Lost: Philosophers

I'm still not exactly sure what the writers are doing with the philosopher references in the names of some of the characters. I'm not sure how much of a connection to draw between the characters' actions and attitudes and the main views of their philosopher namesakes. I keep looking for some deeper meaning, some unambiguous connection between the philosopher's views and the basic, stable characters of their namesakes, but I seem to come up empty. The emptiness most likely stems from the fact that since I don't see any explicit connections, I lose interest in looking for implicit ones. Too much work for this lazy guy. Nonetheless...

Desmond David Hume - Philosopher namesake: David Hume
John Locke - Philosopher namesake: John Locke
Rousseau - Philosopher namesake: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Both Hume and Locke are two of the three philosophers called the British Empiricists. (George Berkeley is the third.) The label "empiricist" signifies their epistemological views - their ideas about where our knowledge about things comes from and how that knowledge is justified. Locke is also well known for his views on government (supposedly his views had quite an effect on some of our Founding Fathers), but I will set that aside for now. Hume and Locke held that our ideas of things (specifically, what they called "matters of fact," which encompass things like concrete objects and events) comes from our sense experience. Hume in particular held that unless an idea we have can be traced back to some sense experience, our knowledge of it cannot be justified, although we can (and do) still act upon that idea or have that idea play a valuable role in our lives. For instance, Hume thought that the idea of causation (one thing causing another thing to do something) included the idea of a necessary connection between the cause and effect, but concluded that all we actually experience is a constant conjunction between the cause and effect. That is, we never actually experience that the cause and effect necessarily go together (which implies that they will on every occasion in the future), only that they have occurred together in the past. So, our idea of causation (insofar as it includes necessary connection) cannot be philosophically justified; yet, our belief that things cause other things to happen (and that the future will be like the past) is very useful and plays a pragmatic role in our lives. Locke was the one who talked about our mind being a blank slate on which experience writes; all the knowledge, beliefs, and ideas that end up in our minds comes from experience. (The Latin for Locke's "blank slate" is tabula rasa, which is the title of the first episode of Lost after the pilot episode. This suggests that all of the characters are starting with a clean slate from the viewer's perspective; as the show progresses, we learn more and more about them from their experiences.)

Neither (the Lost characters) Locke nor Desmond seem to be very good empiricists in a strict sense (which is probably not what the writers are going for anyway), especially with Locke's initial faith in the island and belief in all things mysterious and "metaphysical" (beyond the physical, beyond sense experience). But there are pockets of behavior that could be pointed to in defense of the philosopher-character connection. (This in itself isn't a very interesting hypothesis, since it could be said of anyone that in some particular instance they were acting like an empiricist.) For example, the interchange between Locke and Desmond in the Swan hatch while the timer was counting down was quite interesting. Both of them saw something, both had experiences that were informing them of the reality of what was going on in the hatch. Locke saw the Pearl orientation film, believed what Dr. Candle said in the film, and concluded that the Swan was, in fact, one big experiment. He was through with faith in the hatch. He wanted to see concrete proof (which he got, but which wasn't what he expected). Desmond also experienced something in the hatch - that there was, in fact, something to pushing that silly little button. But without the proof of experience, Locke was not willing to believe him. It wasn't until all things metal were flying through the air at the electromagnetic core that Locke finally acquiesced with his "I was wrong."

Rousseau, on the other hand, seems more explicitly connected with her philosopher namesake. The most well known position taken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was that human beings are naturally good; they are "noble savages" whose goodness is marred by civilization, or, as he puts it, by the barnacles of society. The character Rousseau seems to fit the savage part well, and she appears to be pretty noble besides. She has been alone on the island for so long that she has broken the shackles of civilization and chiseled off the barnacles of society.

Interestingly, the philosopher Rousseau didn't like philosopher Locke's view on human nature. One of Locke's theses was that humans are not naturally good, they cannot coexist with one another in complete peace and security without rules and laws to keep them in check. This view of human nature led him to his views on the origin of government. Although Locke didn't think that the laws had to be backed by a civil government for them to be legitimate (as Thomas Hobbes thought), they still needed to be in place because people would inevitably get into fights. I'm not sure, however, that these views on human nature have much to do with the Lost characters' attitudes on the issue.

