Terrence Malick — philosopher with a camera

cinema, Terrence Malick

Malick, the greatest living American filmmaker, has never made the consistently good fully philosophical film that we know he’s quite capable of. I fear that unless he dumps the star actors, he never will. I suppose that beginning with the Thin Red Line (after a 20 year hiatus) he understandably exploited high-priced luvvies eager to embellish their resume with something artsy — so that Malick could actually have his films generously funded and distributed. The problem as I see it is that having a decent sized budget doesn’t necessarily mean Malick’s vision gets better articulated. Much like Herzog, his best work is done in spite of the financial constraints. The actors in his films from 1998 onwards either try too hard not to reflect their public persona and/or they are just too flat to carry the larger vision — there seems to be no middle ground. Because Malick is so deeply philosophical it occurred to me that he would be the ideal person to film a Walker Percy novel. There was talk of Wenders flirting with such a project. Speaking of Percy, it is quite clear why Catholics have, of late, been particularly fascinated by Malick’s work — and rightly so. Not surprisingly, if one is tone deaf to the sacred then Malick’s work does come over as pompous and pretentious. See the various discussions linked to below (in no particular order). I haven’t read Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy yet but check out the discussion of Malick’s philosophical journey here.

Malick studied philosophy as an undergraduate with Stanley Cavell, and briefly taught philosophy at the MIT. He then traveled to Germany in the mid 1960s to meet with Heidegger, and produced a scholarly translation of Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reasons) in 1969. That same year, Malick abandoned philosophy to become a film-maker. A philosopher turned film-maker is a rare and fascinating creature, so we can readily understand Furstenau and MacEvoy’s confident claim that Malick clearly ‘transformed his knowledge of Heidegger in cinematic terms’ (2003, 175), a knowledge that came to fruition in his first feature, Badlands (1973), in Days of Heaven (1978), and of course in The Thin Red Line (1998).

— Robert Sinnerbrink

The film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away. This feels right. “Knight of Cups” is not a young man’s movie. It’s an old man’s movie. A philosophically engaged, beatific, starchild-as-old-man’s movie. The end is coming. What did it all mean? What else is there but sunlight, water, sex, laughter, sunlight? Why do people sneer when they hear questions like that? Why is it unacceptable to make films like “Knight of Cups,” which speak in the language of poetry, fables, dreams, calendar art, Tarot cards? Why is it banal, vacuous, naive, to hear Rick’s father assign redemptive meaning to “the light in the eyes of others”?

— Roger Ebert.com

National Catholic Reporter 

The Week

MUBI

The American Conservative

The New Yorker

Patheos

Roger Ebert (Malick content listing)

First Things

Bounded Rationality, Shared Experiences, and Social Relationships in Herbert A. Simon’s Perspective

Herbert Simon

The fourteenth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Stefano Fiori

In his autobiography, Herbert Simon writes: “The most important years of my life as a scientist were 1955 and 1956” (Simon, 1991a, p. 189). In those years he published two important articles that laid the foundations of his theory of bounded rationality: A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (1955) and Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment (1956) (henceforth, Simon (1956)). One year later, in 1957, Simon wrote a short story, The Apple, in which he presented in literary form the scientific results of Simon (1956).

The thesis of this article is that The Apple gives interesting insights into Simon’s research and that, because of its literary form, it highlights topics which are less apparent in his scientific papers. Hugo, the protagonist of The Apple, lives in isolation in a castle, and his story represents how a rationally bounded agent interacts with, and learns from, an environment by choosing not optimal but satisficing alternatives. The perspective which inspired both Simon (1956) and The Apple would remain essentially unchanged in the course of time, even when Simon examined bounded rationality in light of artificial intelligence and of simulations performed by means of computer programs.

The question from which we begin concerns the implications of an analysis of (bounded) rationality which removes human relationships, as occurs in Simon’s scientific paper of 1956 and his short story of 1957. In fact, Hugo reminds us of homo œconomicus of the neoclassical approach, that is, an individual who, given environmental constraints, is concerned solely with her/his needs. The difference with Simon’s view is that  in the neoclassical tradition s/he is perfectly rational and maximizes her/his utility, while in Simon’s view s/he is rationally limited and chooses not the best but a satisficing alternative, i.e. an alternative which meets or exceeds certain criteria different from those required by the maximization of utility function.

However, it would be a mistake to state that Simon does not consider social relationships in his work. On the contrary, he took them into account in his early works on administrative and organizational behavior, and even more so in the 1990s, when themes like loyalty, identification with organizational goals, and altruism became topics of new inquiries. These themes were not elaborated in light of artificial intelligence; rather, they remained connected to the theory of organizations, or they were influenced by other approaches, such as the Darwinian view which Simon took into account for his hypotheses on altruism. Although the two perspectives (namely, the one that emerged in the 1950s and was later developed within artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, which analyses bounded rationality at the individual level; and the other, which deals with bounded rationality within administrative systems and organizations) are basically connected, they partially refer to different theoretical tools and use different languages. Their analysis is the subject-matter of this paper, which is organized as follows: Section 1 compares Simon’s (1956) model of bounded rationality with its literary version; Section 2 examines how bounded rationality, especially in The Apple, is represented by starting from the traditional image of an isolated individual; Section 3 discusses how the paradigm of the isolated individual raises problems relative to the emergence of meanings; Section 4 shows that Simon dealt with relationships between the individual and society in his approaches to organizational and administrative behavior and in his studies of the 1990s. Finally, Section 5 concludes.

