• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: film

The people need their opium

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Play, Pleasure

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Clement Greenberg, drugs, existentialism, film, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, kitsch, Martin Heidegger, Milan Kundera, Preston Sturges, religion, Theodor Adorno

Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John Sullivan, is a director of lowbrow comedies who aspires to instead make serious art about the suffering of the poor. He tries to do experiential research about their suffering, and winds up being falsely imprisoned at hard labour. The prisoners’ one reprieve is to watch a Disney Goofy cartoon, at which Sullivan finds himself laughing uproariously. His lesson, from actually experiencing the suffering of the poor, is to go back to making silly comedies. The film closes with his lines: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Sullivan in prison laughing at Goofy

The story of Sullivan’s Travels serves as an eloquent defence of lowbrow or shallow art, of kitsch and even smarm. And I think it helps us see what is wrong with the philosophical critique of kitsch.

Continue reading →

An aesthetic of extremes

27 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Emotion, Food, South Asia, Virtue

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abhinavagupta, Ānandavardhana, Aristotle, Daniel Ingalls, film, James McHugh, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, kitsch, M.V. Patwardhan, Mahābhārata, rasa, Vikram Chandra, Wendy Doniger

Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime might be the most popular book in a Western language ever to deal with Indian aesthetic theory. The book’s official subject is the aesthetics of computer science. Though I am getting a degree in computer science myself, I found myself more interested in Chandra’s lucid comments about the medieval Indian philosophers Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta and their theory of rasa, the emotional “tastes” that an artistic audience can savour.

What is important about Chandra’s work is that he applies the rasa theory. He draws from the best English-language works I know of on Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta: the writings of Daniel Ingalls, Jeffrey Masson and M.V. Patwardhan, especially their translation of Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka with Abhinavagupta’s locana commentary. But Chandra does what Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan do not: he asks how the theories of Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta could apply to us. Continue reading →

To play a flawed role

19 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Bhakti Poets, German Tradition, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Play, Rites

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Ali Asani, autobiography, Constantin Stanislavski, David Haberman, film, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, LARP, Muharram, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Plato, Rūpa Gosvāmi, Seven Virtues

In the past few years I’ve become involved in live-action role-playing (usually known by the acronym LARP, or “LARPing”): a cross between long-form improv theatre and tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This hobby is often maligned, partially because it looks very strange to those not involved (especially on video), and partially because of its association with the kind of intelligent but socially awkward “geeky” subcultures that develop around Star Trek, comic books, collectible card games, Japanese animation and the like. But as I’ve been a part of those subcultures all my life, this is hardly a barrier to my participation. (I hope you didn’t expect that someone who blogs about Sanskrit philosophical texts was one of the popular kids in high school.)

LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. Continue reading →

Certain knowledge

27 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Reading and Recitation, Self, Sufism

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, film, mathematics, mystical experience, Nāgārjuna, Pali suttas, Plato, René Descartes, The Matrix

I recently had an extraordinarily stimulating conversation with two friends who wish to remain anonymous (but they know who they are). The topic: can we ever have certain knowledge about anything? My initial response, not intended to be flippant, was: I’m not certain.

The MatrixThe friends claimed certainty about things that I don’t think we can reasonably be certain about. One claimed to have achieved certain knowledge through the Sufi practice of dhikr; I argued that this could be a feeling of certainty about falsehood rather than about truth, so that one needs standards of truth external to the mystical experience. The other claimed that we could know with certainty that we are awake and not sleeping; I wasn’t ready to grant that. I’m ready to grant the basic point of Descartes’s skepticism: although we can be relatively confident that the things of the world are as they seem, it’s possible they could all be a dream, or the creation of an evil demon – or even the Matrix. (What a gift that movie is to teachers of introductory philosophy!)

Now Descartes himself thinks he can have certain knowledge in spite of all this doubt, or in a certain sense even because of it: he believes that the one thing he can’t doubt is the fact that he is doubting. His doubt would be logically self-contradictory, for its very existence would require the presence of a doubter, namely himself. Thus, “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).

