2 posts tagged “de botton”
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton.
Predictable. You'd think that someone touted as a "pop philosopher" would be worldly yet literary enough to be a good companion on any of your travels, subtly inserting historical/philosophical anecdotes about the scenery, architecture and the culture: this is the path that Immanuel Kant took everyday at exactly the same time such that his neighbors set their clocks by his appearance or Spinoza used to grind lenses in this area of town.
To a certain extent, de Botton accomplishes this in each themed, two-pronged chapter in his The Art of Travel: we follow him on his adventures in some country X accompanied by some literary guide Y. For instance, in his chapter on The Country and the City, we learn of Wordsworth's philosophy of nature, which earned him cruel snickers in his day by the simplicity of his expression (e.g. When I see a cloud,/ I think out loud, / How lovely it is, / To see the sky like this), but whose fruits are now published in the grand old Norton Anthology. Or in discussing curiosity in traveling to a new place, we learn of the author's lack of it as well as how prolific Alexander von Humboldt was when visiting South America in 1799: Humboldt even measured the water temperature every two hours traveling from Spain across the Atlantic. On returning home, he published a 30-volume work called Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Indeed, Humboldt's first biography What May Be Accomplished In A Lifetime listed the areas of his eclectic curiosity:
- The knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants.
- The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants and minerals.
- The discovery of new forms of life.
- The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions.
- The acquaintance with new species of the human race - their manners, language and historical traces of their culture.
As natural as his prose was, and as penetrating as his insights were, de Botton didn't even mention Humboldt's Fifth, above: acquaintance with the people of other cultures. Instead, we get a Western Tourist's view of visiting another place-qua-place. There are uplifting chapters on beauty and the sublime where de Botton shows off his phenomenological skills, but there is no discussion on the similarly uplifting, world-expanding qualities of meeting other people and learning who they are, where they come from, their hopes and fears. This was probably calculated as most people don't travel to a place to meet the locals, but we miss all the dangerous, humourous and human aspects of cross-cultural exchange that are part and parcel of what is truly the art of travel.
So maybe having a gregarious, funny friend around would serve you better than a philosopher on your travels, and hell, in your life at home too.
Tranna. A sprawl of cultures, industries, of a tightly integrated series of smaller worlds. A blast radius of my personal mythology. And surreal because of its absent familiarity – this field is where I played softball, this floor is where I learned how to fight, this parking lot is where I lost my virginity, this room is where I first fell in love, and within these halls I learned how to think. The trajectories of all the people I knew then ended only because I left, waiting for me to plot their possibly circuitous route to their current heading. I’ve always approached their histories with a peculiar reverence, as if their choices were fixed in a snapshot of fate, as if fate and freedom were the same.
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In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton wrote that memory's fidelity is much like that of anticipation of a place, where you subtly edit yourself out, where a place is the only thing that we permit to stand out -- the ponderous falling of packing snow in the dark, a chill in the air, and the creaking of giant pines in the wind; or the sound of someone sweeping from inside an open window on one of Kitsilano's sloping streets, the view of the magestic north shore mountains squeezed between condo complexes on the beach and the trees of Stanley Park; or the image of a dog shitting in the middle of a quiet street in Manila, the heat billowing up from the asphalt, the surrounding lots exercises in decay and apathy. These impressions register with a sandblasted clarity unbeknownst to my recollections, of which most are dull or saturated.
But when you remember home, the clarity is simply not there as something to observe, or as a property of a mere snapshot in a series of actual happenings -- no, memories of home are much more laden. Not laden with more reality, mind you (since Kant taught us that existence is not a property) but laden with you. Or to phrase it in a more a modern garb, there is a certain qualia about it.
Let me explain. Let's call how the colour red seems to you the quale of redness. This is your quale and no one else's, meaning that someone's quale of redness is not the same as yours. The question that philosophers have been vehemently arguing about is whether qualia (generally) make the study of the mind inherently incomplete, and forever beyond the reach of science. One argument goes that qualia are the iconic cases of ineffability and irreducibility. As such, they are private, first-person experiences that cannot be investigated by science. Can you describe the colour red that will make a colourblind person understand what you mean? Another perspective argues that qualia depend on extrinsic, relational properties of experience; they are dispositional -- they depend on your attitudes, experiences and relationships with the world. If qualia are intrinsic, these philosophers say (Daniel Dennett being the most outspoken proponent), then beer is not an acquired taste for how could it be if you didn't like the first sip of beer but came to acquire "the taste of beer"? Clearly these are not arguments but mere rhetorical questions, but I am inclined to believe that qualia are dispositional, and I think remembering home is a good illustration of that.
Now, I'm not entirely certain that a hodgepodge of quales scales to a larger impression to make another quale (or is recursively defined), but for the moment let's assume that they do. Then, the memories of home, being dispositional, are laden with me, with who I am, being part of my history. They do seem that way, at least. And if we are supposedly subliminally editing memories of holidays or anticipations of them, then we are merely acknowledging that we have no trenchant dispositional relations to them, pace de Botton.
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"The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing'". ~Daniel J. Boorstin
And, of course, doing all of that with C. But that's a given.
