A Long, Cold Walk

          I once took a very long walk in Japan on one cold winter's evening. The clouds slumped low over the rooftops of the small towns tucked away in the tight little valleys ringed by slumbering, leafless trees. I was trying to go somewhere for the first time, by a train route I had never seen, which was far enough away from the cold, rainy Tokyo sprawl that little by little English characters that wayward Western travelers used as beacons of hope in a kanji world had all but disappeared.

          As the train cut through the crisp air the saggy clouds gradually revealed the a skyline of gnarled branches had completely replaced the semi-urban one most gaijin only see and come to think of as all Japan is. With a melodic hum, the train came to rest at a stop that the modern world had forgotten. A dim, unshielded bulb flickered on and off as the gray clouds gathered here and dispersed there, tricking the electronic eye into thinking the dying day had sighed its last breath. 

          The old wooden station sign's paint had long since started peeling away making the shallow shadow cast by the confused light bulb the only means to distinguish the nearly-ancient characters. Was it my stop or not? I couldn't tell, but the crackling speaker began to chirp out the happy little local melody that told me I had about 10 seconds to decide. 

          In Japan, it is usually easier to wait for the next train than it is to try to catch one back to a station once passed. So I stepped out. As the electric song of the train's engines sounded out the departure of the heated safety of civilization, the cold wind whipped my face red in a matter of seconds and sucked my warm breath up and away in a swirling mass destined to find its own way in the monochromatic sky. 

          "When you get to the station, use the west exit and turn left at the first road. Keep walking until you come to a Kōban (police box) and turn right. Walk for about five minutes and you'll be here," were the directions I had been given over the phone, confirmed, and them memorized several hours before, and I dutifully followed them. But instead of a warm home to enjoy a pleasant evening, beyond the kōban I found endless snow-covered fields ringed by slumbering, leafless trees.

The Distant Shores of Memory

          In a land on far-distant shores, in a place the locals call Nippon, lays a small rocky beach sprinkled with black sand dancing in salty pools. In the short distance where the endless horizons of the ocean kiss the ground, a tiny fishing village, untouched by the passing of time, sits just out of reach of the quickly marching masses of millions of Japanese men and woman in Tokyo, always moving to the future.

          Standing on the brine-covered beach, a time-weathered fisherman quietly hums an old festival tune to the soft purring of his long-time angling partner, Neiko, a gold and white striped tabby with fur matted by the pungent tailing of his last meal. With a flick of the wrist and a swish of the line, the old fisherman casts off the rough rope securing his small boat keel-skyward in the black sand. As Neiko jumps clear with a decidedly annoyed yowl, the man feels the dry wood of the hull in his hands and the planks smoothed by years of use, but deep in his heart the man knows that the boat, like himself, isn't quite ready for the fire-pit.

          The grinding of sand on wood temporarily drowns out the rhythmic cracking of the waves on the rocks as the man hauls the ship knee deep into the water warmed by the noon-day sun over the shallow bay. The deep scraping in turn gives way the slow lapping of water and wood, a sound of perfect harmony for those who go down to the sea.

          Through the foggy glass of memory, the man and his cat could see deep into his own past, watching his father and his father before him set sail on the fertile waters. He knew from the generational stories he heard from his mother’s lap, this was the way of his family, his people, and from a time long since forgotten, his countrymen as well. Despite the rapidly changing world around his tiny beach, far from the reach of millions of Tokyo men and women always marching to the future, Neiko, the old fisherman and his boat remembered the old ways from ages past.

Smoke and Water

Fading Memories by James Zike

Written June 2008 

         First watch… Always the first watch in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go and almost nothing to do. Well that’s a lie; there was a huge amount of work to do but not anything fun. At least the stark fluorescent lights help all the pasty night-checkers forget the nothingness of the ocean at night just outside every hatch and doorway. Such was my life on board the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.

          She was a fine ship back when the shipbuilders laid her keel, but forty odd years later, time and the tides had taken their toll on her. Rust hung over the haze gray hull like streamers around every vent-port and catwalk. Tendrils of corrosion slowly crept their way over her once impressive face, but that’s the way of these things, I suppose. One day she’s a proud and able icon of American strength and determination, the next a relic of ages overstaying their welcome.

          Of course, back in spring of 1999 no one could have even imagined that the passing of two other icons would keep the Hawk around. I certainly wouldn't have guessed it. In fact, I would have guaranteed the Hawk would not be cruising back to port, but I'd be going home with wet feet by night’s end. However, at mid-night, affectionately called “balls” by most sailors thanks to the “00:00” time entry on the deck log, I was still more concerned with playing paperboy.

Truth Until Relativity: Is Cultural Relativism Applicable Today?

Note to the reader: this paper was written in 2009 and is not a very philosophic review of Cultural Relativity. Nonetheless, I think it is interesting enough to revisit.

Philosopher: When is truth false?
Anthropologist: When the belief of truth is relative.

          The 19th century anthropological theory of Cultural Relativity has swayed a great deal of thought and research, despite its sweeping philosophical implications. The idea that truth is relative flies in the face of philosophical reason, but it still may provide a neutral viewpoint for anthropologists studying cultures that do not share common morals. As humanity enters the 21st century, the great debate between the two disciplines continues, and even after 200 years of deliberation, Cultural Relativism may have a valid place in academia today if restated in such a way to resolve its philosophical issues.

          In an article for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chris Swoyer states that Relativism is a group of theories that include a base notion that many aspects of truth-bearing statements are dependent concepts “relative to language, culture, or biological makeup” (Swoyer). Swoyer goes on to say culture may significantly alter the way a person perceives and interprets information.

