The Philosophy Tree

When we think of philosophy, we tend to think of an esoteric subject far removed from the actual practice of living.  We think of the obscure terminology, the perpetually ponderous "isms" and the various schools of thought which bear their names.  We tend to think of the great names of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and so on, those giants of wisdom who's names we invoke in intellectual arguments as though they were the patron saints of their own peculiar ideas.  If we're in a particularly imaginative or hypnagogic state, we may even picture philosophy as the domain of the wise hermit living on the mountain top who pilgrims have to brave treacherous paths and passes to reach in order to hear his sage advice.

In short, we tend to focus on the vast body of work done on the subject of philosophy, accumulated in books and texts, rather than on the object of study itself.  While the stars serve to remind us what the astronomer is looking at, and the flowers are there to remind us what the botanist is up to, philosophy studies something that isn't quite so easily brought to mind.  It seems like something more intangible and remote.  So it's easy to fall into the misconception that philosophers are off hunting ghosts in another dimension with no relevance to the real world.  "That's all well and good.", we say, "But we've got work to do and bills to pay.", and we move on with our lives.  This is a dreadful mistake.  Philosophy isn't hard to fathom because it's so remote from our lives.  Quite the contrary.  We have a hard time seeing it because it looms so large in our lives, because it is so fundamental and all encompassing.  Philosophy is nothing less than the study of existence itself.  Deeper still, it's the study of our understanding of existence and our place in that existence, and our understanding of ourselves.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Imagine that you and I and everyone else has a tree growing somewhere deep in the core of our minds.  As trees tend to do, this tree branches out from a central trunk, and those branches branch out into more branches and those into even smaller branches, and so on.  This tree and these branches form a kind of network which connects all the ideas and opinions and beliefs that you have about everything, from the seemingly inconsequential things like the etiquette for parallel parking out along one of the small twigs, to more meatier issues like where you stand on the death penalty on one of the sturdier limbs.  Your position on fundamental matters along the main branches are going to affect all the smaller branches that lead off from it.  It's all connected.  The tree as a whole represents our concept of the world and our attitude and approach to life.

Philosophy is the study of that tree.  More than that, it's a way of caring and tending, trimming and maintaining that tree.  Many people don't bother.  They let the tree grow wild, the gnarled branches twisting haphazardly around each other at random, choking the life out of some branches and leaving others neglected in the shadows unexposed to the nourishment of the sun.  They suffer the consequences of this in their actions, their choices, and in their very feelings towards life itself.  There are others who do tend to the tree, but some of them end up doing even worse damage because they don't know what they're doing, because they're not careful, and because they don't take the task seriously to begin with.  They cut into some vital organ and leave the tree half-barren, lifeless, and rotted from the inside.

If I say that I am a philosopher, I don't mean that as a matter of vocation or title.  I am a philosopher in the sense that I am an eater, a dreamer, a bather, and a sleeper.  I am a philosopher because I tend to my tree.  I've devoted a large part of my life to tending to my tree.  I've nursed it to health through the long, grey winters; I've cultivated its blossoms in the spring.  I've tried more than one ill-advised method and risked permanent damage, but hopefully I've learned something from my mistakes.  It's nearly a full-time job, taking on the task myself.  It takes time and thought and study and research.  But so far I've resisted the temptation to farm the job out to any religious group or political affiliation.  I have consulted a few experts on occasion, though.  I let Nietzsche have a go at it one summer.  The tree grew tall and strong, and even a little terrifying to behold.  Kant proposed putting a box of mirrors around the tree, blocking out the sunlight completely.  I sent him packing.  And of course Sartre still drops by now and then in the evenings.  He smiles and nods and reminds me that the tree is mine to make what I will of it; the choices and the possibilities are up to me.

And it's up to you as well.  You can tend your own tree, or you can ignore it altogether, or you can hire someone else to do it and find all of your ideas in their debt.  But make no mistake about it.  You have that tree too.  We all have that tree.  Philosophy studies something which is relevant to all our lives.  We all have some way of looking at the world.  The question is: Are you going to let that view fall into place by a random accident of jumbled ideas, or are you going to cultivate that view deliberately and help it to grow into something wonderful?  The choice is yours.                    

The Matrix: A Study of Internet Identities

For about 11 years now, I have gone by the name "nuclearheadache" on the internet.  I have used the name for websites, forums, email, and of course, as the title of this blog.  I came up with the name on the spot, without giving it much thought.  I was creating an account, I was prompted to choose a username, and I had a really, really bad headache at the time.  There wasn't much more to it than that.  Since then, though, the name has become a persona, a projection of my personality, or at least a projection of those aspects of my personality that I chose to share on the internet.  The name suggests something that a name like, say, hellokittysuperfan116 would not.  

