10 Flight
The Tenth Chapter,
in which you ask yourself again
What’s Keeping Me Here?
Preparation
Required Reading: Dashan, “It is not you, but existence, that is fundamentally unsound” (Aeon)
Optional Reading: Cleary, “Being and Drunkenness: How to Party like an Existentialist” (Aeon)
Writing:
- Dashan’s key terms are “split-group framing,” “everyman framing,” and “see-saw framing.” How does she define these terms? Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
- An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Dashan’s thesis? What reason(s) does she provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
- What is your immediate reaction to Dashan’s argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
- Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: What might your day-to-day life look like if you spent less of it trying to “improve your life,” and more of it just trying to live your life? Be imaginative and specific.
Introduction
Making a conscious, free choice is hard, but it’s hard emotionally, spiritually even. It’s not hard intellectually. If all that matters is that you choose, and that you’re aware of it, then it doesn’t matter what you choose. There’s nothing for your mind to do, nothing to figure out. You just decide.
But if there are better and worse choices, then it does matter, and you need a way to decide. The author says the way is “imagination.” But what does that mean?
Maybe it means the kind of imagination you get when you pay close attention to the situations that confront you, and to the ways you react to those situations. It demands the kind of imagination you get when you reflect carefully on those reactions, by (for example) using the the Basic Move. It demands philosophical method, conversation, attitude.
Philosophy doesn’t just help you realize that you’re always choosing, and to do so with more self-awareness. Philosophy is how you answer questions that don’t have Correct Answers, but do have better and worse answers. It’s how you make choices when there’s no Correct Choice. So philosophy can help with the question about what to choose.
Maybe the idea of fate, the idea that you you don’t have a choice or don’t have to make a choice, is not the only shadow on the wall. Maybe there’s also the opposite shadow: the illusion that you can choose whatever you want, and your choice will be good just because it was yours. Suppose it’s true that you’re always free to choose. Does that mean you’re also free to decide what your choice does to you? Do some choices make you unhappy, whether you want them to or not? Do you get to decide what’s good and bad for you?
Maybe there are some limits that you can choose to cross; but maybe you can’t choose what happens to you if you cross those limits. Maybe there really is some kind of “human nature,” and getting out of the cave isn’t just about learning to make choices for yourself: maybe it’s about learning to freely choose what’s naturally good for humans.
And maybe one of the ways you get stuck in the cave is actually to believe that anytime someone says “you can’t do that,” they’re just trying to hold you back, just trying to tell you who you are, just trying to control you by making you afraid of something that’s not real and won’t happen. Maybe sometimes what they say is just true: if you choose to do this, you’ll be unhappy.
Neo offers a world without limits, and then he flies away. But that’s in the matrix. In the real world, he can’t fly. In the real world, if a human jumps off a building, he dies.
We’ve read a lot about what happens to you when you believe the illusion that you don’t have a choice. The next story is what happens to you when you believe the illusion that you can do anything you choose.
Toure, “The Sad Sweet Story of Sugarlips Shine Hot and the Portable Promised Land”
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Discussion
So, when you’re doing philosophy you’re trying to escape the cave, which is like a theater, full of illusions. Doing philosophy means seeing through illusions. These are illusions about who you are, and what your limits are. The idea is that you live in a world that tells you “if you want to be happy, you have to do this, and you can’t do that.” What you have to do, what you can’t do: that’s what we call “morality.” Morality is a bunch of limits. The idea is that the limits you grew up with aren’t real. You’re surrounded by people saying “don’t go through that door, or else!” Or they’re saying “go through this door (not that one), and you’ll get your reward!” Philosophy calls their bluff, and says you can go through that door and nothing bad will happen to you. Or it says, you won’t actually be happy if you go through the other door. The limits are all illusions. At least, you’ll never know one way or another unless you go through the door, you should have the courage to find out for yourself. Doing philosophy isn’t just about thinking; it’s about having the guts to follow your thoughts through those doors. It’s about how you live. Philosophers break the rules — and not just in their heads.
