To Exist is to Differ, Part Two

To Exist is to Differ

Difference as a Place of Study

Part Two


"I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences."
Isabel Allende

A cursory look over my more politically- or socially-minded posts in the last few years indicates how obsessed I am with a proper attitude toward difference, even if I was not aware that this was a theme in my writing. In what is easily my most popular post of all time, "Sexy Bodies, Disabled Bodies," I introduce my interest in atypical anatomy, though at this time I was not aware of that term (which is Alice Dreger's). However, it is with my ill-fated (because unfinished) series on The Boundaries of Self that I insist that any definition of "body" or "self" must fully account for atypical anatomies without simply designating them "exceptions." The way I run with McCloud's Four Campfires, which is really a kind of structuralism, is to make it about difference rather than sameness. My most recent concern with ethics has been about meta-ethics, the ethics of addressing differences in ethical beliefs. When I talk about political axes (here and here), I get anxious about categories (left v. right) that ignore other ways organizing political belief and activity. I defend the existence of many denominations insofar as they address differences in congregants' needs. I consider myself a heretic in most communities (heretic: a person who has beliefs unorthodox to the community of which zhe insists zhe is a part). Also, if you were to pay much attention to what I say in the comment sections of those blogs in which I participate--Unequally Yoked, Experimental Theology, Elizabeth Esther--you'd probably notice that many of my contributions, and most of my arguments, involve me saying that someone or another is over-generalizing. What may have started out as simple contrarianism during my years as a teenager--when my Grade 9 English teacher said that a first-person past-tense narrator must always survive the story, I immediately wrote and submitted a short story in which the first-person past-tense narrator dies--has become for me a political and social commitment to the appreciation of difference.

I think my academic career has played a role in this, which I outlined in my previous post, as has my extra-curricular reading of post-modernists and continental philosophers. You could also attribute this, maybe (but only maybe), to my habit of hopping between Protestant churches, or my taste for speculative fiction, or my interest in psychology, or my habit of imagining what it would be like to be a non-human animal. (For instance, did you know that the Common Octopus has semi-autonomous limbs? The octopus's central nervous system instructs a limb to complete a particular task, but the limb works out how to achieve the task using its own local nerve cluster. While humans have something like this going on with our ganglia, octopedes' limbs actually do some of their own problem-solving, which is far more extensive than what our ganglia do. It would be fascinating to experience semi-autonomy of one's limbs.)

OK. So what do I mean by "a proper attitude toward difference"?

1. Epistemology. I don't fully know. I have only recently figured out, after all, that this has been a general issue in my thinking. I am also phobic of completion, or certainty, in my personal philosophy, so even if I had been thinking about this for years I doubt that I'd have come to any kind of conclusion.

2. Axiology. What I don't mean is some form of total ethical relativism. I don't think that different ways of doing things are all equally valid. I would say that there are multiple ways of doing things that are just as good, but that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Some ways of doing things are very bad. It's just that there isn't a single best way of doing things. (You might think of this as a few local optima, but none of those local optima are a global optima.) So while I'm not an ethical relativist, nor a metaphysical relativist, I could maybe called a weak cultural relativist.

3. Axiology. Of course there are certain kinds of difference which I would condemn. For instance, certain kinds of criminal behaviour are unacceptable deviations from typical behaviour. I wouldn't celebrate difference without qualification. But my condemnation is based on ethical violations; whether or not the behaviour is different--or, in a more loaded term, deviant--from other people's behaviour is irrelevant to my condemnation. By the same token, I am willing to criticize normative behaviour (for instance, capitalist materialism).

4. Metaphysics, Axiology. What I am willing to say is that a lot of differences aren't comprehensible in terms of good/bad, or good/better/best. Bodies, for instances, are never wrong; no body is better at being a body than another. Some bodies are in more pain than others, of course, and that might well be a result of differences in those bodies. Social conditions make certain bodies more comfortable than others. But there is no Platonic form of "body" from which any given body deviates. No body is more typical of body-ness than another body. Any claim you make about bodies ought to apply equally to all bodies; if it does not, your claim is false (or at least applies only to particular bodies, but that distinction ought to be clear and appropriate). A failure to account for atypical bodies, in fact, is easily the biggest reason why a lot of atypical bodies are uncomfortable to have; the body itself is often not uncomfortable (cf. Dreger's One of Us).

5. Axiology. I would also be willing to say that the failure to account for atypical bodies, or atypical psychology (or even typical but non-normative psychology, like introversion), is endemic to Western philosophy, politics, art...really just Western culture generally. It is also probably a problem in lots of non-Western cultures, too, but I can only speak about Western culture with any reliability. I opened this post with the Isabel Allende quote because it is an example of a common attitude that seems to be in support of inclusion but must result in a failure to understand, and thus to include, people who are different from me. Focusing on similarity at the expense of difference is not a moral good, but so many people seem to think it is a moral good.

6. Epistemology. In the end, I would say that, as with texts, to exist is to differ. Humans have a lot of similarities, yes, but we are also idiosyncratic. Whether those idiosyncrasies are for good or ill I cannot say, but any theory or program or attitude that fails to account for those differences cannot really explain human behaviour, human need, or human dignity. Such an epistemological failure cannot help but produce metaphysical and axiological failures as well. This, for me, is the bedrock of a proper attitude toward difference. (So, with apologies to Eve Tushnet, I actually am a special snowflake, and so are you.)

It's important to note that I have other commitments than just this respect for differences, and some of these commitments might trump the commitment to difference, but ultimately I don't think I can explain and understand my own ideas without at least addressing the above.

(tl;dr: Just as the differences between texts must be addressed in any explanation of those texts, so too must the differences between people be addressed by any account of human behaviour; failure to do so results in other failures, usually ethical or political ones; these failures are really common in our culture; there are a lot of different kinds of difference and it turns out that I talk about them a lot.)

Like No Other Animal on the Planet

I want to recommend the BBC Horizon documentary The Secret Life of the Dog, which explores the relationship dogs have with humans re: domestication. One of their theses (granted, not the primary one) is that humans and dogs co-evolved; our relationship with dogs has radically changed them, but it has also changed us--perhaps allowing for the agricultural revolution. Thanks to my reading of Haraway, this is something I now take as obvious.

However, the primary subject of the documentary is the way in which dogs are unique among all other animals in the traits they've developed which adapt them specifically to human interaction. For instance, when dogs look at human faces, they regularly look towards the left (so they look to the right side of the face), a trait they share with humans alone. (They do not look at the left side of anything else; left-biased expression is a human trait.) So they've developed a unique capability of reading human emotion and understanding human communication.

One of the more interesting segments is about the planned and systematic domestication of foxes as an experiment to learn more about domestication. Two things are remarkable: the first is that it was successful. While foxes may not be as incredibly domesticated as dogs are, it is nonetheless possible to domestic foxes to a remarkable degree. The second remarkable thing is that while the experimenters selected for behaviour, certain physiological traits followed: shorter legs, more white in the coat, curled tail, floppier ears. Specifically, the traits that physiologically differentiate dogs from wolves also developed in foxes over the process of domestication.

