This may be so abstract most will stop reading – or fall asleep – within a couple paragraphs. But I’ll post this here as a DailyKos Dairy entry – too long, and second-draft – because Christopher Nolan has written and directed some illuminating and disturbing insights into reality vs. fantasy, truth vs. certainty, and what does or doesn’t ground our most fundamental understandings of meaning and purpose in life. The movie’s worth a couple Ph.D.s in philosophy and psychology (and a whole lot more fun than reading dissertations).
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) began “language philosophy,” and was one of the four most important philosophers in Western history (with Plato, Aristotle and Kant). OK, I could be biased: I did my dissertation on him two dozen years ago.
I’ll approach the film from some odd directions to try and interest you in some of the easy-to-miss depths of this movie:
Nolan’s “Inception” can be seen as a variation on themes from Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. I've argued that Kuhn's book was the most influential book of the past 50 years. It introduced the word "paradigm" into public and intellectual discussions, was cited as the foundation book/impetus for the whole New Age movement, and the last time I checked (over 10 years ago), it was still -- and easily -- the most cited book in scientific literature -- maybe in all current writings, I forget.
Kuhn's argument was that our “mere facts” are given meaning through the paradigms we use to understand them, and that paradigms are lenses that give us creative license to augment the images. (Example: people who watch political debates rate the “winner” differently depending on whether they’re Republicans or Democrats – each tends to see his/her candidate as the winner. A religious believer can see all of life through the lens of her faith, just as the believer sitting next to her can see a very different world through different beliefs.
Our paradigms, myths, stories, and assumptions help create our world. So “evoliution” could be seen as just one damned thing after another, or as signs of instability obviously built deep into nature, or as a grand saga connecting us to all other life on earth, letting us see one of the processes by which all life has changed and continues to change -- at least until it arrives at a form that continues to be a good fit for its (mostly unchanging) environment: sharks, horseshoe crabs, cockroaches, e.g. Good paradigms, including those in “Inception,” can easily be applied to almost every field. I’m using the words paradigm, model, theory, picture, pattern and metaphor as roughly equivalent. Just a few examples:
Psychology -- the Freudian, Jungian and Behavior Modification psychological models each see the human psyche coherently, but very differently, with different diagnoses and recommended treatments.
Science -- the Big Bang paradigm, Quantum paradigm, Einsteinian/relativity paradigm, etc.
Religion – Each style of religion is grounded in a different picture/paradigm: literal or liberal Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, nature religions, and the rest.
Interpersonal relationships -- the "family," "friend," "lover," and "partner/mate" paradigms all show (and exclude) different facts about our relationships, and shape most of what we can both look for and see. Each of these has other, subsidiary, pictures. So "family" can be linked to "Blood is thicker than water" (which can help us sort out our allegiances); "friend" can include "good/tried-and-true friend," "soul mate," etc. -- and these help us focus the depth of our attraction, what we expect from those friends, what we feel we owe them, etc. The difference between "lover" and "partner/mate" has subordinate paradigms like "The kind of girl/boy you date versus the kind that you marry," the notion that "lover" is, by definition, a temporary category, while "partner/mate" is, by definition, supposed to be far more permanent. And so on. The paradigms, as Kuhn and so many others have seen (the New Age movement was big on this) structure most of our thinking for us, like the dreams/illusions in “Inception.” I think it’s impossible to overstate the importance and reach of these internalized patterns.
ADD or ADHD — it has been seen as abnormal, a diagnosis, treatable by chemical and/or talk therapy. But it’s also becoming the norm. The paradigm “multitasking” helped in that evolution. (“Multitasking” could also be described as scattered, unfocused, uncommitted, superficial, etc.) Once we buy the paradigm, we’ve bought way more than we think, because it shapes and limits what we can see, or even the questions that make sense to ask. (If people diagnoses with Attention Deficit Disorder could make the rules, they might diagnose everyone else with EDD: Excitement Deficit Disorder.)
Wittgenstein would love this – and I think love “Inception” – because one of his most profound aphorisms – on the subject of what’s true and false, how can we know, epistemology, etc. – was “Certainly is only an attitude.” There’s a whole philosophical revolution right there. We can be dead certain and dead wrong at the same time, and there is no logical contradiction. (In “Inception,” Di Caprio’s wife illustrated this business of different meanings in different worlds wonderfully.)
What “inception” adds to this discussion is an imaginative illustration of how the paradigms — the root ideas, assumptions, patterns, pictures, metaphors — interact with our own imagination to create the worlds within which we live. We usually need to believe that our certainties are our own, that we’re sure of them, etc. But they can operate only within some paradigms, assumptions, ideas that we’ve internalized: otherwise, the illusion comes apart.
Wittgenstein’s paradigms: “language games” and “forms of life”
“Inception” uses the idea of “dream worlds” for these co-created worlds within which we each live. Wittgenstein called them “language games” and “forms of life.” A “language game” is like a grammar we impose on reality to locate ourselves within it and find our way around. It’s like a city map, with all the shortcuts and back alleys shown. It’s how we make sense of ourselves and our world. It can be a scientific theory, a theology, mythology, or the way people in a certain culture think and talk: Christians, Muslims, secular humanists, liberals, conservatives, “Tea Partiers,” etc.
Some language games
Theology. The game is to use the word “God” as central and unquestioned, then draw conclusions or implications, either for thinking or living. But Buddhists draw equally good conclusions and implications for thinking and living through their distinction between living in illusions vs. waking up. (In this sense, “Inception” was a challenge to Buddhist thought, saying/showing that we often can’t tell the difference between illusion and “reality” (if that word even has a clear meaning).