Lost: 5/26 Podcast

Some interesting notes from the latest podcast by producers/writers/creators Cuse and Lindeloff:

1. There will be more character development/archaeology in Season Three than there will be exploration of the show's mythology.
   
2. Nonetheless, we will get to see the black smoke monster again! Sweet. (They say, cryptically as is their style, that "maybe we've seen it again already," presumably in the season finale. Jerks. I'm not going back through the episode to find it.)
   
3. The episode schedule for Season Three will be very different. They didn't like the reruns any more than the fans did - they would rather the show be aired in big chunks. So, from the season opener in late September there will be six straight weeks of new episodes, with a mini-cliffhanger at the end of the chunk. Then there will be a break (will they show reruns during the break? I'm not sure) until January or February, when they will show the remaining episodes of the season in an uninterrupted chunk. The network is what has the say-so in how the show gets aired, but Cuse/Lindeloff have managed to convince them to do it this way. We'll see how it goes.
   
4. People wonder how much of the show they have already thought out when they write an episode. One of the interesting, and to me consoling, things they mentioned is that they don't introduce new lines of development into the show unless they already have a resolution to it worked out. So, yes, they do know what they're doing. But I'm sure the details get tweaked quite a bit in the process of actually putting on film what they've got worked out in their heads.
   

Lost: Season Finale

What a well done finale! Although we would like to have full resolution to every can the writers/producers have opened, we can't get it all at once. We shouldn't want it all at once. We should rest assured that there is a resolution in the mind of the creators of the show, enjoy what clarifications and new mysteries crop up, and take satisfaction (if there is any to be had) in how the lines are developed. That's part of the fun of the show - speculate based on available information and hope that our hypotheses prove to be correct.

Henry Gale and the Others
I'm sure there are those out there who think HG is "him," but it just seems too soon for that conclusion. Especially since the creators have established a knack for leading the viewers down one path only to show that another path is the right one. HG is definitely one of the leaders, though. He wasn't lying when while a prisoner in the Swan he said that Mr. Friendly is a nobody. What else was he not lying about? That no one could see the island, including God himself? (Hyperbole, to be sure, but one that makes a point.) He looked none too happy when the deafening sound and the white sky thing happened after Desmond shut the system down, like he knew what that meant. When that happened, the Portuguese-speaking people in the snow station had been alerted, telling Penny Widmore "I think we found it." Found what? If the 'it' is the island, then maybe HG was right about the island being hidden, in this case presumably by the naturally occurring electromagnetism of that part of the island (geological anomaly, as Kelvin called it) being harnessed at the Swan, and Desmond's shutting down the system made the island visible for a while, if not indefinitely.

We are getting more and more information on the Others, but at the same time we are getting more and more mystery. But that's a good thing! The dock where they brought Hurley, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer was called Pala Ferry. In the Pearl orientation film, Pala Ferry was mentioned as the place where the people in the hatch needed to go in order to get to the barracks after their day of tedious note-taking. Will we get to see where the Others' "home" is next season?

Hurley: "What about my friends?"
Henry: "They're going home with us."

And we still need to find out what in the world they were doing with Walt.

Henry: "We got more than we bargained for when Walt decided to join us."

The Swan
Of course I, like Locke, was convinced that the Swan was the experiment (I'd been holding to that for quite a while) and the Pearl was the real deal. And, like Locke, I must admit, "I was wrong." That big pile of notebooks in tubes was fantastic! All that work coughed up on some hillside. It looked like the notebooks hadn't even been picked through by the Dharma folks - which suggests to me that they have their eyes on the hatches elsewhere (other than the Pearl station). At the very least, the stuff in the notebooks wasn't important enough to the researchers for them to keep. The Swan was the real deal.