I highly recommend this video. The combination of clever scientific research, dogs, and mind-theory stuff will always interest me. The Secret Life of the Dog has an X-Files feel to some of it, which I found amusing; they play almost-eerie music when leading up to the sorts of things a really intelligent dog named Betsy can do which made me think of the psychic-of-the-week episodes, and of course the experimental breeding of foxes was reminiscent of the experimental breeding of clones that a certain Fox Mulder discovered. Perhaps this is why I considered wild sci-fi scenarios while watching the show: what if the next sentient life to exist on Earth was not AI but canine? And what other animals could we domesticate: lions? cheetahs? elephants? If we did domesticate them, what effects would that have on our own behaviour and development? In what ways (cognitively, behaviourally) would those domesticated animals differ from dogs? (I suspect that horses are another animal worth investigating re: domestication and adaptations uniquely suited for interaction with humans.)

7 Quick Takes (79)

(Quick note: Leah could yet again use your help in discerning atheist from Christian responses; since I think most of my readers are likely Christian, I'd highly encourage you to go over since for this round she'll be most interested in Christian responses.)

1. On the Saturday after you last heard from me, I went shopping at Metrotown Mall for clothing with two (female) friends. I do this sometimes; having a little money ear-marked for clothes but not enough fashion sense (or inclination, honestly) to actually make fashionable choices, I enlist the help of fashionable people who like clothes shopping but don't have the funds to do it as often as they'd like. Somehow they thank me for doing this, which seems backwards to me. The upshot is that I now have three new pairs of shorts, a new button-down shirt, and a new polo shirt.

2. Thanks to Netflix, I have watched numerous movies recently. (Some of these likely precede the last 7 Quick Takes, but I thought I'd lump them all here.)

Harry Brown stars Michael Caine as a pensioner and ex-Marine who tries to mount a one-man war against the street gang that murdered his friend and terrorizes the project he lives in. It's an OK movie, but quite bleak. Don't expect a thrills-a-minute ride.

The Life of David Gale is about David Gale, a death-row inmate (Kevin Spacey) who was formerly an anti-capital punishment activist. He has recruited a reporter to tell his story in the three days before his execution, and she comes to believe that he is innocent and tries to exonerate him before it's too late. (This film is fairly obviously anti-capital punishment.)

Traitor concerns the acts of a former US Forces operative (Cheadle) who now appears to be tied to Islamist terrorist groups, and the FBI agents who are tracking him. It's far easier to follow than most political thrillers but at the same time doesn't oversimplify. (Or, at least, it oversimplifies no more than other such movies do, which is probably to say it oversimplifies quite a lot.)

Agora follows the atheist philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and her students and slaves during the conversion of Alexandria to Christianity. Three religious traditions--polytheism, Christianity, Judaism--clash during the time of transition. The film glows when Hypatia attempts to refine a heliocentric model over the clumsy Ptolemaic epicycles; the film is rather dark when it depicts human arrogance and religious exclusivism.

Kill Bill, which I'm sure most of you have heard of, is Tarentino's two-part take on martial arts and samurai movies. Since I was expecting it to be pretty bad, it was better than I expected, though I found I enjoyed the first part more than the second. The best moments in the second concerned the protagonist as a mother. However, the second part does not free itself from the orientalist baggage of the movies it references; it walks a fine line between parody and homage, and unfortunately is not explicit enough in its parody to escape from the label "racist."

(500) Days of Summer is sort of like a rom com, but isn't. I like the novelty of boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, girl-leaves-boy-for-good, and I like narratives that wander across chronology, but that didn't save this movie for me. See, I could not stand the female lead--Summer--and as a result had difficulty getting into it. As far as I could tell, Summer displayed everything that is unlikeable about the "indie lifestyle" (affected voice, flouting social conventions, pretentiousness) and nothing that is likeable about it.

Centurion was better than I thought it would be; its protagonist is (surprise!) a centurion stationed in Britain. After the slaughter of the 9th Legion at the hands of the Picts, a small band of Roman soldiers is deep in hostile territory, fleeing back into Roman-occupied lands while being pursued by an expert tracker named Etiane. It is not an especially optimistic movie, a mood reflected in the bleak but beautiful landscape they run through.

Saving Face is not a movie that I would ordinarily watch, but recently I've been trying Asian-Canadian and Asian-American films. Wilhelmina Pang is a brilliant young surgeon and a kind-of-closet lesbian whose mother keeps setting her up with local Asian men. Suddenly her mother, Hwei-Lan, a widow, arrives on her doorstep needing a place to stay. Hwei-Lan is pregnant and was kicked out her parents' house because she won't tell who the father is. I'm afraid I'm not describing this very well. Watch the trailer. Anyway, as I said, it's not what I'd usually watch; it was funny, but rom coms are not really my cup of tea.

3. I am no longer catsitting as of last weekend. I've been enjoying the ability to sleep in and without interruption. The cat was wont to climb on me at about 4:00 in the morning. However, she was quite soft and I'm sure I'll periodically wish I had a cat to play with again.

4. This week (Tuesday) I began volunteering as a narrator for audio recordings of library books for the print-impaired. I've only done it once so far, but it will be a weekly thing. One's voice is usually sore afterwards. I'm pleased to be doing this, though; I feel like I'm not really doing enough positive work right now and appreciate the opportunity to get involved in this. Ability is such an underrepresented issue at the moment--compared, at least, to sexism, racism, heterosexism, etc, but not compared to neurotypicality and atypical anatomy, of course--and I'm happy to have even a small part in this endeavour.

5. Tuesday afternoon I attended a lecture on civic Islam and secularism. Dr. Amyn Sajoo gave the talk, entitled "Public Islam: Citizenship, Identity, Anxiety," hosted by the Iona Pacific Inter-Religious Centre at the Vancouver School of Theology. I can't hope to encapsulate his talk in a single take, but he addressed the Sam Harris version of secularism, which posits secularism as modern and rational, opposed to the traditional and sentimental religion. Dr. Sajoo suggested what I've written about before, that it is not possible to separate the religious and the "non-religious", and tied this in with an activist and publically engaged ethic in Islam. I should also mention that he brought up the idea of alternative modernities, ones that do not have an Enlightenment history, and how this seems to threaten some proponents of a non-religious secular ethic. I was very heartened by the talk not only because of what was said but also because the audience was largely Christian and I was so pleased to see such fairly conservative-looking parishioners interested in inter-faith topics.

6. I've been apartment hunting. Yesterday I was trying to respond to a craigslist advert and the e-mail address did not work. Since the location was close to where I currently live, I decided to walk over and see if a phone number was given at the location itself. After all, the rent was very low and the details in the posting looked good. It was a great deal and was close to where I wanted to live, so I wasn't about the let the failed e-mail deter me. I got to the apartment and saw a "vacancy" sign out front, so I took a photo of the sign, which had contact information on it. As I did so, a woman came out and interrogated me about what I wanted. I explained, and she seemed rather displeased. It turned out that the craigslist ad was a hoax. She did not know who posted it, but she was furious. There was a vacancy, but the rent was actually about double that listed. All told, that was disappointing. Fortunately, I do have some other leads.

