The Rashomon Interpretation

Abandonment of Community

In 1950 there was a radical (I thought) movie produced,albeit I didn’t view it until the late 60’s when it had its radical effect on me.  It appeared as radical to me, because it challenged my idea that my worldview that I had developed was a correct view, or that all communication between people could be interpreted equally.  By equally, I mean, that each person will have the same interpretation of a singular event.  Thus we get the “eyewitness effect” of interpreting events.  Both prosecutors and defense attorneys understand, or should understand, that eyewitness accounts may not be totally accurate.  But they also understand that juries interpret eyewitness testimony as the most substantive interpretation of reality, or of what actually occurred.Therefore, to prosecute a case,eyewitness testimony can be really important.  I wrote in an earlier newsletter about my experience as a witness in a case where I had been robbed.  When I took the stand I defined what I had experienced, but I refused to connect my subjective interpretation of what had occurred to an objective interpretation of identifying the perpetrator.  I try to delineate my experience of being victimized to only my experience, because I had come to realize that the Rashomon effect limited my interpretation of my experience to the subjectivity of how I viewed what had occurred.  

So the problem we have that creates the conflict of reality is not that some deny some event as truth that others view as truth, but that the subjectiveness of experience past formulates our version of truth of experience present.  This creates an environment of varying versions of truth.

So if we translate this into the “truth” of the stolen election, and what some complain that those who believed that the election was stolen are denying objective facts are confusing the subjectivity of all objective interpretation. And to combat the “false” notion of the stolen election by claims of objective proofs that the election was not stolen, and by attempts to “debunk” the mythological subjective belief with objective facts is a losing game to anyone whose subjective experience has presented to them a different alternative of the objective facts.

The problem occurs because defining objective truth as always universal, denies communicative intentionality. The goals of communication are not necessarily to seek mutual understanding as much as to seek mutual conformity.  So if my goal in writing is to appeal to the reader's desires and fears to motivate the reader to behave as I wish them to behave, it may not follow that my motivation for desiring the reader to believe as I do, or to cooperate with me to achieve my goal necessarily mean that the reader necessarily agree with my goal (say reduce taxes for the rich) are an inherently worthy goal to the reader unless I offer an advantage to the reader (say it will allow him to have more for himself, i.e. “trickle down”).  So if the reader accepts my goal (having to pay less taxes myself) to get an advantage of having more material value for themself and that  matriculates in the fact that they do have more income (my goal did advance their wealth) but while they may have more things ( my goal gave them more “stuff” of wealth) but my goal (having more than they have) results in their new wealth of greater income and more stuff of wealth, but they consume more debt than they accumulate wealth, then obviously I should be refuted.  I have more, they have less, therefore they were deceived.  But since they do have higher incomes and more stuff of wealth they were not deceived if I now propose the reason is not that I have taken too much but that someone else has taken too much. So now I have to tell the reader (to maintain his allegiance) that some people are trying to redistribute their wealth (actually “some people'' are trying to redistribute my wealth) and those people (“the black welfare recipient” not them if they receive welfare, or the immigrant that crosses the border that I need to hire to increase my own wealth and deflate theirs) are creating their own disadvantages, then it is obvious the enemy (the fear I attempt to project is stealing elections in favor of those who are keeping them from feeling more wealthy.  The truth from another perspective could be that their debt that is being accumulated outweighs the accumulation of the stuff of wealth that is stealing the elections; but fear is a greater motivator than reality in formulating subjectivity.  All wars are fought because the enemy is perceived to threaten the lives of the subject more than the fear of not fighting the war.  The reason some may see a particular war as an “invalid” or “bad'' war, is when the projected fear seems substantively less threatening to not fight the war than to fight the war.  

Now if the  subjective view of my followers experience is that they have more income and more stuff of wealth and that the reason they don’t really have less turmoil in accumulating that wealth is because of the fears I have projected into them that someone else is stealing from them the promised wealth I offered them, and that is not I that is doing the stealing but those that I have made them fearful of.  Then those  fears lead them to believe it is being stolen not by me, who is gaining more wealth, but by those trying to gain more wealth then their  subjective experience of having higher income and more stuff of wealth that has not reduced their toil in pursuit of wealth to their advantage then fear of what they have  accumulated is being stolen from them,  cast subjective doubts that their wealth, and therefore their selves, are being replaced.  Now there is some objective basis for the notion of being replaced.  But the subjective notion of who is doing the replacing becomes the issue.