What happened to the Swan - and Desmond, Eko, and Locke along with it? Although the hatch door ended up miles away on the beach, I doubt that it was destroyed. Why do I doubt it? Because I don't think the creators are ready to kill off those three quite yet. (Cuse and Lindeloff hint at this in their 5/26 podcast.) There is still a lot we don't know about them, how Locke got into the wheelchair, for one, and it seems that there is still more work for them to do in the show. I have a feeling we'll be seeing more of them in Season Three. (And Charlie will likely lose face again with his newly reunited woman when everyone finds out that something really did happen at the hatch. Why did he say that nothing happened??)

Thanks to Desmond's legwork and Eko's insistence on taking the Pearl computer records with him, we know, pretty much, why the plane crashed. We know who was writing stuff on the blast door and how they did it (faking the countdown, detergent mixture). Kelvin and the guy before him were both writing on it, and given that there seemed to be three different additions to the blast door map, I suspect Desmond was adding stuff, too. We know why Desmond took off when he thought the computer was busted and the ticker would go to the hieroglyphics - no dodging kitchenware for that Scot again!

The Snowglobe comment
While drunk on the beach after Jack et al. found him in his boat, Desmond mentioned that it was as if they were trapped in a snowglobe. One of the sillier suggestions is that this is somehow connected to the two guys in the Arctic (or Antarctic) station and that they are actually on some other part of the island. Hogwash (though I might be proved wrong!). Desmond's point was that no matter how well he knew how to sail his boat, no matter that he set his course for exactly the opposite that brought him to the island, he kept showing up at the stinkin' island. I might be having a bottle or two of that Dharma whiskey if that kept happening to me, too.

Character connections
- Kelvin and Sayid met once before during the Gulf War.
- Kate's dad was Kelvin's CO.
- Desmond got his boat from Libby. Too bad Desmond and Libby never met on the island.
- Libby's husband had died when she and Desmond met. Was this before or after her stint in the mental hospital? This was the same mental hospital that Locke's mom was in.

The Four-toed Foot
I'm with Sayid on this one: "I don't know which is more disturbing - that it is the foot of a big statue or that it has only four toes" (r something close to that). What the heck? One thing that Cuse and Lindeloff mention in the 5/26 podcast is that the foot is part of the "archaeology" of the show. The archaeological digs into the characters' pasts has been central to the show. What we saw of them on Day 1 of their crash was only the most recent tip of a history that was buried in the past; as we uncover more and more about the characters, as we delve into that history, we learn more about who they are and their connections with other characters. Sometimes this even helps to explain their actions on the island. Similarly, the creators stuck the foot there to remind us that there is more to the history of the island than the Dharma Initiative. The DI has only been there for a short while - since the late '70s. But the island has a longer history, one that Cuse/Lindeloff say we will be finding more about.

What I Learned At Work This Week

1. That Dasani brand bottled water is regular tap water from Cobb county (Atlanta) that's been purified with minerals added.

2. That guys have train horns installed in their cars and drive around scaring people.





3. That there is such a thing as fainting goats - and they even have their own international association.

Lost: Musings

1. I'm still intrigued by this good-bad dichotomy employed by the Others. The Others had a list of nine of the Tailies who were dragged off within twelve days of crashing on the island; according to the infiltrator of that group (who A-L took care of), only the "good people" were on the list. Fake Henry exclaims that he isn't a bad person when faced with the prospect of being shot in the head by Sayid. He says Locke is one of the good ones. He mentions that They once thought that A-L could be reformed (from a bad person to a good person, presumably). And now we have another list given to Michael - a list of Losties that the Others want. Are they the "good" ones or the "bad" ones? Both? Assuming that the good-bad criteria is based on what they did off the island, if it's a list of "bad" ones, Hurley seems to be the odd man out in that list - maybe Jack is, too. We know that Sawyer and Kate were criminals, but what did Hurley and Jack do? But then, what sense does it make for the criteria to be based on off-island activities - I mean, how would the Others know about their lives? And if they did, why crash them on an island and drag them off somewhere? But it really doesn't make sense to base the criteria on on-island activities, either, since they hardly had time to do very many "bad" things (except for Sawyer, who started off right away). 'Good' and 'bad' still need the quotes, because we don't know what criteria is being used. I've been assuming that it is a moral criteria - good and bad in a moral or ethical sense, but this need not be the standard employed by Them.
   