7. I've started listening to The Wailin' Jennys. Leah at Unequally Yoked mentioned them last week. I particularly like "The Parting Glass", which I think I'd like played at my funeral (whenever that happens), and "Storm Comin' ."

Please proceed to Conversion Diary, host of this blog carnival.

Examined Life -- Disability and Body Issues

Instead of updating my body-self series, I'm going to give you this video. It's well worth watching. (It helps if you already have the Cole's Notes version of Gender Trouble, but I imagine it wouldn't be necessary?)

Planaria

In murky ponds your flattened lengths you hide,

Your heads like tender diamonds gazing dim

'Long logs you use as cover for your slim

And soft bodies, your vision feeble-eyed.

Your race's many members creep in streams

Around this world, yet we the treading swains,

Whose errors cut upon you ample pain,

Do little know your cross-eyed, broken dreams.

Yet every brokenness will yield another

You, from your wound; each fragment blooms into

A separate self. A cloven head's now two

That share a body branching. Quarrels mother

You clones who split your lengths by pulling free;

You worms will grow through love--and injury.

Yup. Planaria are funny little critters.

This is more emphatically a draft than usual. If anyone is out there, interested in contributing, I have a question: do you prefer the fourth line as it is, or would you prefer to see it, "And soft bodies, with tiny muscles filled inside."? Further, would the twelfth line be better as it is, or rendered, "That share a branching body."? Other critiques also welcome.

I had wanted to do more with this, but I often find that sonnets hold less than I anticipate they will, so I have to make due. Perhaps I could write another planaria sonnet, one that should follow immediately after in the sequence, which discusses how sexual reproduction is more genetically beneficial than asexual reproduction... and, yet, asexual reproduction seems to directly benefit those planaria who get injured, since they reproduce their genes exactly. It might be worth another sonnet.

Actually, an aubadina might work well for this subject. Shame it's not a real tradition.

Making Sense of Existentialism

Warning: epic-length post.

Jon suggested I write a post that tried to make sense of existentialism. I'm currently off from work nursing a nauseated stomach, so maybe I'll give this a shot. I admit I have never been fond of existentialism, or at least certain strands of it, and so it hasn't ever been something I had ever studied of my own choosing. This being said, I've been enrolled in philosophy courses before and dealt with this school of thought there. Like Eastern religions and the more subtle forms of Western philosophy, existentialism is, I think, one of those worldviews which requires time more than rational premise-to-premise analysis to comprehend. When I first encountered it in high school I managed to deceive myself into thinking I understood it. In my first year of university I was thoroughly disabused of this notion. Now, after having existentialism reside in the back, cobwebbed corners of my consciousness, I have looked into the matter at Jon's urging, and think I might have a grasp of it. I am somewhat aclimatized. (Maybe I'm wrong; if you're an expert in existentialism and you're reading this, feel free to point out my errors.)

Don't let the accompanying picture fool you; existentialism has little to do with chain-smoking. The figures in the picture--Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus--are all important figures in the development of this philosophy. I could take you through existentialism's development, from its grandfathers Kierkegaard and Neitzsche down into the present, but I don't think this is really the way to do it. If you wanted an in-depth understanding of the philosophy, this would be necessary, since each thinker contributed a different version, as it were, to the whole picture. (As you may well know, in the same way that religious traditions and scientific departments not only allow wiggle-room in individuals' beliefs but are in fact made up of an aggragate of individuals' beliefs, so too are schools of philosophy not much more than the common denominators in multiple philosophers' systems.) For our purposes, whoever, I feel we would lose the thread that the runs through them and get lost in the details. So I will avoid names except when necessary. This being said, those three names are ones worth remembering, because if you did want to look into the matter a little more, these are the people who best expressed the existentialist outlook.

Let's get to it. First, take a look at the word itself: existentialism. The philosophy is based on the idea of existence. Moreover, it is based on a particular concept of existence, in this case that it precedes essense. "Existence" and "essense" are specific terms with long, meandering philosophical pedigrees, so I'll try to explain what they mean by saying that existence precedes essense. According to the existentialists, people exist before they have an identity. When you or I, as a discrete individual, comes into the world, we are isolated and without an identity. Only after we encounter the world do we begin to accumulate something of an identity, but even in then it's not a static thing. We build who we are by what we do. I have heard this described by the following metaphor: the human person is a paintbrush that paints itself.* We are built up of our past decisions, but we mustn't let that fool us into thinking that these decisions limit what we do. No, each decision is made freely.

This is the second important marker in existentialism: free will. The philosophy holds that all of our decisions are made in radical freedom. We alone are responsible for all of our decisions, and cannot pass this blame on to anything else. In a related move, the existentialists claim that we can choose to adjust our values at any time, and thus are responsible for the values we hold as well. This is different from saying that we have no values; acting without values, or randomly, is a refusal to take responsibility for our actions. However, to claim that we had no choice but to act in a certain way is also a refusal to take responsibility for our actions, as we could always have changed those values.

It is in this important element--free will--that existential is most different from naturalism. Both schools of thought are modernist philosophies that tend to produce urban and pessimistic plays or literature in which characters appear desperate and human society comes off looking hypocritical. They are thus sometimes confused. In fact, they are very different. Naturalism is a philosophic and aesthetic movement which supposes that people have no free will; we are mechanized animals which are driven by our instincts, devoid of real reason, free will, or civilization. Existentialism disagrees entirely; according to Sartre and his co-philosophers, humans, while not rational, are free to make decisions. Their 'instincts' or biological predispositions cannot be held responsible for our actions. We are responsible for our actions, and neurology can get off at the next stop, please and thank-you.

Further, we cannot pass responsiblity off onto reason, either. We are not reasonable, and the universe is inherently chaotic, so even if we were reasonable, it wouldn't do an ounce of good. We must make our decisions in spite of the irrational world. In this way you'll notice that existentialism is different from new atheism or scientism: while many existentialists are atheists, this is the only thing they have in common with folks like Dawkins or Hitchens, who believe strongly in humanity's ability to reason about our ordered universe. According to the existentialists, believing that humans are rational is just another attempt to avoid facing the truth.

What is that truth? Simply, this: the world is without meaning. It is absurd. We are each alone in a subjective world. No set of values is inherently true or stable, and the world does not have any meaning of its own. (Or perhaps it does, but whatever meaning it intrisically has is only relevant to itself and accessible by itself, so whether it has its own meaning or not makes no difference to you.) In this world, we are wholly responsible for our actions, but these actions have no inherent meaning. When we realize this, we face the Absurd.

Now, Absurdism is a movement of its own, which claims that all the world is absurd, like existentialism. The difference is that absurdism stops there: the world is absurd, and our goal is to live with and perhaps even embrace this. Theatre of the Absurd** develops these ideas, though to say that Theatre of the Absurd is either always existentialist or absurdist would be a gross and inaccurate generalization. Existentialism, then, says that we cannot sit still with sheer meaninglessness. Rather, our goal is to construct our own meaning for the world. We must draft our own values and live by them, taking full responsibility for having made the values ourselves. There is a third camp which is relevant to this paragraph, and that camp is Nihilism. Nihilism believes that there is no meaning at all, that we can't even create meaning, and that idea of 'meaning' in the world is itself meaningless. Not even Absurdism will go that far; Absurdism allows that the idea of values exist and that searching for them is productive, even though that search will only yeild the Absurd. Wikipedia has a nice little chart summing this up.