Christianity. Jesus Christ is my lord and savior. He died for my sins, his blood ransomed me from my own weakness and made me pure. If I love and follow him, he will guarantee me eternal life in heaven with him and God. Liberal Christians would be more apt to say Jesus is a model/paradigm of how we should live.
Science (ala Richard Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al). My salvation comes through understanding correctly, which involves accepting the correct theories/paradigms, then reasoning logically from them to gain an accurate picture of myself, others, and the world. There is a prize for doing all this right: we get to be Right, on the side of Truth, maybe even consider ourselves Enlightened. By joining the search for truth, we align ourselves with something transcendent and eternal – and true.
Once within any of these games, there are certain ways to talk, and ways we must not talk. (You can’t be in the Science language game if, when you reach the edge of your understanding, you say, “And then a miracle happens.”) You can’t be in the literalist Christianity language game if you say, “Of course all this God-Jesus-Heaven stuff is mythology. It doesn’t really exist, but I like the story.” (Though you can be a liberal Christian this way — Bishop Spong or Karen Anderson, e.g.)
The point of language, as the point of any game, Wittgenstein said, is not only playing it well, but also winning. You win heaven, “Avatar of Truth,” etc. by playing/talking/thinking right.
Forms of Life
But surely there’s more? Surely it isn’t as superficial as just a smorgasbord of language games, none any better than the others? (Hitler vs. MLK, tyranny vs. democracy, e.g.) Well, Wittgenstein said, yes and no. Language games are given their deep integrity and power through the “form of life” (way of living) that must support them. (Otherwise, to just talk the talk without walking the walk, can make us very shallow or hypocritical people.)
This too works at infinite levels. Our commitment to a relationship (with a person or an institution or Idea) is only good as long as it’s contained within a form of life where we can trust and be trusted, have the moral courage to defend the most basic moral and ethical rules – on which the whole possibility of a healthy and stable world depend – etc. If a partner cheats or beats, a corporation is finally seen as selfish, destructive, dishonest, etc. – then the grammar of our commitment (language game) becomes both incoherent and deeply wrong. This link between language games and forms of life is profound, even if those terms are awkward. I guess a good shorthand would just be talking the talk (the games we play with language) and walking the walk (form of living).
The bad news – and again, I think this was Wittgenstein’s most profound insight – is that NOTHING supports a form of life. Here are some of his aphorisms that come immediately to mind on this:
“Remember that we stand on the earth, but the earth doesn’t stand on anything else (children think it’ll have to fall if it’s not held up).”
“But if you are Certain, doesn’t it mean your eyes are closed? They are closed.”
Or the saying (not Wittgenstein’s) that “a fact is what you get when you stop thinking.”
Here’s a more nuanced and emotional illustration he gave. He drew a simple line drawing of an animal that could be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. (I always thought of the very detailed 19th century drawing of … Vanity, I think. A young beautiful woman sitting in front of a dressing-room mirror, admiring herself. But if you focus on the picture differently, you can see within her image an ugly witch. Another version has a big skull rather than the witch.) Wittgenstein’s comment – uncharacteristically sensitive without judging – was that those who see his drawing as a duck can’t see the expression on the rabbit’s face.
At this level — since our way of living can’t be grounded in Undoubtable Truth — we look for Truths to transcend our forms of life. I think there are some, but they’re not absolute. That’s what evolution and ethology have done: found deep patterns that we share with thousands of species, showing that key parts of our way of living are “true” beyond just the context of our species or genus. Sense of fair play, duty, care for young, willingness to fight, etc. That’s something. But it falls short of the nostalgia for a worldview in which God created the whole shebang, took care of it, and loved us best. So that’s what we do with our paradigms, myths, stories and forms of life – ways of living. That creates the “world” within which our certainties feel justified and persuasive.
How do you tell the difference between being “awake” and “dreaming” (a key point in “Inception”)? This was also the Buddhist question, of course. Here, the movie stops short of Wittgenstein by (nearly) ignoring any moral considerations. You can live within any worldview that persuades you. Is there a prize for getting it right, or a penalty for getting it wrong? Not once you go beyond your worldview. Again, Wittgenstein’s aphorisms are amazingly condensed and on point:
(I’m paraphrasing this story): Imagine that a certain man lived at some time. He believed everything his church taught him to believe, never questioned it, and gave his life the form of his beliefs, as he was told to do. He loved all, was a blessing to all, and was beloved by all. He worked, loved, played, laughed, had many friends, felt that his personal, professional and spiritual life had made a good difference, all based in the faith of his accustomed beliefs. At the end of a long life, he died peacefully and fulfilled. Now imagine that – somehow – just two weeks later it was shown that everything the man believed was false. Very well, you can say that the man’s beliefs were false. But can you say that his life was false? And if not, what role does truth play in either religion or living a meaningful, purposeful, fulfilling life?
To paraphrase this: Can we find “true” happiness in an illusion? Sure. Can we find “truth” but be miserable people? Sure. What’s the difference between an illusion/dream and reality/enlightenment? Perhaps just that we locate our certainties differently. “We stand on the earth, but the earth doesn’t stand on anything else….”
“Inception” shows the psychological mechanisms of all of this, as I saw it, more brilliantly than anything I’ve seen. Hope this was interesting, or at least boringly useful.
Davidson Loehr
25 July 2010
Austin, TX