Now so far, all the illusions you’ve read about have been things you see. They’re hallucinations. A hallucination is the kind of illusion that stands in front of reality, so to speak. You can’t see reality because all you see is the hallucination. It’s like a mirage: because you can see the oasis, you can’t see the desert behind it (which might be that “desert of the real” Morpheus mentions). When Di Pizan sees herself through the eyes of men, or when Du Bois sees himself through the eyes of white people, they are seeing something — they’re seeing the images other people have of them. Those images are nightmare versions of themselves, illusions of inferiority. So they can’t see themselves as they really are, because they can only see the illusions others have about them. Those are illusions about who they are — about what it means to be a woman, or to be black. This means they’re also illusions about what they can and can’t do, if they want to be happy. Di Pizan and Du Bois have to work their way out of their caves. They have to dispel the nightmares that hold them back. But that’s not easy: everywhere they look, they see those nightmares staring at them. It’s hard to believe they aren’t real.
But there’s another kind of illusion. This is the kind where reality just goes blank, turns invisible. It’s not that you’re seeing a fake thing, a hallucination, which hides a real thing. It’s that you just don’t see the real thing. Like when David Blaine makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. He doesn’t hide the real thing behind an illusion. The illusion is that the real thing gone, when actually it’s still there.
Du Bois talked about just wanting to be able to live “without having the doors closed roughly in his face.” For Sugarlips Shinehot, “white folk is like doors. You got to go through them to get most anywhere. . . . Doors don’t always open up, and sometimes them doors get heavy and Negroes get tired of openin door after door to get anywhere, and mosttimes to walk through them doors you have to act a certain way you don’t won’t to. But if you want to go through there’s lil choice.”
So, white people put Sugarlips in a box, and he feels boxed in. They are a limit on what he can do.The limit isn’t so much that they don’t let him do anything; it’s that they’re the ones who get to decide whether he gets to do stuff. Suppose you’re a grown-up, but your mom still gets to decide how late you can stay out, or whatever. Even if she let you stay out as late as you want, wouldn’t it still bother you that it was her decision? Wouldn’t you feel unfree, deep down, even though on on the surface you were free to go where you want? That’s what he means by calling them a “door.” Even if you get to go through it, you shouldn’t have to be knocking all the time. You want real freedom. “A world without limits, without borders and boundaries.” Without doors.
Now, the philosopher comes along and offers you freedom from the illusions that keep you down, the illusions that tell you what you can and can’t do, the illusions of conventional morality. Ask the big questions often enough, practice the Basic Move long enough, and all that stuff falls apart. But in this story someone else comes along and offers what sounds like the same sort of thing, and he’s no philosopher. He’s “a Reverend and a Doctor,” a “shepherd” who offers Sugarlips a new version of Gyges’ ring. If Sugarlips takes it, he gets “boundless freedom.”
It’s like Gyges’ ring, because it turns people invisible. But it’s also not like Gyges’ ring, because this one turns other people invisible. The white people, the ones who are putting him in the box. The doors that decide where he gets to go, the rules of his world, the limits that keep in inside his cave — all of a sudden they’re all out of sight. He doesn’t have to think about them anymore. From now on, he only sees what he wants to see.
This “boundless freedom” is peculiar. “[H]e felt the weight of tuggin on door after door drop away. Without bein able to get at them doors, it was like he couldn’t go nowhere, but then again, without bein able to get at them doors, it was like he could go nowhere. Wit no place to go and no place bein exactly where he wanted to be, he felt something like a jus-freed slave.”
All his life, the rules and limits have been imposed on him by other people, who used the rules to keep him in the box they made for him. He’s had obligations every day, obligations to knock on the doors and wait for permission, to go through this or that door if he wants what he wants. And that’s his only experience of what it’s like to have an ‘obligation,” what it’s like to “follow a rule.” Then, suddenly, all the people who made the rules, the people who stood in his way, are just gone — even though they’re all still there.Wouldn’t it feel like heaven, like a “portable promised land”? Wouldn’t it feel like the “freedom” you’ve been looking for? Wouldn’t it feel like you’d finally gotten out of the cave, escaped the master-slave dialectic?