The goal of existentialism, then, is to accept our radical responsibility for our actions in a chaotic world by creating our own meaning. I repeat that we are not trapped in our meaning, because we create it ourselves. Because we can change it at any minute, we are still responsible for how we act. Facing our own responsibility and generating our own meaning, or values, is called living "authentically"; trying to pass the responsibility to someone or something else or claiming that the world is without meaning and therefore that our decisions mean nothing is living "inauthentically."

Now, a person may come along and say, "Well hold on. There are things that limit our actions. For instance, I cannot ever choose to run faster than the speed of light. It's just not possible." Existentialism is well aware of this fact.*** You cannot make decisions against facticity. This word basically denotes the unalterable facts about the world and yourself. For instance, you cannot change the decisions you made in the past. You cannot change the physical limitations of your body. You cannot change the social and political situations (though you can change what the social and political situations of the future might be). In other words, you exist in a context. If you ignore facticity, you are being inauthentic. However, if you think that facticity in any way shapes what your decisions within that context are, you're also being inauthentic. Let's say you've lived a life that is deceitful, murderous, bigamous, and cruel. If you choose to ignore your past and make the rest of your decisions with a 'fresh' start, you're being inauthentic. If you say that your past obviously makes you a deceiving, murdering, cruel bigamist and that you really have no choice but to continue a life of immorality and crime, then you are also being inauthentic. If you accept your past, face it squarely, choose a system of values that understands your past decisions as immoral, and live your life in compliance with this system of morals, taking responsibility both for your previous actions and the ones you make now, you are being authentic. The same goes for your place in society and what your body is capable of.

According to existentialists, we humans, in the condition I outlined above, often exhibit numerous states which are akin to emotional states. The most important of these are angst and despair. Angst is the feeling we get when faced with our own freedom to action. It's the feeling of standing at the of a cliff and realizing that not only might we fall off, but that there is nothing to prevent us from throwing ourselves off. We can always choose to destroy ourselves, and we cannot create any external barriers to prevent ourselves. The choice is ours. A housemate of mine, who shall remain unnamed, once told me that he felt this when he was on 'shrooms. He was shaving and realized that nothing was stopping him from slitting his own throat. It was not as though he thought he would kill himself; what scared him is that he could. Afterwards he said he didn't think would do 'shrooms again. An existentialist would suggest that he did not want to do 'shrooms because he disliked the truth the experience showed him.

Despair is what we experience when one of the facets of the identity we've created for ourselves is put in jeopardy. A common example is when an athlete receives an injury which permenantly prevents her from playing sports. Somehow who defines themselves as a model citizen and then, for whatever reason, commits a serious crime, would then feel that their identity is threatened. According to existentialism, we are always in a state of despair, since our constructred identity is never secure. This is not to say that we are always despairing, but that we are always in this specifically defined state of despair.

I will also say that existentialism has particular things to say about the Other and the Look (or Gaze), but these don't seem integral to the position, in my opinion. If you want, you could always look into it. Existentialism's Other is significantly different from post-colonialism's, and its Gaze is also different from feminism's.

Finally, I will again remind you that no two existentialists believe quite the same thing. A particular rift is between atheistic existentialists and theistic, often Christian, existentialists. In many ways they have the same opinions, but the Christian existentialists believe there is something behind the Absurd--namely, God--which does endow the world with meaning. However, God is 'invisible' to reason, and in order to access this meaning humans must make a leap of faith, a free decision to believe in God, without any justification. Such a leap of faith, to the Christian existentialist, is the only way to construct your own meaning. Notice, though, that meaning is still constructed and that the individual is still responsible for accepting it as his own. To say, "I do this because the Bible says so," is in this view inauthentic; only saying, "I do this because I have decided to accept what the Bible says, and the Bible says I should do this, so I have decided to do this," is authentic. Kierkegaard,**** one of those grandfathers of existentialism, is the most obvious forerunner of this line of thought, while Nietzsche is more clearly the forerunner of atheistic existentialism, though both contributed ideas to all streams of existentialism.

One thing I also did not spend much time discussing is existential art. From its beginnings, existentialism has been developed and spread as much through literature and drama as through philosophical discursive writing. Perhaps this is because existentialism to some degree requires immersion to follow comprehend: you must live in its worldview to grasp it, and literature is a way of doing this. (See Michael Ward's Planet Narnia for a similar idea; he suggests the Lewis wanted to advocate particular Christian symbols not by discursive writing, but by creating stories embodying the worldview and inviting readers to inhabit the stories and therein the worldviews.) Anyway, there are a lot of artists who draw on existential themes or try to create works embodying existentialism. Wikipedia's article on existentialism can help you out in this case, since to list every existentialist artist would be a waste of space.

Jon, I hope this helps crystalize the position. Other readers, I hope this also helped you understand the position. In this concluding paragraph, I want to emphasize that I am not an existentialist. I do not believe much of what's up there. About the only thing I will accept whole-heartedly is that we must take responsibility for our actions. (Oh, I'll also accept that we are not fully rational.) I do not think we have radical free will; rather, it is my suspicion that we have only limited free will. I do not think that the universe is meaningless; rather, I think that there are objective and universal values. Further, as I once heard a pastor say, "What if I like being lazy and inauthentic? If there are no values, there are no values." That is, I don't see how the existentialists can claim that we 'must' be authentic or that our 'goal' is authenticity when, according to them, all values are subjective and constructed. This alone makes me a pretty lousy existentialist. However, one cannot reject a position without endeavouring to understand it, or at least you should not try to get other people to reject it if you don't understand it; for this reason, I am happy to try to explain existentialism.

Okay, time to go, curl up on the coach, and try to forget about my miserable stomach.

----

*I had trouble with this metaphor the first (and only) time I heard it. By good luck I remember it, and now it makes sense to me. The key is to stop taking this so literally, and to stop applying the logic you already think you know to it. If you want to understand this worldview, you must take it on its own terms at first. Only after this can you critique it, if you like.

** Theatre of the Absurd is a fascinating dramatic form which pushes theatrical conventions. Rather like dreams, actors will switch characters during the second act and then repeat the first act pertty much verbatim, only in new roles; "audience members" will get up join the acting, while the cast will step down and join the audience; each character could quite possible be two or three other characters in disguise; language and communication breaks down, moving through double entendre into utter nonsense. For an excellent example, see The Real Inspector Hound. Woody Allen's God has many characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd, as well.

*** For the reader's information, this sort of objection is known as a 'strawman arguement.' A strawman arguement is where you come up with a pretty stupid claim, say it's part of your opponent's position, and then disprove it easily, thereby 'disproving' your opponent's arguement. This is a silly, underhanded, invalid, and unsporting way of going about philosophy. Please do not do it. You only wind up looking like a fool yourself.