One  perspective may be  that some that have more wealth are attempting to replace my accumulation of wealth and thus I challenge their right to have more than I have.  Or it may be that my fear is directed at those who are also striving to accumulate more wealth.  Either way, the subjective interpretation is someone is stealing from them their own desire for more of the fruits.  

So I can walk over the brink and believe the theft by those who demand to have more are the threat and I may challenge their legitimacy to having more.  Or I may view the threat as those who are in competition with me as the prime threat because I accept the legitimacy of the right to have more and therefore the illegitimacy of the competition of those whom I am directly in competition with. 

Habermas proposes a multi-dimensional conception of reason that expresses itself in different forms of cognitive validity: not only in truth claims about the empirical world, but also in rightness claims about the kind of treatment we owe each other as persons, authenticity claims about the good life, technical-pragmatic claims about the means suitable to different goals, and so on. Thus, a type of validity claim counts as distinct from other types only if one can establish that its discursive justification involves features that distinguish it from other types of justification. 

The pragmatic analysis of argumentation in general thus becomes non-relatable. Habermas's discourse theory assumes that the specific type of validity claim one aims to justify—the cognitive goal or topic of argumentation—determines the specific argumentative practices appropriate for such justification.  To get at these presuppositions, one cannot simply describe argumentation as it empirically occurs; Habermas assumes one cannot fully articulate these normative presuppositions solely in terms of the logical properties of arguments. Rather, he distinguishes three aspects of argument-making practices: argument as product, as procedure, and as process, which he loosely aligns with the traditional perspectives on argument evaluation of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric.  

At the logical level, participants are concerned with arguments as products, that is, sets of reasons that support conclusions. But the problem we incur with logical arguments is that they incur a dialectical propensity of the opposing logic as illogical.  The German term Geltungsanspruch, that Habermas uses, does not have the narrow logical sense (truth-preserving argument forms), but rather connotes a richer social idea—that a claim (statement) merits the addressee's acceptance because it is justified or true in some sense, which can vary according to the sphere of validity and dialogical context. It often gets translated, simplistically, into English, as merely meaning an invalid argument.  From this we move into the wrongheaded idea of truth as established as an objectively valid logical determinant.  But logical arguments are valid or invalid only on the basis of the argument properly supporting the premise with its conclusion.  But to be valid as a “truth” as definitive objectively, it begins with a subjective premise.  So arguments about the conclusion always center falsely on the objective steps developed to support the conclusion.  But if one does not accept the subjectivity of the premise then arguments on conclusions make deaf arguments to those who have begun with differing premises and so they will never reach the same conclusions no matter the objectiveness of the argument that leads to the conclusion.  So to argue to the subject that he is wrong about the stolen election because the facts do not support his conclusion ignores that his original premise is subjectively different and so the facts you present to him cannot objectively support his premise. I have another substack column entitled Weird Thoughts and Logical Conclusions whose focus is to question commonly accepted premises and propose questions that might be asked to challenge those commonly accepted premises.

Now if we turn to Camus, he points out what he calls the absurdity of logic. Logic begins, according to Camus (and we are speaking primarily of early Camus, Nuptials and The Myth of Sisyphus), with asking broad questions about meaning—primarily the meaning of existence, of which Camus says has no answer, or that the answer to the question of meaning is that there is no answer.  Camus primarily talks about religion, but he applies it to other philosophical systems and economic systems, and he argues they all end up by offering hope as the visionary possibility to meaningless as the reason for existence.  Generally we tend to think hope is a good thing. The falseness of what Camus sees as the offerings of hope—whether it be of a religious afterlife, an economic paradise promised by communism or by Reaganomics, or any type of utopian future existence, are all offerings of false hope to supply meaning to the meaninglessness of existence. False because they offer no meaning to the momentary existence of the moment we are in, but promise a meaning is some future frame of time

But it is not all despair in Camus’ mind.  In fact, the false hope creates the despair and the conflicts of violence within society.  Granting that if life is meaningless, then life becomes meaningless and that despair leads to simply ending existence, or committing suicide.  Without meaning one can turn to just checking out of existence leaving one only the choice of not existing or of existing with the hope of some future escape valve.  But if hope leads to violence and conflict to support particular visions of the hoped for future paradise, whether on earth, or colonizing other planets, or by some form of eternal salvation in a god-created paradise makes life despairing and the choice is self-violence because of disbelief in any meaning then there is no actual option to acquitting the meaningless of existence.  