It’s not freedom-to do things. It’s not positive freedom. The doors, the rules, the limits, are still there. You’re still not free to “do what you want”; you still have to knock on the doors, go by the rules, obey the limits. No, it’s freedom-from something. Negative freedom. But this is key: because they’re all still there, it’s not freedom-from the doors, freedom-from the rules, freedom-from the limits. It’s freedom-from your awareness of the limits. So it’s not really freedom at all, not even the negative, freedom-from kind. It’s the illusion of freedom. It feels like you’ve got freedom-from, and so it also feels like you’ve got freedom-to. And you like that feeling. You feel happy. Feels like “you’re in the promised land wherever you go.” Portable promised land. Utopia, but all in your head. Morpheus tells Neo: “free your mind.” The Reverend frees Sugarlips’ mind: but his mind is the only thing that’s free. He’s still in the matrix, and all the limits still apply; it’s just that now he’s free to pretend they’re not there. He’s still in the cave, but in his head, he’s out. That is his cave.
What did Sugarlips do? He exchanged his nightmare, the nightmare in which he’s always less-than, always seeing himself through the eyes of others who see him as a box, and who he can only see as doors — the nightmare in which there are only masters and slaves — for a daydream in which he is the master, and there are no limits on what he can do. The nightmare was not getting what he wanted, and not being respected. The daydream is getting everything he wants, and showing everyone “exactly what bein a Negro could mean.” The daydream is: “I can do things no man has ever done before!”
You know what happens. He flies; he dies. The limits still apply, whether he wants them to or not. Sugarlips is the prisoner in the cave who gets free, sees that it’s all been fake, and could keep going up and out to the sun, but gets sidetracked by the idea that since everything he’s known has been fake, since all the limits have been imposed on him by people who just want power over him, then all limits are fake, and if he just has the courage to call their bluff and walk through the door, step over the limit, it’ll be obvious, and nothing bad will happen to him. But then “jealous Gravity snatchin him back, and, once Gravity caught hold ah him, she pulled harder and harder, and he fell faster and faster . . .”
The point: even though philosophy shows you that familiar morality is fake, that lots of rules are just made up by weak people who don’t want you to fly because they’re jealous, or by strong people who want to keep the flying all to themselves, that doesn’t mean morality itself is fake, that all rules are made up. Just because some of the limits don’t need to be there doesn’t mean there are no limits. Philosophy is for dissolving illusions; it’s not for exchanging nightmares for daydreams.
He flies, he dies — but not before landing on a white man, Fat Jimmy, who also dies. The other point (and now we’re going from philosophy to political philosophy): inside the cave, where there are masters and slaves, the slaves’ temptation is to become masters, to confuse the freedom and happiness they really want (which is outside the cave) with the fake freedom that the master’s have (which is inside the cave). The masters have the fake freedom of getting what they want without having to consider what others want, without other people getting in their way. But it’s the masters who tempt the slaves with that idea. And at least the slaves want something more than they have. The masters don’t even know how to want anything better. So the slaves get sidetracked on their way out of the cave, if in their attempt to get free they end up killing the masters (revolution!), well — it’s not exactly the master’s “fault” (Fat Jimmy was just walking down the street, minding his own business), but it’s definitely what you should expect to happen when you keep some people down with nightmares, so you can keep living in a daydream.
The only way out of the cave, the only way to escape the master-slave dialectic, is to refuse to be either a master or a slave. And that means refusing to live either in a daydream or a nightmare. It means not believing you’re better than you actually are, and not believing you’re lesser than you actually are. It means trying to see the truth about who you are — like di Pizan, like Du Bois. And that means finding your true limits, finding what’s truly right and wrong, good and bad. Know thyself. Not the self you are, or not only that: know the self you’re becoming. But the self you’re becoming isn’t a person who just gets to “freely choose,”; it’s a person that gets better and better at making “better choices.” The better choice is to respect your true limits. That’s how you respect yourself.
Sure, you’re free to choose to jump of a building, but you’re not free to choose whether it kills you. And maybe this too: you can choose to murder the king, sleep with the queen, take over the kingdom. But you don’t get to choose whether it makes you happy or not. There’s conventional morality, keeping you unhappy, or making you fake-happy. But there’s also real morality, and you’d better figure out what it is, if you want to be real happy.
Reflection
- In Chapter Three you considered whether the shepherd was happy in the end. What about Sugarlips Shine Hot – is he happy in the end? Define your terms. Write at least 150 words. Refer to at least one other course text.
- Whether or not Sugarlips is happy in the end, is he free? Define your terms. Write at least 150 words. Refer to at least one other course text.