****Kierkegaard, according to one of those Facebook quizzes, is my philosophical analogue.

7QT XXV (Two-week edition)

Righty, because I did not do 7 Quick Takes last week, having been in Edmontonia and all, I will cover 2 weeks with 7 takes. Deal? Deal. Also, I don't think I have that much news in the first place.

1. Last weekend we went to Edmonton, driving down Highway 63 on Friday. It was the first time I'd been south of the airport since September. Man, it is nice to be heading south on that highway. Of course, eventually we drove north on it as well, returning to Fort McMurray. In that direction we saw more of the land around us; southbound it got dark before we were too far down and we couldn't see much. Before it was dark, though, we got to one of the more visually interesting sections: to the edge of sight to the east and west, short, thin evergreens march over low rolling hills. While the forest is tangled, it isn't thick. There are few needles on the branches. This area was struck by forest fire maybe not quite a decade ago, and the trees we see are the survivors and the since-grown. Here and there, often on tops of hills, are pockets of taller thicker trees, sometimes deciduous. The look, to me, is Cretaceous.

2. First thing Saturday morning, we went to the Royal Alberta Museum. We stayed until 3:00. This was likely the coolest part of my weekend. I won't go in detail about each exhibit and display, but I will say discuss two: 1) in the front lobby there was a collection of photographs of endangered cultures from Tibet, India, Mali, and elsewhere, and 2) upstairs there was an insect-related exhibit at which we got to hold some cool specimens. The photographs were black and white and exceptionally beautiful. The insects, arachnids, and other arthropods were awesome, too. I got to hold two species of stick insect and I got to pat or stroke a tarantula. Best of all, I got to hold a giant African millipede, something I have always wanted to.

As I always do in museums, I began to feel saturated before we finished the Aboriginal Culture exhibit. I had taken in too much info before the day was up and I could not take in any more.

3. After this we went to Value Village. While Mom was spending forever in the clothing section, I was trying not to buy lots of books. In the end I got Samson Agonistes, The Dante Club, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Deception Point, Saint Augustine's Confessions, The Dead Zone, The Witch of Portobello, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/Weir of Hermiston. I may have failed just a little bit. (As you may now know, I read Samson Agonistes on the drive home.)

4. Then, and this was getting late, we went to the West Edmonton Mall. We had all been before, so it wasn't as though we were gawking around like tourists any more. That's not to say it isn't an interesting place, but after your first visit it stops being quite as spectacular. Mom wanted to get some supplies from DeSerres and I wanted some CDs from HMV. I have lost much of my music when my computer crashed, so I have only been listening to the music I took from Cait's and Quinn's computers. Now I have the soundtracks to Gladiator and Pan's Labyrinth. That was the last place we went that evening and we left for Fort McMurray pretty much first thing Sunday morning.

5. Reading. I finished The Dead Zone this week, not to mention getting through most of The Elements of Style, which if you have a prodigious memory you know I bought a little while ago now. I have started lullabies for little criminals, which I bought almost a year ago by now. I don't know about it yet.

6. On Thursday I finished my exhibit at work. So that's that. I am doing other things at work now, but it still feels odd not to be working on my project. I have been working on it since September. I understand now how it can be odd to finish a Master's. How can I be done? What comes next? etc. I'll let you know when it launches.

7. Last night, the folks and I went to see the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour at Keyano College. It's a two-night thing, but we only saw the last night. There were a number of great films: Revolution One, about off-road unicycling, which is actually pretty slick; Deep [something in Japanese], a very brief one about skiing in very deep powdery snow; A Little Bit Mongolian, an excellent film about an Australian boy who learns horse-racing among traditional Mongolian nomads, the quality of which film was mitigated only by the main character's mild sullenness and by his mother's silly colonial phrasing ("He's a real Mongolian now!" she says at one point); one the title of which I'm forgetting, about taking solar ovens to African countries while white-water rafting across the continent; Spirit Songs, about a Tibetan family connecting through music despite being separated by exile; To the Rainbow, about a famous mountain-climber who broke his head and is now returning to one of his favourite climbs, called The Rainbow, despite being in much lower physical condition and not having the use of his right arm (this was something to see); and The Ultimate Skiing Showdown, consisting of stunt-skiing and skiing accident clips put to "The Ultimate Showdown (of Ultimate Destiny)."

7 Quick Takes is hosted by Conversion Diary.

Thoughts on Three Books

1) Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.

I started this a little while ago, and would put it down to read other books between chapters. It's not that I wasn't interested in it, but that I wasn't interested enough. The main character was interesting in her own flawed way, and there were a number of narrative quirks and preoccupations I found interesting--one of which, though the least frequent, having to do with my recent obsession with multiple selves. This wasn't enough, though. I just could not feel the stakes. I suppose part of it was that the back of the book led me to believe it was a ghost story, and it's not.

But then the novel began to gain momentuum, as they say. The novel is about the narrator, an unnamed early-twenty-something girl orphaned into the working class, who marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter and moves into Manderly, his estate. She, however, is his second wife; her predecessor is the late Rebecca--the very recently late Rebecca. The crux of the novel is that the narrator's dreams of an idyllic life are repeatedly blocked by the 'ghost' (though not supernatural) of the house's previous mistress. The narrator feels herself rivals with Rebecca on a number of accounts, and she finds she loses more often than not. It's interesting, but it wasn't as riveting as I had hoped.

Until, of course, the weeks before the Manderly Ball, the structural centre of the novel. As the plot progressed toward this point, I became more interested. I could see what would happen at the ball, but I could not predict how it would fall out. There was about to be a disaster, and I wasn't sure what the consequences would be. And after that, things moved quickly, and everything was of consequence.

I have two observations. First, it's one of those books that is good to read because it alerts you to other people's emotional or interpersonal situations: it's about wrong assumptions, about people trying and failing to connect, about despair and redemption. The narrator's situation is one which deserves empathy, notwithstanding her own foolish caused no small part of it. Second, it has pointed out to me a trend in our contemporary literature which perhaps prevents us from enjoying some of the 'classics.' We have not exactly revived the tradition of beginning in media res, because people don't like flashbacks any more. We are, however, beginning precisely where the exciting part begins in our literature. We don't tend to allow things to develop, to build up, to reach a climax. This is of course partly to do with the genres we now produce. Detective stories, political thrillers, spy novels, and the ilk in a way must begin with the violent and transgressive act which move the story. (Of course, Hamlet begins after the murder and it still builds slowly, but there is speculation that Hamlet was Shakespeare seeing how long he could drag out the Rising 'Action' without destroying the play--and in so doing he made something that worked. It made Hamlet's own deliberation, own internal torment, the focus of the play, with the piling of bodies being a consequence of this.) I think of course of Shakespeare's climb toward the centre: it is not until the climax in the third act that Turning Point, or exciting part, happens. Thinking about it, this is true of many 'classic' novels--Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, and The Great Gatsby. We so rarely see this any more, this paced progression, and when we do run into it we get bored. It's not that we couldn't stick to it if we thought there was a promise of excellence, that this was a build-up. But we don't even think of that. We expect a novel to be homogenous, the same sort of pace and style straight through. How awful that would be, if all books ran like that! I think I enjoyed Rebecca so much more for it taking off then if it were the same throughout. The point where we, the reader, think, "Here we go," is worth it. In my opinion.

