Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar

by Thomas Cathcart

  Consider the following two questions:

  • What is the difference between a duck?

  • What is the sound of one hand clapping?

  Both questions elicit what is known in philosophical circles as a “Whaaa?” response. They don’t scan. We just can’t comprehend what an answer could possibly be. But while the first is a quaint bit of schoolyard nonsense, the second is a classic Zen koan (rhymes with Ben Cohen).

  A koan is a riddle or story that, when told by a Zen master to a student, has the possibility of shocking that student into a state of consciousness known as satori—sudden enlightenment. In this consciousness, all the distinctions and evaluations of the everyday world evaporate, leaving one with a profound appreciation of the unity of the universe and of all experience in the universe. A Zen response to the one-hand-clapping riddle is not something literal and scientific like, “The soft murmur of air being wafted by a moving, flat surface.” No, the Zen response is more like, “Wow!” Koans catapult us to enlightenment by confounding our minds with impossible ideas. Get beyond those and, bang, you’re in satori.

  Everybody’s favorite koan is:

  Before I sought enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers.

  While I sought enlightenment, the mountains were not mountains and the rivers were not rivers.

  After I reached satori, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers.

  We Westerners can get the general idea that enlightenment is not a matter of attaining some far-out consciousness. What we have trouble getting—and what constitutes the koanic core of the mountain thing—is how enlightened consciousness can be both ordinary and transcendent simultaneously. You either have a feel for this kind of thing or you don’t, and most of us in the West don’t.

  This raises the question of whether the old difference-between-a-duck riddle could be considered a sort of Western koan. After all, it rests on illogic and absurdity; it confounds reason. But judging by the responses to this riddle—the acid test when it comes to koans—the answer has to be no. A smile, maybe even a giggle, but no satori we’ve heard of.

  Alas, it may be a cultural problem—most of us in the West simply cannot get our minds around the Eastern notion that if you cannot get your mind around something, you’re on your way to enlightenment. Which leaves us with this lame, Western pseudo koan:

  If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you.

  If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.

  That’s an ice cream koan.

  The most memorable koans have become part of Zen lore, handed down from generation to generation. For example, Hui-neng, the seventh-century Sixth Patriarch of Zen, famously asked, “What did your original face look like before you were born?” Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson, nicknamed “the Zenmeister,” contributed, “If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.”

  AIRHEAD PHILOSOPHY

  Airhead philosophy appeared on the scene in the late 1960s, coincidentally with Harvard professor Timothy Leary’s pronouncement that the way to enlightenment was through ingesting magic mushrooms. Subsequently dubbed “New Age Philosophy,” airheadism is an amalgam of ancient Eastern philosophies and some medieval beliefs such as astrology, Tarot cards, and the kabbalah. “Affirmations”—statements such as, “I am at one with my duality” or, “As I learn to trust the Process, I no longer need to carry a gun”—are also an important part of New Age philosophy. This reminds us of the elderly woman who approached British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a lecture in the early 1800s and said, “Mr. Coleridge, I’ve accepted the universe!!” Coleridge peered over the top of his glasses and said, “My God, madam, you’d better!”

  Happily, we have jokemeisters to illuminate the dimness of New Age thought.

  How many New Agers does it take to change a lightbulb?

  None, they just start a “Coping with Darkness” support group.

  If there’s anything up-to-date about New Agers, it may be their belief in extraterrestrial beings that not only visit us, but invite us into their airships for dinner and romance. It takes a satirist to push the limits of such New Age beliefs to their logical extreme.

  A Martian makes an emergency landing in Brooklyn and finds that a key part of his saucer has been damaged—the all-important troover. He goes into a deli and asks the counter man if he knows where he can find a troover. The man asks, “What’s it look like?”

  The Martian says, “It’s round, kind of hard on the outside, soft on the inside, with a little hole in the middle.”

  The deli man says, “That sounds like a bagel. Here, does this look like what you need?”

  The Martian says, “It’s perfect! What do you use those for here?”

  The deli man says, “Well, you’ll probably find this hard to believe, but we eat them.”

  The Martian says, “You’re kidding! You eat troovers?”

  The deli guy says, “Yeah, here, try one.”

  The Martian is pretty skeptical, but he takes a bite. “Hey,” he says, “with a little cream cheese, this wouldn’t be half bad.”

  Another element in the New Agers’ kit bag is their fascination with parapsychic phenomena, such as clairvoyance. Many Old Agers—aka rational thinkers—continue to believe that there is always a reasonable explanation for such phenomena.

  “My grandfather knew the exact time of the exact day of the exact year that he would die.”

  “Wow, what an evolved soul! How did it come to him?”

  “The judge told him.”

  Hea-vy!

  DIMITRI: I still have one question: If Zeus doesn’t exist, is Poseidon still his brother?

