paul mccord writes here

I am going to post a series of reactions to monologues and short dialogues from Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, along with a few comments of my own. I figure the subject matter is perfect for this little community, given its defined purpose. If you like the quoted material from these posts, perhaps you should consider purchasing the film.

This is the first of many posts on this subject. You can see others' comments and post your own at the philosophymuse livejournal community.

The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete, like you and me talking, making decisions, doing things and taking the consequences.

It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting; nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference first of all in material terms, it makes a difference to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.

This first monologue from the film sits well with a revelation I had on Thanksgiving 2002: "I don't know my purpose in life and you don't know yours; no one does. The only guarantee that we have is that we are all intended to live different lives; each and every person's purpose is as different from mine as it is from yours. That is the foundation of my philosophy." This is simplified further in a previous statement I had made in one of my earliest college writing assignments: "the sole purpose of life is to just go with the flow. Whatever happens should happen naturally, and it cannot happen by any other method." That is, the purpose of life is simply to live.

To put it another way, I don't objectively believe in obligation -- to myself, you, my family, any god, or anything else in this world -- because that would require concrete understanding of my purpose or the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I can't even logically prove that this world exists outside of my own mind. All I know for certain, by virtue of my own consciousness, is that I exist. My only purpose, therefore, is to live the life and experience the moments I am granted. Likewise, the only thing I must do, at some point, is die. It's the only necessary action any life requires.

Maybe some other science or philosophy defines life in such a way as to justify more rigid beliefs about purpose and meaning, and therefore obligation and responsibility. But as I see the world, those things are only subjective abstracts that each individual, conscious mind can determine for itself. (That is, of course I feel obligated to some extent to serve the interests of myself and loved ones, but not because I think it's necessary (I don't), but because I feel like it's the correct way of thinking for me.)