So Camus turns to Sisyphus, endlessly rolling the rock up the mountain that continually falls back upon him.  But instead of despairing of the endless meaningless of existence, Camus suggests Sisyphus has conquered the meaningless of existence by continually pushing the rock up the hill and by doing so, Sisyphus embraces the meaningless of existence by abandoning hope of succeeding against the rock forever falling upon him, and nevertheless does not despair but pursues the meaningless existence and ultimately finds satisfaction in the struggle against the rock.  Happiness, says Camus, is the goal of struggle, because only in the struggle to exist can one achieve a parity against false hope and suicide.  The struggle becomes the meaning, and the meaning is only in not giving up the struggle to exist. As we struggle to exist we embrace our unity by struggling together and while the individual ultimately does not survive, the community struggling together does give birth to new individuals to continue the struggle against the meaninglessness.  And in that, although he does not call it the meaning of existence, is the meaning for Camus, it is the reason to not to suicide and to embrace the happiness of having survived,  If we try to find meaning through hope in a future that provides meaning only when it is achieved (and he suggests it cannot be achieved) then the despair turns from suicide of the individual to the suicide of the community by setting the communities against each other by proclaiming only the victory of their own vision of what the future should be.  This violence destroys all versions of hope by pitting them against each other and creates the violence that leads back to the meaningless that any vision of future escape from the meaningless has offered by destroying through violence, the very professed hopes that brought about the hopes in the first place. 

Now if we turn momentarily to Sarte, while not directly attacking hope, he refutes its existence as reality by focusing on “being which is what it is not and is not what it is' ' (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and  Existentialism is a Humanism. Now people talk a lot about “bad faith” when speaking of Sarte, and explain bad faith as an opposition to our essential needs, primarily psychological, and acting against one’s own consciousness (his critique of Freund) but in actuality that is such a simplistic view of Sarte’s argument that it is actually what Sarte might term a bad faith interpretation.   What Sarte actually attempts to convey is that to existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith . There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind.  So that essentially for Sartre, “I believe”, is self-identifying oneself as something other than oneself is what he determines to be bad faith.  To identify oneself as a profession (his example, the waiter), or an ethnic or group, or of a political persuasion.  And far from being nihilistic or pessimistic Sartre says to separate ourselves from our identities we can move out of self-identifications towards becoming a part of social activity (in Sartre through communism).

Now at this point Camus says that Sartre has offered false hope, and that any escape valve, or alternative to meaningless is to relapse away from the embrace of the struggle that provides the only meaningful route to personal satisfaction.  Sartre perfectly (I think) describes the feelings of inter-subjectivity that exists on the impossibility of concrete relations with others.  And basically, Sartre’s argument restates Hegel’s argument of the master-slave relationship of all human interactions when individuals set themselves apart from the community.  But Hegel sees the solution against this relationship of selfhoods  by a rejoining of the interdependence between the community and the individual so that both are united in giving each the need to be individuals of equal importance within the community.  Hegel suggests the way out of despair is for no individual to stand above the community, for then the interdependence breaks down.  Only one master who enslaves another breaks down the interdependence that grants individuals strength in their individualism on an equal basis within the rather than the superior-inferior relationship.  That relationship cannot exist on a parity with the individual-community interconnecting relationship . One master demands everyone to be a self-master and everyone becomes both master and slave with the result being the rashomon interpretation of individuals seeking to be their own masters paralleled with their own enslavement.

And the problem becomes no one can ever master himself apart from the community and no matter how many slaves the master might possess, he is always afraid to lose his mastership and so the society as a community becomes a society of individuals pitted against each other to escape enslavement and become masters.