2. So, Michael wasn't exactly brainwashed, he's just hyper-driven by his desire to get Walt back. I thought it was really interesting what Ms. Klugh said: Why does Michael want to get Walt back so badly when he knows so little about his son? Perhaps that's precisely why he wants him back - there's a lot of lost time between them (pun intended).
   
3. During their brief reunion, Walt mentioned that They were pretending, They are not who They say They are. This fits nicely with the dingy costumes, fake beard, and theatrical glue found in the medical hatch and that we've already seen Mr. Friendly niced up and beardless. What sort of trap is the place where they took Michael (if it is a trap)? Why stage such an elaborate village? Is that a real hatch that they are supposedly guarding?
   
4. But fear not the trap - Sayid is on it, baby! What an awesome character. "I think Michael's been comprimised." Dang right. "We'll continue to let him think that he's in control, so we can create an advantage." Man, can't wait to see what he brings tomorrow night.
5. Speaking of tomorrow night, there was a series of some short and fast scenes from the finale. Of course, I slow-motioned through them. Some of the highlights: (a) A bunch of the Losties are on the beach, hands raised and waving as if signalling something or someone on the water. (Perhaps there is someone on the small boat we saw at the end of the last episode?) (b) A shot of Ecko trying to run under or stop the closing blast door. (Why is it closing this time? Another airplane drop?) (c) A shot from under Jack, who is holding a pistol. (Reminded me of the pit that A-L dug.) (d) Someone with a Dharma key inserted into a key hold and turning the key. (e) Desmond!! (Yep, and it looks like he might be armed, but I couldn't be certain.) (f) Kate falling backwards. (It looks like she is fainting or something. Getting shot, maybe?) (g) Locke raises what looks like Ecko's Jesus stick to smash the Swan computer; Ecko's hand stops the stick. (Last we saw, Locke took off down the beach/into the jungle during the funeral. Where'd he go? What's he doing back?)
6. And, finally, I got sucked in. I'm reading the fake fiction (HA! what a concept) book, Bad Twin, the manuscript of which Sawyer was reading a few episodes back on the show. Coming full circle to my first point above, it's mostly about what makes someone good or bad and how difficult it can be to make a judgement on this since we do so according to many different aspects of a person. Mostly it gets applied to behavior, but behavior can take different forms. Someone might be "bad" because they break the law, but they might be "good" in that they treat others with generosity and kindness. Another person might be "bad" because they are condescending to their parents but "good" because they are honorable and trustworthy. This is not to say that some aspects could be taken as more important and thus override others, but it is to say that judging someone as "good" or "bad" is not always, and I would go so far as to say hardly ever, straightforward. I wonder what aspects are within the scope of the Others' standard of moral judgment.
   

Blue Collar Philosopher

This summer I'll be helping a guy who is a dealer for this company that installs decorative concrete products. I helped him do a commercial floor this past Friday and Saturday. This boy ain't used to getting up at 6 a.m. and this boy's joints ain't used to 10-hour days of stooping and bending, but my body will adjust. Hopefully. And it's nice that I'm learning something that could be potentially useful one day, even if it doesn't actually get put into practice. Once I get trained on the products and materials, he'll let me loose by myself when he can't go. So, at least I'll have some experience doing it on my own.

Some of the immigration brouhaha going on touches on the idea that Hispanics will work harder than whites and blacks in this country. I don't doubt it if the stories this guy would tell me of the lazy white people he's had working for him are any indication of a general trend. Apparently, he's more used to his workers standing around waiting to be told what to do than their seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Lack of initiative, as he put it. Well, that's not how I operate, and I imagine he appreciated it.

Beautiful Ralph

There's so much that I don't mention in these posts, so while I'm thinking about it...

