February 26th, 2009 by Neal
TIMBER! Get it? No? You will by the end of the post, I hope.
A point of my book about ninjas is that existentialism is stupid. The idea that we can reduce arguments to the point of absurdity by questioning the constinuent elements of the question bother me. Yes, when I ask the question “What is god?” we must first define or have understood the words “what” and “Is” and “God” but too often, I find the existentialists I encounter use it as a way to avoid the question, “What is god?” by ignoring the question and muddying the waters.
To that end, I am pissed, because I cannot draw a metaphor. There is a man, alone, in a room full of people he calls his associates, and I want to make the “If A Tree Falls in the Forrest” gag. The idea being, the intention of the question is to ask what a thing means when humans aren’t there to experience it, but I want to poke at, “Does a thing mean something if many people experience it, but there’s no point to it?”
But I know it would fall by the wayside, because people are so damned religious, and the subject/object paradigm is so enmeshed in our damned society that even without knowing why, if I were to do that, they would think something wrong.
We are convinced we are special as entities, and thereby religion is a fine thing for us. We want to feel better than what we are, so we say, “Yes, we will live forever!” even though our existence is finite. To that end, I’ve “lost” the tree in the forrest argument many times to someone who will not acknowledge that if a tree falls in the forrest, and no human is around to perceive it, YES, it still makes a fucking sound. We just weren’t there to hear it. The idea that without US, or without the implied ME, things do not happen, it just baffles me, even though I’m the most arrogant son of a bitch in the world because everybody loves me. He chortled.
At any rate, I see it as the center of the universe argument, its kin.
For all we fucking know, there are people in the future looking back on that forrest. For all we know, there are alien telescopes in space watching that tree’s every fucking move, and that tree is their version of Jesus or Buddha. For all we know, there’s an old hermit no one ever loved or listened to in that forrest who saw that tree fall, and when he dies having told no one of that tree falling, it’s only not heard because we were too dumb to listen.
To pragmatically accept the idea that NO ONE heard it, and no one possibly could, begs the question of how we were even aware of it to ask the question in the first place, and contradicts itself.
In other words, fuck existentialists. Give me a devil’s advocate first any day.
But beyond that, I have completed all but the clerical work on the novel. I will read it one more time tomorrow, and probably find one or two errors, but otherwise… my tree is downed. Do you care to hear it?
