My brother made me sit through his new favorite movie, "Waking Life". If you haven't seen it (and you probably haven't), it's an 'artsy' flick. That adjective alone should set a foreboding tone for this entry&ldots;

The unique thing about the movie was that the characters were filmed doing their thing, and then they are given an animated look through the magic of computers. Essentially, it's like you're watching a cartoon with uncannily fluid animation, kind of like the original Lord of the Rings cartoon. The creativity that went into the presentation of that was indeed quite cool.

The downside is that the director, the venerable Richard Linklater, forgot whatever he ever learned about making an interesting plot. Basically, the lead character is walking around in a dream state listening to people spout on and on about their personal philosophies in life. Most scenes were almost uninterrupted headshots of people engaged in an enthusiastic monologue for an average of 4 minutes each.  It's not like they're talking about anything interesting, either. I was there waiting for something deep or interesting to be said, but instead I got the same banal psychobabble I've always heard. How I prayed for the warm embrace of death!

The purpose of this essay isn't hack on Waking Life since, admittedly, many people liked the movie. They were mostly pot-smoking, acid-dropping, college burnouts, but they liked it nonetheless. Instead, the film inspired me to question this whole philosophy thing. What the hell, I ask myself, is the point of wasting brain power trying to answer inherently unanswerable questions? "Human nature is this, the meaning of life is that, we can't know anything." What a waste of friggin' time.

What's more, people seem to flock to these 'thinkers' and declare themselves to be disciples of one philosophy or another. Essentially, instead of truly emulating their idols and THINKING, they just use them as an excuse to shut their own brains off and regurgitate whatever that dead philosopher said. "I'm a follower of Kierkegaard, and know all of his works backwards and forward!" Great. That and $50 will get you a blow job in some back alley.

My philosophical wet dream would be to have all of those guys in one room together with plenty of whiskey and knives.

"Mankind is basically good," Rousseau declares, "and if we let children develop naturally, we'll all be better off."

"Are you off your gourd?" Hobbes demands. "In his state of nature, it's every man for himself! Man is constantly at war with every other man!"

"And so," Calvin says confidently, "God rightly abhors us, and looks upon us with disgust!"

Marx snorts. "God? What is God but a drug given to the common man so he forgets his misery? God was invented by the ruling class!

"Shut up Marx, you little worm!" shouts Aquinas. "God is everywhere! He is in everything!"

Nietzsche laughs derisively. "God has no place in modern society! We have lost all sense of meaning!"

Socrates rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Define 'God'". 

"Well," Descartes says, "I think, therefore I am, and I couldn't be without God, so therefore He must exist. From that fulcrum, everything else can be explained through experience."

"That doesn't make any sense!" Bacon yells. "People are slaves to preconceptions! You can't be certain of anything you believe!"

"Can too!" Descartes shouts back.

"Can not!"

"Can too!"

"Can not!"

"Can too!"

"Can not!"

"I'd wager that God exists," Pascal says haughtily. "After all, it's the safest bet you can make."

Freud shakes his head. "Obviously you are all suffering from the repressed desire to anally rape your mothers."

"Define 'anal'," Socrates says.

"Eat me, Freud!" Kant shouts. "It's impossible to know the true nature of the universe!"

"How do you know?" Locke bellows.

"Because I said so!" Kant shrieks back.

Then Heidegger speaks up. "Authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an essential condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an existential modification of the 'they'--of the 'they' as an essential existentiale."

"Get him!" Aristotle shouts, breaking a whiskey bottle and brandishing the jagged edge.

I'm sure that someone with more than a rudimentary knowledge of philosophy would have created a much more interesting battle royale, but would anyone be able to understand it?

So what have these guys done for us? I suppose like anyone else, they can be judged by the actual impact of their work. Bacon laid the groundwork for the scientific method, Locke inspired the founding fathers of the U.S., and Marx's obscure little rant killed close to 100 million people. Most, though, don't seem to have done much of anything to further human development. Hume? Sartre? Kierkegaard? What have they done for me lately? Sure, you could say they indirectly affected the course of history, but I could say that my fart indirectly created a hurricane.

What further bothers me is that many of these guys' amazing conclusions lack any form of underlying evidence to prove their claims. Descartes and Bacon, to name a few, do try to slice out all of the subjective opinions that humans characteristically hold as immutable truth, while others like Calvin and Sartre and Rousseau build their entire mythology on said opinions. God hates us? Prove it! Existence precedes essence? Says who? Kids learn better when not in school? HA!

And THEN, inspired by all of those dead "I know more than thou" knuckle-suckers, everybody and their dog believe that they have the answers to the meaning of life! That was stunningly evident in "Waking Life". "I think things are this way" and "I believe we're all connected" and on and on. It's like the concept of finding PROOF never occurs to people. "I believe that when we die we dream forever." Why? What evidence do you have that suggest that?  What makes you believe that? "I dunno. I just do. Don't oppress me!"

I guess that just goes to show that, in absence of a religion, most people will flock to whomever seems to have the answers, no matter how outrageous and unfounded. Failing that, they'll create some other mystical power in their heads to explain everything. Oops, that sounded a little too philosophical. I must slap myself in the head.

This much is reality: We are born into weak, frail little bodies to face and vast and indifferent universe in which our purpose is unknown. We are at the mercy of forces beyond our control that can extinguish our little lives, whether those forces are comets, wrathful gods, or cholera germs. We instinctively form social groups, adapt to various cultural norms, and act to preserve ourselves at almost all costs. Then we die. Anything more than that is pretty much mental masturbation.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be constantly trying to figure out the answers to everything. We definitely should be searching, or else what will they teach Philosophy majors?

Just don't make stupid, shallow movies about it.