I was walking to church in the rain the other Sunday when, fortuitously, I looked down to see a sopping wet wrist sweatband. But this was no ordinary sweatband. This sky blue beauty had a picture of Ralph Wiggum picking his nose on it.


I couldn't believe it. I had to have it. But I couldn't very well take it into church with me - I mean, where would I put it? Some punk kid (or punk 30-something) might snatch it out from under my chair. Should I chance it? Will it be here when church is over? I decided to gamble and leave it on the sidewalk. Wouldn't you know it - it was still there after church. So, what did I do? Picked it up, of course. Set it out to dry. Stuck it in the washing machine on cold. And VOILA! My very own Simpsons sweatband.

Yes, I've worn it. Yes, it was in public. No, I don't feel bad that someone might have lost it.

Apostrophe Catastrophe

I've got to wonder. I'm standing in the checkout line at a grocery store and look up to see the following sign, looming large above the wall of front windows in all its glorious permanence:

Thank's Ya'll

Do people know what an apostrophe is for anymore? Do people think about what they're doing when they decide to make a big, permanent, expensive sign to put in their place of business? Do people care? I know what the sign is supposed to mean, so the semantics of the phrase is not in question. It's the syntax that confuses the heck out of me. I can understand misspelling "y'all" and putting the apostrophe in the wrong spot - this is one of the very few times (the only time?) that the apostrophe does not go right before the double l. Chalk the mistake up to familiarity. No problem.

But "Thank's"?? Who thought that would be a good idea? Is the thanks that's supposed to go out somehow being personified? Is it something that now possesses "ya'll"? Who is this Thanks and why does he get to have the second person plural possessive contraction? Who was the genius that, having received the sign, went ahead and put it up there? Maybe I should have asked the manager about it. I'm genuinely curious how something like this happens. How it is allowed to happen. The number of hands that this creation had to pass through in order to get up on that wall, and yet there it is.

I expect this kind of oversight, laziness, or whatever in a spam or hoax email, but in a respectable business? Unbelievable.

Lost: Men of Faith

[Spoilers below]

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

There were a number of significant things happening in this week's episode, but the one that stood out to me the most was the issue of faith (and losing faith) in the interaction between Locke and Ecko. Up until fake Henry told Locke that the button didn't do anything, Locke had complete faith in pushing the button, that it was accomplishing something grand and significant, even though he didn't know quite what the purpose was. The important thing is that it was important to do; Jack's suggestion that it was just some big experiment didn't phase him. His experience of a miraculous recovery initiated his faith in whatever else the island would bring ("The island changed me, it made me whole"). He felt led by the island (e.g., in dreams). He embraced the weird and unexplainable things going on on the island (such as the black smoke), even against Jack's skeptical objections. But now he has become Jack in his skepticism, and Ecko is there to rekindle his faith.

In Season 1 when Locke and Boone were trying to get the hatch door open, Locke shows faith in the island against Boone's skepticism.

"This is useless. It's a dead end, you can't get in."
"Don't tell me what I can't do. We didn't find this by accident. We were supposed to find this."
"If we're supposed to open it, then why haven't we opened it yet?"
"The island will send us a sign. All that's happening now is that our faith is being tested, our committment. But we will open it. The island will show us how."

The sign ended up being a vision/dream of a plane crashing on the island and a bloody Boone. A plane did crash (carrying Ecko's brother) and Boone ends up bloody...and dead.

In the last episode of Season 1 when they got the dynamite from the ship and the black smoke monster tried to pull Locke down a hole, Locke's belief that he is being tested by the island comes back to the fore in a conversation with Jack.

"I believe that I was being tested. I think that's why you and I don't see eye to eye sometimes, Jack, because you're a man of science."
"Yeah, and what does that make you?"
"Me? Well, I'm a man of faith. Do you really think all of this is an accident? Do you think we crashed in this place by coincidence? In this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason."
"And who brought us here, John?"
"The island. This is no ordinary place. The island chose you, too, Jack. It's destiny."
"Did you talk with Boone about destiny, John?"
"Boone was the sacrifice that the island demanded. What happened with him in that plane was part of a chain of events that led us here, that led us down the path, that led you and me to this day, to right now."
"And where does that path end, John?"
"The path ends at the hatch. All of it happens so that we can open the hatch."
"I don't believe in destiny."
"Yes, you do. You just don't know it yet."