2) John Milton's Samson Agonistes.

Technically not a novel but a tragic poem, Samson Agonistes is Milton's portrayal of Samson the Nazarite after he is betrayed by Delilah, blinded, and handed over to the Philistines. Samson is a slave lamenting his poor fortune and discussing it with assorted visitors upon the scene. Also, this is a closet drama. Perhaps there are interesting things to say about a play which will never be seen and Samson's blindness (that just occured to me now, typing this), but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm not claiming this reading is for everyone. It's interesting to somehow who has studied the Renaissance, of course, in that it discusses typical Renaissance preoccupations in new ways (fortune, publishing, women, manliness, love, nationhood, productivity). It was also be interesting to someone who is interested in disability studies, given that Samson in the narrative is blind--as was Milton, when composing it. But to your average person, what interest?

If you can get past the formal diction and the characters' tendency to frame everything in the manner of a formal debate, the interesting part is in the characters' emotions, of course. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is what clued me into the poem's interest in this respect, calling Samson, scream that he would tear Delilah apart if she touched him one of the most--I forgot what word he used, 'touching' cannot have been it, but it had to do with emotional impact, so let's say--moving scenes in all English literature. Samson is blind, and people are staring at him and he can't look back. Meanwhile, Delilah, his wife, the women he loved despite his family's misgivings, has betrayed him; he also knows that he betrayed himself in trusting her. She has returned to him and wished to make up, and in his anguish he cannot forgive her, even though he knows he should. When she tries to explain herself she winds up hurting him more. Samson's anguish is made less palpable by the Miltonic verse, but if you can read it and then picture it to yourself immediately upon reading it, the emotional stakes are high.

Milton has a tendency among the Renaissance poets, I think, to give his villians reasonable perspectives. This has led people who perhaps read more simply than others (and I'm not separating literary analysts from 'philistines' here but rather some analysts and some regular folks from other analysts and other regular folks) to say that Milton himself sided with his villians. They say that Milton's hero is Satan, not Christ, and I think in reading Samson Agonistes people might be tempted to say that Milton vindicates Delilah. I do not think this is ture. I have not yet read Paradise Regained, so I suppose I cannot speak, but from what I understand of it, it can put rest to any claims that Milton sided with Satan. The hero in this one is clearly Christ, and Satan is clearly the villian. This being said, a story is more interesting when the villians are not unreasonable. Consider Lewis' The Silver Chair. Many consider The Lady of the Green Girdle to be the most dangerous of Lewis' villians because she not only comes so close to winning (both the White Witch and King Miraz get further than she does) but because it is so clear that had she broken the surface, things would have been much bleaker and harder to overthrow than under either the Witch or the Telemarine. She, after all, is far more convincing, which we see in people's reactions to Puddleglum's speech: either they cannot accept his reasoning and end up believing the witch, or upon accepting it, they are actively relieved. And I mean the readers, not the characters. This moment is a strong one, one that lasts.

But back to Milton. I do not think he vindicates Delilah, but he does make her a more engaging character than he may have. I am still not sure how much the chorus' dismissal of her 'showing her true colours in the end' (as a traitor) reflects Milton's own attitudes towards her. It doesn't really matter in the end, though. The chorus doesn't quite have it right about her, after all. She did wrong, yes, but I can understand her, I can feel for her. I think that her last defiant speech to Samson, claiming she is proud of what she did, is a reaction to her rejection of her. I think that she really did want his forgiveness, that she truly was contrite. I can empathize with her on this. She made a horrible, horrible mistake, and now it's too late to go back. I, for one, feel bad for her. I, for one, forgive.

There are readers who wouldn't, who would say that you sow what you reap and that it's her own bloody fault, no complaining now. These are the people who don't sympathize with Northumberland in 2 Henry IV as he mourns his son's death; yes, Hotspur died because his father was a rebel and a coward and Hotspur himself was a rebel and rash, but his son is dead. This requires pity. The fact is, if people who screwed up don't get our pity, then we all deserve whatever horrors come to us and have no place lamenting to others. We have all made enormous errors that, if combined with bad luck, would have destroyed ourselves and those around us. We have simply been lucky, or good liars. All of us. Delilah made a mistake, and paid for it; her mistake may have been worse than any of ours, but it is different only is magnitude and consequence, not quality. So I say, yes, she is a villianess, but she deserves our pity, too. If we can get past the prose, I like to think Samson Agonistes shows us a pathetic (in the original meaning, "deserving of pathos") Delilah, but of course I realize that there are many, many readers who won't spare her their empathy anyway, because they are so in the habit of dispensing judgement.

3) Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Litte Town

I loved this book. The back described it as a blend of the idyllic and ironic, and I had thought that impossible. It turns out it was quite possible. It's about a small Ontario town after the turn of the century but before WWI. It's both grand and small; the very humble matters of Mariposa are elevated to historically-shaking heights. Leacock manages to blend affection and ridicule perfectly, such that the townsfolk's foibles are presented good-naturedly. I recommend this book to anyone at all. I would in particular like to hear what a city-person thinks of it; after all, I align myself with the rural every time. My perspective of this book would be different from someone else's.

This book, for the most part, sits in a timeless past. Leacock wrote the novel as taking place twenty years before its writing, before the Great War and the Depression he was writing from. I suspect that even for him it had a sense of idyllic history, of nostalgia, of the world the way it was. For him, it was the world as it was when he was a boy; for us, now, we have never seen the world this way.

At least, not in this time period. But small towns don't change much in their structure, except perhaps in becoming gradually more anonymous as times go by. One way or another, the small town of Mariposa is in ways similar to small towns today. In ways it's dissimilar, too, but if you watch Corner Gas or read books by Stephen King, you might already have a feel for the small town mentality. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Corner Gas is a modern, televised Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town at heart. The point is, there is something timeless about Mariposa. It chugs on and on and remains virtually the same, while the urban 'important' world morphs yearly. The big, urban world may change as it likes, but I wonder how much of its change is sustained or generated by the actions of the little, rural world it ignores. Perhaps the election in Mariposa means nothing at all by itself, but the elections of all the Mariposas in Canada combined... well, I am forced to think that those matter quite a bit, really. Seen as a very small part of a very large whole, perhaps Mariposa is after all just as grand as it thinks it is.

Perhaps we all are.

Sexy Body, Disfigured Body

Aimee Mullins, who I have referenced here before, asked a question in her TED talk on her 12 pairs of (prosthetic) legs. Actually, she asked three questions. They are, "What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability?" I started to think about this over the course of about a week. Not only was I wondering about the answers to her questions, but I also had a few questions about her questions. I'll try to explore these with you here.

1. What is a sexy body? What is a disabled body?

The most obvious way to answer this question is to Google these terms. But I don't think you have to. I think you'll know what you'll find, especially in the case of the former. This won't answer our questions, though. Neither question--sexiness, disability--is easily answerable. Likely, neither is answerable at all, in the end.

