions, and

  David realizes that some have them more than others. Richardson,

  Harry’s partner, also knows about his guilt over the Norris family

  deaths. In one scene, Richardson walks up to Harry as he stands in

  a tall window of the Bureau building with a view of the cityscape

  at night crowned by the Empire State Building, to tell him that

  Thompson has finished the job. Richardson says: “You can’t let it get

  to you. Like it did with his family. This is the job.” Then Harry asks:

  “You ever wonder if it’s right, I mean, if it’s always right?” Richardson replies: “Not like I used to. Look,” and he looks upwards into the

  night sky as he says this, “chairman has The Plan. We only see part of it.” Richardson took the same attitude when David told him that he

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  must be misreading the Plan or, if not, then the Plan must be wrong.

  “Do you know who wrote it?” “I don’t care.” “No, you should! You

  should real y show a little respect.” Respect for god.

  Instead of showing unquestioning respect for god – or, as it were,

  “the chairman” – David earns the respect not only of Harry but

  ultimately of the chairman himself by trying to force his way past

  the enforcers of the divine bureaucracy to seek a direct hearing with

  the Lord. As he tries to make it to the Ceder Lake dance rehearsal he

  taunts Richardson that his increasingly outrageous use of obstacles

  must be causing endless ripples, something the Bureau is supposed

  to avoid, and he yel s: “I don’t care what you put in my way. I’m not

  giving up.” Later Thompson confronts David with the rhetorical

  questio
n: “Why do you refuse to accept what should be completely

  obvious by now. You’ve seen what we can do. You can’t doubt we are

  who we say we are… You can’t outrun your fate, David.” He means to

  remind David that he is dealing with the angels of the Lord. David’s

  response gives Thompson pause. He stops in his tracks and thinks to

  himself, wincing slightly, when David says: “Look, it’s not about who

  you are. It’s about who I am…. I just disagree with you about what

  my fate is.”

  When David leaves Elise in the hospital we should not take

  this as his giving up with respect to the Bureau, but his putting her

  lifelong ambitions and hopes before his own interests. Thompson

  has, perhaps deceptively, convinced him that if he stays with her she

  will wind up teaching dance to 6-year-olds instead of becoming one

  of the best dancers in the country and, eventual y, one of the world’s greatest choreographers.

  Even this does not deter him in the end. He is determined to

  do “whatever it takes” to get her back. When Harry teaches David

  how to use the doors this is a metaphor for what Aldous Huxley

  called The Doors of Perception in a book by that name, after which the band The Doors was named. It turns out that he will be able to navigate these “doors” even better than the Bureau because they

  have a problem with improvisation. Some humans are better at

  risky creative thinking than they are. This limitation on the power

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  of angels has a long precedent in traditional religious literature. It is his creative vision, together with his determination, that eventual y

  inspires not only Harry but also moves the chairman himself.

  This was David’s intention. Before he takes Elise through the

  door at the Statue of Liberty, obviously a profound symbol of the

  question of metaphysical freedom at the core of the film, he explains

  to Elise that the Bureau’s book says that their relationship is wrong

  “but what if I can find who wrote it?” On top of Rockefeller Center,

  in what they think might be their last moment together, David and

  Elise are confronted by Thompson with these words: “Did you real y

  think you could reach the chairman and change your fate if you

  did? Or write your own? It doesn’t work like that, and I told you

 

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