[NetBehaviour] Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life.
marc garrett
marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Sun Jul 19 13:20:54 CEST 2009
Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life.
by Doug Mann
Richard Linklater's 2002 film Waking Life is all about dreaming, and how
we can sometimes lucidly control our dreams. Yet it's also about some
broad philosophical issues, including one of the oldest philosophical
conundrums, the distinction between appearance and reality. When René
Descartes sat at his stove and meditated on the world and on whether an
evil demon controlled everything he perceived, he wondered, what's more
real, dreams or waking life? The diverse collection of characters in
Linklater's film ask the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a
literal sense, but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture
and for the human condition as a whole - in what ways do we fall asleep
even while awake? How can we lead a life that is more awake, more aware
of people and things, more authentic? The film provides the outlines of
three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate ways in which we
sleep too easily.
This issue is not new. It goes all the way back to Plato's Allegory of
the Cave: what if you were chained in a dimly-lit cave your whole life
where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the entrance to
your cave reflected on its back wall? Suddenly you're free and come into
the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as more real than your
cave world? And would you be able to convince those still enchained in
the cave that there was a greater world outside their dwelling? Would
you be able, in Plato's terms, to wake up to reality?
This whole idea of "waking up" is a key idea in a number of philosophies
explored in the film. In ancient Eastern philosophy - the Indian Vedanta
philosophy of the Upanishads, Taoism, and Buddhism - the key to waking
up is Enlightenment and a correct understanding of the relation of the
self to the external world. In existentialism, we have to wake up to our
personal freedom and our responsibility for creating our own selves and
lives. And in the situationism of Guy Debord and others, we have to wake
up from the sugar-coated spell of consumer society.
more...
http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm
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