First: sexiness. Or, if you prefer, beauty or physical attractiveness. (If you don't want to follow my reasoning, jump to the next bold point.) They say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and, whatever that person who originally minted this phrase meant, it has a truth different from that most people accept. Most people think it means that everyone has their own standard of beauty, which is of course somewhat true. However, there is another interesting element to this which I think becomes more clear if I say, "Beauty is in the mind of the beholder." Beauty is not, at least as we experience it, a quality inherent in an object or person. Rather, it is an interpretation of that object or person. People have said this before of all sorts of things, such as colour, but this is really a different matter than colour. A thing, of course, is not red itself. That is a psychological interpretation of the lightwaves we receive. But all things that we experience as red do reflect that particular wavelength. They are in a sense red after all.

In other words, our brains see a person and think, based on assorted qualities our sensory receptors pick up, "That's a sexy person." (If you want to hold onto an essentialist theory of beauty, you of course can. God or Platonic principles or what ever defines universal beauty can make a thing beautiful--truly, inherently beautiful--and then allow our brains to perceive that. Or, there is such a thing as beauty, somehow, derived from something, and it is to our reproductive advantage, somehow, to be able to perceive that, and we have evolved to be able to perceive it. The relevant point is that it's still a process that goes on in our brains.) In this sense, beauty is in the eye of the beholder--but that doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. To the extent that our brains operate the same, sexiness, even though interpreted, is objective; to the extent that our brains operate differently, it is subjective. The degree of difference isn't just genetics, of course, but also individual personal experience and cultural factors (and I'd argue that culture factors are way bigger than most people think). Anyway, the upshot is, 'sexiness' is partly universal, partly cultural, and partly individual. So we can answer 'what is a sexy body' in part, but only in part.

Now, there are all sorts of theories about facial symmetry and hip-waist ratios and things. I don't want to get into those, because I think that they are no more than contributing factors. A girl whose enormous, unibrow-laden, protuding forehead is perfectly symmetrical isn't going to win any beauty pagents. Meanwhile, I wouldn't say Helena Bonham Carter is the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's made it pretty well in Hollywood. But her face isn't perfectly symmetrical. Not at all. So I think we can say these sorts of things contribute, but aren't absolute.

I think here we need to fall back on what I said before. A lot of it is cultural. We are trained to think of particular people--often whole, 'healthy,' young, thin people--as beautiful and others as not beautiful. There was a time when overweight girls were considered sexy by some (Renaissance). There was a time when husky women were desirable (frontier, pre- and revolutionary Russia). There was a time when effeminate men were considered beautiful (ancient Greece, some Renaissance). Sickly girls also had a vogue (Victorian). It is true that some people we just won't find all that attractive anyway for biological reasons. But I don't think that's the case for people without legs. So long as we aren't actively repulsed by them, there's no reason we can't find them attractive. Listen to Aimee Mullins talk--just the first few minutes--on training repulsion.

That's not a real answer, but it's all I've got for now. I'll also note that I purposely trained myself not to be repelled by people with prosthetics and people with assorted facial disfigurations, etc. As a kid, I simply couldn't deal with anyone who looked 'disfigured' or 'deformed,' as I put it.

So what is disability? You'll notice I used "disfigured" in my post title. This is to emphasis a point: disability suggests a definition which rests on whether a person can perform as well as a typical person can in those tasks deemed part of everyday life. So we have people with missing limbs or people who are shorter than usual or what have you or blind people. This definition works well if you're only thinking of amputees, but it breaks down in other areas, at least if you want to talk about attractiveness. People with albinoism are not in any way less able to perform typical tasks, but they are often considered unattractive. Conjoined twins are often less able to do particular things, but they aren't always. Sometimes the only thing they are less able to do is to be alone, and I hardly think that counts. Aimee Mullins points out that people without legs are far from less able. They have now become more able. And then blind people, one of the largest demographics of people who are part of the disability--or different ability--activism movement, are often indistinguishable from sighted people, including in the realm of attractiveness. Disability is not the issue; it's 'looking weird' that is.

What definition can we use, then? Well, one possibility is, People who are visually atypical in some significant anatomical or pigmentational way, which is distinct from race, gender, or age. Another, less politically correct but I think more to the point, definition would be, People who would fifty years ago have been in a freak show, and now would be on the TLC network.

Where am I going with this? Good question. This is where: the fundamental question is, can a person who stikes us as so visually atypical also strike us as attractive?

Of course they can. If you care to, you can find all sorts of fetish literature about amputees and conjoined twins and human-animal hybrids (not possible yet, I know, but they would fit in this class if they did exist--and they were once thought to exist) and goodness knows who else. There is fetish literature about dragons doing R-rated things with luxury vehicles, so I guess we oughtn't be surprised.

But what about a 'normal' person, who doesn't have such fetishes? Well, I hope by now the pictures I've been putting in have answered that for you. There's no reason they can't, so long as we don't allow ourselves to be repulsed by them. And those fetishes may not be so off topic. I wonder if the forbidden-ness, the taboo, even the repulsiveness itself contribute to the fetish. If you look it up, people can be attracted to some pretty repulsive things. A Freudian analyst might talk a lot about the repression of certain disallowed desires being exagerated through a fetish. My point being, we might be naturally inclined to feel that these people are attractive--that these are sexy bodies--but we think we shouldn't feel so, and are as a result confused and repulsed. Consider the on-going cultural debate about whether the Medusa was beautiful or hideous. C. S. Lewis, for instance, calls the Medusa beautiful long before Cixous does. The classical painters painted her as such. And yet she's also a figure for ugliness--and disability.

Can a disfigured body be sexy? Sure it can. But we must let it be so.

2. Who becomes sexy?

And, of course, unless we find ourselves desiring that element which is different, the body must be sexy even without the disability. By now you'll likely have noticed that most of the people I've shown on here would have been attractive without their particular difference (or not, if you don't find them attractive). A 500-pound person will likely not be considered sexy, unless obesity turns you on. That's just a fact. And if a person is just generally what we'd consider unattractive, whether for cultural or hardwired reasons, then that they have a plastic arm isn't going to make much of a difference one way or another. If they could somehow grow that arm back, it won't help.

Which begins to put stress on Aimee Mullins implication that allowing the disabled to be beautiful is a victory. It seems that it's only a victory for those who are beautiful.

And I don't think this is going to push us into saying, Well, now that the legless are beautiful, people with distortions on their faces can also be beautiful. Because, I'm sorry, but by standard societal definitions, they can't. Not yet.

[I recognize that someone will come around with the argument that, if you fall in love with someone who is unattractive because of their personality, you will begin to find them physically attractive by magic, almost. I am absolutely sure this is true. Love is magic. I think we can also agree that that is beside the point. We already said we're not talking about the subjective. We're talking about quasi-objective attractiveness, in as much as it exists.]

So, if only some disabled people get to be beautiful, why should we value it at all?

3. Why sexiness?

Two reasons.