  TASSO: You know, Dimitri, either you are one enlightened Buddhist, or you’re a few bricks short of an amphitheater.

  {VI}

  Existentialism

  “Existence precedes essence.” If you agree with that

  statement, you are an existentialist. If not, you still exist, but

  you’re essentially out of it.

  DIMITRI: I have to admit, Tasso, sometimes I wish I were more like you.

  TASSO: But you can be! Existentially speaking, you are a totally self-originated being! You are who you create!

  DIMITRI: That’s terrific! Because I always wanted to be as tall as you.

  To get our heads into existentialism, we need to get a bead on nineteenth-century Hegelian Absolutism, the philosophical pov that the only true picture of life is from the outside looking in. Was it Rodney Dangerfield who said, “Much of the best comedy can be found in the tension between the Hegelian Absolute and man’s existential estrangement?” Probably not. But if he had, the following classic joke is probably what Rodney would have meant.

  A man is making love to his best friend’s wife when they hear the husband’s car in the driveway. He dives into the closet. The husband comes in, goes to the closet to hang up his jacket, sees his friend standing there naked, and says, “Lenny, what are you doing here?”

  Lenny sheepishly shrugs and says, “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.”

  That’s a Hegelian answer to an existentialist question. The husband wants to know why Lenny of all people is in this particular existential situation—naked and in his closet! But his putative friend, Lenny, for reasons of his own, chooses to answer a different question: “Why is anybody anywhere rather than nowhere?”—a question that only makes sense if you’re a lofty German philosopher like Hegel.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel maintained that history is the unfolding in time of “Absolute Spirit.” The spirit of one age (say, uptight 1950s conformism) generates its own antithesis (the hippie movement of the 1960s), and the clash of the two creates a new synthesis (the “plastic hippies” of the 1970s, like Wall Street bankers with Beatles haircuts).

  And so it goes, on and on, a dialectic of thesis / antithesis / synthesis (which becomes the new thesis) and so on.

  Hegel thought he had jumped outside histo
ry and was looking down on “It All” from a transcendent point of view. He called this point of view the Absolute. And from up there things looked pretty okay. Wars? Just a move in the dialectic. Pestilence? Just another move. Anxiety? Not to worry. The dialectic is on the move, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Just hang on and take in the scenery. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich thought he was looking at history from God’s point of view!

  Consider Bette Midler’s golden oldie “From a Distance,” in which the Divine Miss M imagines looking at the world from on high and finds the whole deal harmonious and groovy. That’s the distance that Hegel is looking from. The song ends with none other than God looking over Bette’s shoulder taking in the grand view. Who would have guessed Bette Midler is a Hegelian?

  Enter Hegel’s contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, and is he ever pissed. “What difference does it make that all is well from the point of view of the Absolute?” Søren asks. That is not—and cannot be—the point of view of existing individuals. In that statement, existentialism was born. “I am not God,” Søren said. “I am an individual. Who cares how peaceful it all is from on high? I’m right here in the finite thick of it and I’m anxious. I’m in danger of despair. Me. And so what if the universe is ineluctably rolling on—it’s threatening to roll over me!”

  So, if Kierkegaard finds you in his closet and asks, “What are you doing here?” don’t say, “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.” Our advice: Improvise.

  The twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre picked up on Kierkegaard’s idea of an individual’s scary isolation and spun out the implications for human freedom and responsibility. The way Jean-Paul put it is, “existence precedes essence,” by which he meant that human beings have no predetermined essence the way, say, a coat-hanger does. We are indeterminate, always free to reinvent ourselves.

  Jean-Paul Sartre was wall-eyed and altogether not a very handsome fellow. Therefore, he may have been taken aback when his fellow existentialist, Albert Camus, expanded Sartre’s notion of human freedom by saying, “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for the face he has.” Curiously, Camus looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart.

  If we see ourselves as only objects with fixed identities, we cease to Be, with a capital B. And one way we see ourselves as objects is by identifying with a social role. That, Sartre says, is mauvaise foi, or bad faith. And that ain’t good.

  Sartre watches the waiter in the café and observes that to be a waiter is to pretend to be a waiter. Waiters learn how to become waiters by doing their impression of a waiter. Waiters walk a certain way, strike a certain attitude, stake out some point on the scale of intimacy versus distance, etc. This is fine as long as the waiter is conscious that it’s only a role. But we all know waiters who believe they truly are waiters, that that is who they essentially are. Très mauvaise foi!

  Jokes make fun of our tendency to unthinkingly identify with the attitudes and values of our social group by showing us exaggerated instances. This is itself a philosophical gambit: the reductio ad absurdum.

  Reductio ad absurdum is a type of logical argument that extends a premise to the point of absurdity and then claims that the opposite premise must therefore be true. One reductio argument that has been making the rounds lately goes like this: “If we extend the idea of marriage to include same-sex unions, what’s to stop us from approving marriages between people and platypuses?”