My Buddhist readers will probably be unsympathetic to Descartes’s argument, and rightly so. Descartes tries here to prove the very thing that the Buddha of the Pali suttas – and the vast majority of later Buddhists – would be at pains to deny, namely the existence of the self. I would argue that a Buddhist critique knocks Descartes down quite effectively. Descartes may have established the existence of doubt, but not of an agent of doubt, of a doubter. That’s an error, a reification. As a popular book on Buddhism has it, there are thoughts without a thinker. Even if one disagrees with Buddhist deconstructions of the self – and I am often skeptical of them – one must surely still acknowledge that they at least cast doubt on the self, the thing Descartes thought could not be doubted.

Nevertheless, there’s a route to certain knowledge that one can still follow from here. Continue reading →

On Examined Life

23 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Blog Admin, French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Truth

≈ Comments Off on On Examined Life

Tags

academia, Astra Taylor, Avital Ronell, Cornel West, Emmanuel Lévinas, film, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer

I just saw a screening of Examined Life, Astra Taylor‘s movie about philosophy. It’s a little surprising in the first place to see a movie about philosophy (as opposed to a movie that expresses philosophical ideas, of which there are many). But there’s something about the film that’s in its way even more surprising: although all of the eight philosophers in the film is a professor, only one (Kwame Anthony Appiah) is actually a professor of philosophy. Two of them (Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer) have minor appointments in philosophy, where they might teach a few philosophy classes on the side but most of their work is done elsewhere. The majority, however, have no current official association with academic philosophy whatsoever. They’re in departments of French and Italian, rhetoric, sociology – anything but philosophy. This despite the fact that every large university and nearly every small college has a philosophy department, full of people who consider themselves philosophers. The film makes no comment on the fact.
Continue reading →

In praise of the culture of death

08 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

film, John Paul II, Plato

Catholic conservatives frequently say they defend a “culture of life” against a “culture of death” soaked in abortion and euthanasia. (It’s not only Catholics who use these terms, but they’re most popular in Catholic circles, not surprisingly since they originate with former Pope John Paul II.)

The intended rhetorical significance of this phrasing is pretty clear: life good, death bad. But I find myself taking it somewhat differently. The problem with contemporary worldviews, in my books, isn’t that we have a culture of death. The problem is that we don’t have a culture of death, and we should.

All life ends in death. This isn’t news. How, then, could we imagine a culture of life that isn’t a culture of death? We need a culture that enables us to face the inevitable reality of our own deaths and the deaths of our loved ones, and that’s exactly what we don’t have. In our everyday lives we allow ourselves to think that death won’t really happen to us. I think of the generally forgettable movie Practical Magic, which rests on the premise that its leading women suffer from a curse: a man who falls in love with them “will die.” Not die young, not die prematurely; just “he will die,” and this is seen as something horrible. But we all suffer from this curse. We just don’t want to admit it – because we don’t have a culture of death.

Plato said the love of wisdom – philosophy – is the practice of death. We should listen.

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on Confucius in middle age
  • Amod Lele on Confucius in middle age
  • Seth Zuihō Segall on Confucius in middle age
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on Confucius in middle age
  • Amod Lele on King’s improvement on Gandhi

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (12)
  • Applied Phil (280)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (42)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (14)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (26)
    • Play (13)
    • Politics (160)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (37)
  • Asian Thought (401)
    • Buddhism (289)
      • Early and Theravāda (124)
      • Mahāyāna (118)
      • Modernized Buddhism (86)
    • East Asia (84)
      • Confucianism (54)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (131)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (37)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (36)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (4)
  • Method (243)
    • M.T.S.R. (137)
    • Metaphilosophy (160)
  • Practical Philosophy (356)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (43)
    • Emotion (153)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (47)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (32)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (48)
    • Flourishing (85)
    • Foundations of Ethics (107)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (64)
    • Virtue (149)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (14)
      • Patient Endurance (28)
      • Self-Discipline (8)
      • Serenity (27)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (121)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (32)
    • Monasticism (44)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (334)
    • Consciousness (15)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (64)
    • Hermeneutics (55)
    • Human Nature (30)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (64)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (425)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (141)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (22)
      • Roman Catholicism (48)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (85)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (110)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (18)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (149)
      • Economics (32)
      • Psychology (61)

Recent Posts

  • Confucius in middle age
  • King’s improvement on Gandhi
  • Honing in on a disagreement
  • The Nativity is my Ramakien
  • Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.