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Methodological Individualism, Structural Constraints, and Social Complexity

cosmos & taxis

New (double) issue of Cosmos+Taxis

Cover

Walker Percy Wednesday 84

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The 10th May commemorates the death of Percy in 1990: this year marks the centenary of his birth.

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The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn’t decide.
What is one to make of such a person?
To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness—depression—which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case.
On the one hand, he was depressed.
On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical.
Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year.
True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes.
On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.
But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.
If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?

*****

It was a scene from his youth, so insignificant a recollection that he had no reason to remember it then, let alone now thirty years later. Yet he seemed to see every detail as clearly as if the scene lay before him. Again the explanation of the neurologist was altogether reasonable. The brain registers and records every sensation, sight and sound and smell, it has ever received. If the neurones where such information is stored happen to be stimulated, jostled, pressed upon, any memory can be recaptured.
Nothing is really forgotten.
The smell of chalk dust on the first day of school, the feel of hot corduroy on your legs, the shape of the scab on the back of your hand, is still there if you have the means of getting at it.

*****

It is not at all uncommon for persons suffering from certain psychoses and depressions of middle age to exhibit “ideas of reference,” that is, all manner of odd and irrational notions about Jews, Bildebergers, gypsies, outer space, UFOs, international conspiracies, and whatnot. Needless to say, the Jews were and are not leaving North Carolina. In fact, the Jewish community in that state, though small, is flourishing. There were at the last census some twenty-five synagogues and temples, ten thousand Jews with a median income of $21,000 per family.

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Camille Paglia on Free Speech on Campus

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The Smart Set — great to have CP renter the “fray”.

Free speech was a primary weapon of the Left against the moralism and conformism of the Right. How then, we must ask, has campus Leftism in the U.S. been so transformed that it now encourage, endorses, and celebrates the suppression of ideas, including those that question its own current agenda and orthodoxy?

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Performance

cinema

Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired and shallow. We didn’t freak out when we saw some of the scenes, scenes that just wouldn’t be seen today and if they were, it would be so phonily “provocative” — further compromised by going soft with some edifying PC resolution. Indeed,  we welcomed being challenged by a film without having some sort of illiberal pearl-clutching indignation from a journalist, academic or some micro-group. Back then this petulance typically emanated from the Right, now most of this cry-bully petulance comes from the regressive Left. Performance is the film that Tarantino has been trying to make throughout his career. (OK, so Tarantino has made good stuff, all in the service in trying to make Superfly again :)). The editing (sound and vision) of Performance is superb, the music both from the Glimmer twins and Jack Nitzsche is perfect. The dialogue, the accents and the script are absolutely pitch perfect.

Paul Schrader on ‘Performance’

Memo from Turner

Didn’t I see you down in San Antone on a hot and dusty night?
We were eating eggs in Sammy’s when the black man there drew his knife.
Aw, you drowned that Jew in Rampton as he washed his sleeveless shirt,
You know, that Spanish-speaking gentlemen, the one we all called “Kurt.”

Come now, gentleman, I know there’s some mistake.
How forgetful I’m becoming, now you fixed your bus’ness straight.

I remember you in Hemlock Road in nineteen fifty-six.
You’re a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of stick.
You’re a lashing, smashing hunk of man;
Your sweat shines sweet and strong.
Your organs working perfectly, but there’s a part that’s not screwed on.

Weren’t you at the Coke convention back on nineteen sixty-five
You’re the misbred, grey executive I’ve seen heavily advertised.
You’re the great, gray man whose daughter licks policemen’s buttons clean.
You’re the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.

Come now, gentleman, your love is all I crave.
You’ll still be in the circus when I’m laughing, laughing on my grave.

When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on.
And the young girls eat their mothers meat from tubes of plasticon.
Be wary of these my gentle friends of all the skins you breed.
They have a tasty habit – they eat the hands that bleed.

So remember who you say you are and keep your noses clean.
Boys will be boys and play with toys so be strong with your beast.
Oh Rosie dear, doncha think it’s queer, so stop me if you please.
The baby is dead, my lady said, “You gentlemen, why you all work for me?”

 

 

Team “H”

friedrich hayek

It’s been a four “H” week. Commemorating the birth of Hume, acknowledging the ascendance of Haidt, reading Haack again and today marking the birth of Hayek. Here is a brief article by Emily Skarbek discussing an aspect of Hayek: individualism ‘true’.

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Our Greatest Living Public Intellectual

Jonathan Haidt

Having listened to some 100 hours of “rabbi” Jonathan Haidt I’ve come to this conclusion. (Yes, the usual scratched record names will be proffered along with the activist wannabes, but their time is now over, and long overdue at that — advocacy is not inquiry!). Haidt has the empirical credentials, the philosophical credentials and equally importantly he has a very appealing modest disposition. He’s a beautifully elegant speaker and is mordantly funny, a cultural diagnostician in the tradition of Walker Percy. Haidt is not your standard snide protectionist ideologue — he’s way too bright and intellectually honest for that conceit. Feeling the heat, the illiberal forces of darkness are already casting aspersions on the Heterodox Academy.

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David Hume

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Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

(Commemorating the birth of the greatest moral psychologist of all).

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