  In the following reductio joke, Sol gives new meaning to the bad faith inherent in identifying with a group.

  Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk. They pass a Catholic church with a sign out front that reads “$1,000 to Anyone Who Converts.” Sol decides to go inside and see what it’s all about. Abe waits outside. Hours go by. Finally, Sol emerges.

  “So?” says Abe. “What happened?”

  “I converted,” says Sol.

  “No kidding!” says Abe. “Did you get the thousand bucks?”

  Sol says, “Is that all you people think about?”

  (So we’re not politically correct. We’re philosophers. So sue us!)

  On the other hand, it is also bad faith to envision ourselves as having unlimited possibilities with no constraints on our freedom.

  Two cows are standing in a field. One says to the other, “What do you think about this mad cow disease?”

  “What do I care?” says the other. “I’m a helicopter.”

  For the existentialist philosophers, genuine anxiety—the one they call “angst” because it has such a bitter taste when you say it—is not a symptom of pathology to be addressed by therapy. No, it is a basic human response to the very conditions of human existence: our mortality, our inability to fully realize our potential, and the threat of meaninglessness. It’s enough to make you wish you were an airhead philosopher instead of an existentialist.

  The existentialists are eager to differentiate between “existential anxiety,” such as the anxiety of death, which they feel stems from the human condition, and ordinary neurotic anxiety, such as the anxiety of Norman:

  Norman began to hyperventilate when he saw the doctor. “I’m sure I’ve got liver disease.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said the doctor. “You’d never know if you had liver disease. There’s no discomfort of any kind.”

  “Exactly!” said Norman. “Those are my precise symptoms.”

  The twentieth-century German existentialist Martin Heidegger would respond, You call that anxiety, Norman? You haven’t lived yet. And by “lived” I mean thinking about death all the time! Heidegger went so far as to say that human existence is being-toward-death. To live authentically, we must face the fact of our own mortality squarely and take responsibility for living meaningful lives in the shadow of death. We must not try to escape personal anxiety and personal responsibility by denying the fact of death.

  Three friends are killed in a car accident and meet up at an orientation session in Heaven. The celestial facilitator asks them what they would most like to hear said about themselves as their friends and relatives view them in the casket.

  The first man says, “I hope people will say that I was a wonderful doctor and a good family man.”

  The second man says, “I would like to hear people say that as a schoolteacher I made a big difference in the lives of kids.”

  The third man says, “I’d like to hear someone say, ‘Look, he’s moving!’”

  For Heidegger, it’s not just that living in the shadow of death is more courageous; it’s the only authentic way to live, because our number could come up any minute.

  This cartoon illustrates the limits of our freedom. A man may reasonably consider becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, but can he meaningfully consider becoming a duck?

  There is another existentialist puzzle buried in this cartoon—namely, “Who the hell do those ducks think they are?”

  A man asks a fortuneteller what Heaven is like. The fortuneteller gazes into her crystal ball, and says, “Hmm, I see some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there are several golf courses in heaven and they are all incredibly beautiful.”

  “Wow! Terrific! What’s the bad news?”

  “You have an 8:30 tee time tomorrow morning.”

  Still in denial? Try this one:

  Painter: How am I selling?

  Gallery owner: Well, there’s good news and bad news. A man came in and asked me if you were a painter whose work would become more valuable after your death. When I told him I thought you were, he bought everything you had in the gallery.

  Painter: Wow! That’s terrific! What’s the bad news?

  Gallery owner: He was your doctor.

  However, every once in a while we hear a story about death that dares to look the ultimate angst right in the face and laugh at it. Gilda Radner had the strength to tell this one in front of a live audience after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  A woman with cancer sees her oncologist, who says, “Well, I’m afraid we’re finally at the end of t
he line. You only have eight hours to live. Go home and make the best of it.”

  The woman goes home, gives the news to her husband, and says, “Honey, let’s just make love to each other all night long.”

  And the husband says, “You know how sometimes you’re in the mood for sex and sometimes you aren’t? Well, I’m just not in the mood tonight.”

  “Please,” his wife pleads. “It’s my final wish, darling.”

  “Just don’t feel like it,” the husband says.

  “I beg you, darling!”

  “Look,” the husband says, “It’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to get up in the morning.”

  The existentialists’ emphasis on facing the anxiety of death has given life to a new mini-industry, the hospice movement, founded on Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s twentieth-century bioethical philosophy that encourages the honest acceptance of death.

  Customer in a restaurant: How do you prepare your chickens?

  Cook: Oh, nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.

  TASSO: What are you laughing at? I’m talking about the angst of death here. It’s no laughing matter.

  DIMITRI: But there are worse things than death.

  TASSO: Worse than death? Like what?

  DIMITRI: Have you ever spent an entire evening with Pythagoras?