Cause and Effect: Humean Doubts and Kantian Answers

          To understand David Hume's criticism of the idea that we can know, in a robust and philosophical way, that there is a connection between what we call causes and effects, we must first examine how he thought our minds related to the world. Unlike the Rationalists that came before him, Hume was skeptical that reason and intuition were all that we needed for knowledge. For Hume, the first contact that we have with any object (if it exists at all) is the appearance the object has on our senses, so that the first thing that we are aware of is an impression that we have.¹ Humean impressions are not simply limited to our sensual perceptions of the potential objects around us, but are also of every possible thing that we might experience, including our own internal mental processes, like emotion-states and first-order desires. Impressions are not just what we see, feel, taste, etc., but how we feel, what we want, and what motivates us. In short, impressions are the way that we first experience everything.

          From those impressions, content is directly added into the mind and forms ideas that share the same content. Hume thought this was a matter of common sense, anyone could see that while reflecting upon the painful experience of touching a burning hot object, we almost feel the same pain, but with less force than if we were actually touching something hot.² To Hume, the impression had a strength to it that could never be matched by a mere idea, but impressions only differed from ideas in strength; the content was copied directly into the idea exactly as it was in the impression.³

          Once a series of impressions has formed a series of ideas, the imagination tends to form perceived connections between the ideas, and those connections can be evaluated according to any number of relationships they bear to each other.⁴ The comparative work is not a function of perception, but of imagination, and as such, it cannot involve working with impressions, but only with ideas. Of all possible relations, Hume thought that they fell into seven broad groups: resemblance, identity, space and time, quantity, quality, contrariety, and cause and effect.⁵ From the comparison of ideas, the imagination then sorts the ideas in a way that allows us to make sense of the impressions we receive.

The Breath of the Stoic God

     To readers from Christianized cultures, the claim that the divine is a physical being which directly, causally interacts with the matter of the world can seem odd. Church traditions are drawn from Jewish beliefs, mixed with Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the divine being immaterial. It might cause those familiar with that line of thought to see the Stoic conceptions as weaker than the self-existing, eternal “supremely good being, separate from and independent of the world, all-powerful, all-knowing, … creator of the universe,” which became the monotheistic God.¹ However, the pantheistic conception of the Stoic God aligns with the Stoic's strict materialism, completely avoiding the host of issues packed into supernatural concepts, and is strengthened by the appeal that God is a part of the physical processes of the universe—a direct link in the causal chain of events.

     One would be remiss to not point out that the philosophic reason for seeking the truth behind the concept of the divine was different in the ancient world. Modern theists attempt to show that their concept of God is a necessary part of the world through a series of arguments meant to demonstrate and justify their conclusion. This was not the goal of ancient religious philosophers. Each school sought its own first principle, the explanatory force that caused the empirically observable world around them (with at least one exception of the Epicureans, who did not associate the first principle with the divine). They did not start with a religious book and then try to justify that position, but rather the trend was to start from the functioning world around them and ask the question, “what sort of thing could have caused this world?”

     While this decidedly teleological approach is similar to William Paley's watch, it does not mean to show that the universe is, or is like a purpose-built machine, constructed one cog or gear at a time by a great watchmaker.² The Stoics did not presuppose a conception of the divine as modern design arguments tend to do, but started with the four elements, a common belief in all schools of philosophy at the time, and sought to show how the world that actually is could become organized using them. Diogenes Laertius traced out the process where the two principles in the universe, the active and the passive, combined in a “seminal fluid” in the form of “water via air” in a way that reorganized matter into the four elements, which he called the “spermatic principle of the cosmos”.³ Laertius uses this principle along with his concept of God, Zeus, mind and fate being the same, part of the active principle, to explain how the world becomes organized, like a biological process in which the active changes the passive into a new form like itself, which he calls “an animal, rational and alive and intelligent … in the sense that it is a substance which is alive and capable of sense-perception”.⁴

The Heart of Men and the Direction of God

“The PREPARATIONS of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord. … The Lord had made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. ... A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.”¹

There may be no more enduring philosophic problem than that of human free will. We seem to think that we are ultimately morally responsible for what we do, and yet by means of excuse we can find reasons where one might not be responsible. Some of those reasons seem to be so strong that they are either taken as Gospel or appear to be metaphysical facts of the universe.

It might be a fools errand to try to fix a date to the beginning of the free will debate, but surely the threads of the debate can be found in ancient texts, both religious and philosophic. For instance, Plato held that the will of a person comes from the rational portion of the three-part soul, and is properly used to keep base desires in check.² Essentially, in this view, as long as reason governed desires, a person was acting freely.

Forgetting The Dead

(A note to the reader: this paper was written from sources that were made available in class, and as such, not all of the sources are publicly accessible, and I did not have full information to construct a proper bibliography.  Where possible, I've tried to include links to comparable sources.)

fallen autumn leaves 
memories of days that passed 
wait for winter snow 
(Lindsay Zike, personal collection, 2013)

While no event at any point in history is so fully documented as to know every possible fact, the twentieth century introduced several key innovations that changed the way people interact with memory and history. Photo albums, rolls of film, video collections, and scrapbooks around the world hold a greater number of clues to personal and collective memories than at any previous age. Using those kinds of primary sources, a group of University of Illinois Historians and students spent a year “explor[ing] 'the fate of the twentieth century'” by casting a wide-net that pulled in the perspective of the famous victors and the defeated poor with no special regard for race or political associations, which culminated in Imagining the Twentieth Century, a “frankly unauthoritative history” (Charles C. Stewart and Peter Fritzsche, pg. viii). Despite the broad scope of the project, the photographs and essays that dug deep into likely forgotten collective memories still missed several major events.