First, that there is no reason we can't bestow a privilege on some when we are unable to give it to all. It's not fair, but it would be ridiculous not to push for empowerment when not everyone in the demographic will be able to share it. It would be like saying, Let's give women the right to an education, and then someone saying, No, you can't, because those women over there are too old to start learning new things, and those women over their are so mentally handicapped that they wouldn't benefit from that education. (They have advanced learning disabilities or something.) It makes no sense.

And sexiness can be empowering. As much as people talk about beauty being a limit for women in some fields, I'd suggest you try being really downright unattractive before saying that. If you think you aren't taken seriously when you're pretty, at least people listen to you (or pay some sort of attention to you). At least people don't openly mock you for how you look, which I've seen happen.

Second, if we see some disabled people as attractive, we might be more willing to think of them--and by extension their whole demographic--as people. That is, we might think 'disabled person' over 'disabled person.' Grammatically, that is rendered 'a person with a disability,' which is the language differently-abled activists are pushing for. Hopefully, if we see a really hot albino guy walk down the street, we're less likely to think of people with albinoism as 'freaks.'

4. Why not sexiness? (I'll tell you.)

Notwithstanding what I've said so far, I think there's still a problem a number of problems, and I'm likely missing some.

While we're busy training ourselves to think of some disabled/differently-abled/disfigured/anatomically-or-pigmentally-atypical people as attractive, we're simultaneously training ourselves to think of being attractive as an important goal. That is, we're educating ourselves in the culture that worries about how people look in the first place. We're not breaking out of the system which discriminates by appearance. And before Jon breaks in here, I'm not talking about the movies. Whether we agree with Jon or not on cinema (and if you don't know Jon or what he thinks about cinema, don't worry about it) doesn't matter: I'm talking about real life here. I think it's fair to say that while enjoying an attractive person's appearance is not culturally destructive, discriminating based on it is. So we need to be careful when worrying about who is sexy that we don't by mistake brainwash ourselves into thinking that sexiness is somehow more important than, or even worse a contributing factor in, a person's humanity and their right to respect and compassion.

I revealed a particular issue earlier indirectly. There is a sort of thin edge where people who are too attractive aren't taken seriously and people who aren't attractive enough are avoided or ridiculed. Even if you found that happy medium, it would only be successful in that context; presumably, you'd be still unable to compete with those who were 'too attractive' in the other context when it comes to romantic rivalry, etc. In the end, the only thing we can say for sure is that we don't want to be in the lowest half of the attractiveness food chain. The hope, of course, is that we can somehow get out of this scenario, but if that is possible (which you might have cause to doubt), we certainly can't do it if we're at all worried about whether we're sexy when have a disability.

And then there's the issue of encouraging lust. At this point some of my readers will likely be thinking, Uhp, he's playing the prude card again, and from those readers' perspectives that would be somewhat true. There are a number of reasons why I think encouraging lust is problematic, but since some of them are religiously derived I won't fool myself into thinking that they'll be persuasive to someone outside of that context. I want to clarify here, though, that I'm not condemning the experience of physical desire. In the right situation, physical desire is a good thing--and that's biblically supported, in case you were unaware of that. But, at least from a Christian perspective, there is a problem with putting all this focus into making yourself (as a person with an atypicality of some sort) sexy, into discerning who is and who is not sexy, into allowing/encouraging/forcing yourself to feel physical attraction toward a person with a disability; the problem is the encouragement of an over-active libido. In our culture, there's already that threat. We don't need to fan the flame. But I think you can make secular arguments against allowing ourselves to be too sexually active, having to do with destroying our relationships, driving our desires into unattainable fantasies, and hampering our abilities to be romantically and sexually loyal to our partners. I haven't developed these arguments largely because I haven't seen the need to on a personal basis. They exist, though. I've heard about them.

(And in case you're thinking that I'm thus a hypocrit for writing this at all and for putting up all these pictures selected for their ability to arouse you, I say this: you're likely right. I do hope I'm making a point in all this that transcends that, but that's not to say on some level I'm not doing this just so I can think about pretty girls. The naked vanities, and everything, right? My only answer can be, "Orges and onions.")

This, then, is the crux of the question I have about Aimee Mullins' question: If we do allow that a disabled body can be a sexy body, then we are forced with a particular dilemma, which is between choosing the short-term empowerment of sexiness at risk of keeping ourselves in a destructive and discriminatory culture, or striving for other forms of empowerment which have concerns like ability and accessibility, added perspective, inherent worth, compassion, and meaningful relationships. Do we feel that worrying about sexiness as empowerment is in the end empowering, or does it just cause more problems?

There are some further lines of inquiry which are pertinent, but not so directly related that I will give them the space here (as I've so clearly gone well beyond the reasonable length limits of a blog post). You'll notice one of my photos is of an African-American woman who has albinoism. There is no way to discuss her attractiveness without bringing up race--is she beautiful because she is 'white'? The on-line discussion about the attractiveness of the Hensel twins (a pair of dicephalic conjoined twins) has, if not been exhausted, at least been exhausting. The first picture shown on here is of a prosthetic designed to be and marketed as 'sexy.' It avoids what is apparently called 'the uncanny valley'; that is, things which are close enough to looking real to sometimes 'trick' us but not close enough to really convince us are uncanny and make us uncomfortable, and the designers tried to avoid that when making this arm. Other designers strive for something verisimilitude instead, as you can see in other images. The point, then, is that whatever we decide about the moral worth of this question, in the end we cannot stop at the general principle but must then begin to untangle it on a specific level--race, uncanniness, privacy and individuality. These questions are not inseparable.

Which would be a perfect segue into the one problem I have with the feminist movement (Jon and I have discussed this), which is that there are so many other facets to identity that to focus on gender alone for your emancipation seems like a case of poor resource management. But that is getting off-topic and must be saved for another post. This one is way too long as is, and I need to go to bed.

Disabilities and Sexiness: A Post Promise

I'm in the midst of stressful applying. Occasionally I have taken brief forays into the Internet today, when I was feeling a momentary bout of ADHD, to find images which related to Aimee Mullins' question, "What is a sexy body?" Her context, of course, was prosthetics and disability, and so that was my challenge: find images which defied our usual conception of a 'sexy body,' as she put it, by qualifying without fitting into the usual conception of normativity or wholeness.

I can't write my thoughts on this tonight (time constraints). I'll leave you with a few questions, though, and then the pictures I found, and then I'll write up my analysis (for lack of a better word) when I have time.

Is beauty/sexiness a legitimate form of enpowerment? How are we defining sexiness? Are some disabled/differently-abled people still unsexy, and what of them? To what extent is the decision to measure acceptance along the lines of sexiness immoral?

And I'll even talk a little about the question, What is beauty?

Now, case study pictures (you'll notice that I didn't limit myself to subnumary limbs, but also included people with atypical physionomies or pigmentations):

What has 12 legs, 2 arms, and runs very fast?

Aimee Mullins.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html

Cait linked to a Ted Talk a day or so ago, and I ran into this one at the same time. I'm not for transhumanism in general, but I do like this technology.

I should maybe warn that there is some nudity.