In real life I am Bryan White.  I'm a 35 year old factory worker.  I'm married.  I have a daughter.  I'm left handed, and I have grey eyes.  My identity in the real world is at the mercy of countless things which are beyond my control, not the least of which is my name, picked for me at birth and not a matter I had the slightest input in.  My hair has decided to abandon me for the most part, also without consulting me at all.  This undeniably affects my image in the world, again, in ways that are beyond my control.  Although nuclearheadache  is not my real name, and although the persona it encapsulates is an artificial construction by virtue of the fact that I can select and choose what constitutes that persona, in some ways these things are more real precisely because my choice was involved.   A username is a creative expression.  A given name is an outfit someone else dressed you in.   A virtual avatar is an artistic choice.  Your face in a random accident of genetics.  

Yet, there is honesty in a face.  A lifetime of choices, good and bad are written there.  A face displays your virtues and your faults.  There is a paradox here.  On the one hand, our internet identities are more genuine expressions of ourselves because they are more deliberately chosen and they are less subject to factors  beyond our control.  On the other hand, our real life identities are more genuine because we can not hide our faults behind an artificial construction.  You might say that a  person who knows us in real life is much more likely to see us at our worst because they are more  liable to see us under pressure as we deal with real problems and we struggle in the real world.  But yet, there are times when a person uses the anonymity of the internet to reveal hidden sides of themselves that they usually keep hidden in normal society.

If you're reading this, that means you're on the internet just like I am.  We all have a foot in either of these two worlds, and we all possess these dual identities, and so the question becomes:  Which one of these worlds is more real?  Which one has more of our true selves invested in it?  Who really know us better; the people we interact with online, or the people we interact with in life?  And in turn, which of these people are more real to us?  The consideration of these questions is one of the major themes of the movie The Matrix. 

Years ago, I used to have this friend that was very suspicious of the internet, and of computers in general.  I'm sure you've all known someone like this at some point.  I was sitting around with him one night and we were talking and he said that some day aliens might land here and they would find the streets deserted, the buildings empty, and everything rotting and rusting away.  There would just be silent desolation everywhere.  Eventually, these aliens would find their way to our homes, where they would find each and everyone of us in some back room plugged into a virtual world of easy and infinite possibilities which we had long since chosen over the limiting confines of the real world.  I wasn't sure that I agreed with his pessimistic outlook, but as an aspiring writer, I appreciated that there were some intriguing possibilities for fiction there, if someone could figure out how to make a story out of the idea.  So when I heard about The Matrix, my first reaction was a smile that someone else had had the same idea.  

On its surface, The Matrix seems to be a simple story of people being freed from an artificial, virtual world so that they can live in the real world.  This would appear to be the primary struggle of the characters in the film.  The virtual world appears to represent a form of bondage, and the fight is for the freedom of reality.  A straightforward reading of the narrative suggests this unmistakably.  But if you look a little closer and dig a little deeper, you find it's a little more complicated.  Beneath the obvious surface, you find that the real world and the online world have been switched.  Each one represents the other in the reality of the film.  This is a mirror image of our world, through the looking glass and flipped around backwards.   

The first and biggest clue to this switch is in the names.  In the film's virtual world Keanu Reeves' character is named "Thomas A. Anderson", while in the film's real world he is known as "Neo."  However, the name Neo is clearly recognizable as a type of internet username, as are the names of the other characters, "Morpheus", "Trinity", "Tank", and so on.  A big point is even made, during the climax of the story, of Reeves embracing the username over the Anderson name, which is clearly recognizable as a type of real name in our world.  The point being that "Anderson" is a kind of slave name that belongs to his former life of captivity. 

On the surface of the story, this captivity involves being held prisoner by the artificiality of the Matrix.  But the juxtaposition of the name-types reveals a deeper level.  The captivity that the Anderson name represents is the captivity of the circumstances of the material world.  It's the captivity of his job, the suit and tie he has to wear, the neighbor's garbage that Smith mentions.  It is the captivity to the mundane realities of life.  The Neo identity, as Smith again points out, is another life, lived in computers.  It is Anderson's online persona.  As Neo, he has a much grander purpose and a far less restricted existence.  It is  breaking these chains of reality's restrictions that defines Neo and ultimately leads him to the realization of his true self. 

Since this scenario suggests that the Matrix represents our physical reality, this might seem as though it is contradicted by the superhuman feats of agility and bullet-time virtuosity displayed by the characters within the Matrix.  However, the dividing line in the symbolism between the real and online worlds is not simply between the Matrix and outside the Matrix.   The actual point of demarcation between real and online is the moment when Neo wakes up from the Matrix.  By following Neo's path to becoming the "one", as opposed to the zero he apparently was in his former life, The Matrix explores the duality between the limiting realities of real life and the possibilities of the online life.  From the soul-crushing dullness of corporate America Neo is initiated into a realm of instant downloads, customizable options, and fantasy role-playing.

That is the real trick of The Matrix.  Although it plays like a dire warning and an indictment of the virtual world, it is actually an endorsement of it and exploration of its place in modern life.  In the question of where our true selves lie, it falls firmly on the side of the persona that we create by choice.  The society of the real world, it argues, is a system that keeps us under control with its agents checking our every step.  The internet provides our minds with an opportunity to break free and become the person we were actually meant to be.  You may agree or disagree with this, but the hidden secret of the film remains.  The Matrix is the real world.