For Locke, everything has led up to the hatch. Yet, fake Henry introduces doubt in the grand purpose of their being in the hatch, of pushing the button. Locke begins to lose his faith in what they are doing, in a sense of purpose and meaning to his and their actions. When people call in "your hatch" in addressing him, he corrects them: "It's not my hatch."

Enter Ecko. He, like Locke, has dreams that he feels led by. Building the church is due to a dream. He dreams that he must help Locke rekindle his faith: both dead AL and dead Yemi say he must help Locke. Interestingly, Yemi also tells Ecko that "the work being done in this hatch is of great importance and it is in danger." This would lead one to think that it's not just one big experiment after all but that it has a real purpose. Yet when they get to the plane and find The Pearl station, they see that what is going on in The Swan is an experiment after all. There is no grand purpose or meaning behind it. Just at the time when Locke's faith seems to come back, when he excitedly asks Ecko if he can do the honors of opening the new-found hatch door, this breaks him.

There is an interesting reversal of roles between Locke and Ecko.

1. In their hatch conversation when Ecko mentions Boone, Locke repeats his phrase, "The sacrifice demanded by the island" as if it no longer had the meaning attached to it when he first uttered it, as if it is something long ago that he used to believe but no longer does. He says it without feeling, without life. Before Ecko got on the Oceanic flight, he pretended to be a priest, repeating phrases in the confessional that a priest is supposed to say. He said them without feeling, without meaning. But now, on the island, they mean something to him. He once was not a man of faith; now he is.
   
2. In the conversation where he mentions Boone, Ecko is reviewing a number of events that, taken together, point to some meaning beyond mere coincidence. That a plane from Nigeria ended up on an island in the South Pacific, that the plane contained his brother, that Ecko and Locke were on the same flight that crashed on that same island, that Ecko and Locke are now together in that hatch. Ecko's beliefs reflect what Locke used to believe: "We are being tested. The reason to do it, push the button, is not because we were told to do so in a film. We do it because we believe we are meant to." Locke, however, seems to have lost his faith in the island. "It's a joke, rats in a maze...without the cheese." "I was never meant to do anything! Every single second of my pathetic little life is as useless as that button.... It's nothing. It's meaningless. And who are you to tell me that it's not?" The path to the hatch is truly, as Boone said, a dead end for Locke.
   

What strikes me as interesting about Ecko's faith in what they are doing is that it seems stronger even after the realization that pushing the button has no purpose. At least, it does not have the purpose that they were led to believe (by Desmond) that it had. After viewing the orientation film, Ecko says to John: "I believe that the work you have been doing [i.e., pushing the button] is more important than ever." This just seems incredible. Locke had a faith in the unknown and thought that all would be revealed in the hatch. Now that this isn't the case, now that the veil has been pulled back to reveal nothing but a human experiment, now that the unknown is known to be nothing, Locke crumbles.

But, for some reason, Ecko is all the more excited. "We do it because we believe we are meant to." Like Locke asks Ecko on the way to the plane, I want to ask him, "Are you seeing something I'm not?" What is Ecko's faith in? Faith in the power of a sense of purpose, even when that purpose is not efficacious, when it is ineffectual? Ecko seems to be saying that the sense of purpose is even more important when the actions performed don't really accomplish anything - at least not what they are primarily meant to accomplish. I suspect Ecko's point is that some things are accomplished by our actions and our sense of purpose in those actions other than what we think the actions are supposed to accomplish. Sometimes our actions accomplish things we do not expect or are not looking for, things that are unknown to us. Ecko seems to be getting Locke to look even further beyond where his sights were once set. What happens when our sense of purpose and meaning leaves us? We cease to live. "Every single second of my pathetic little life is as useless as that button." We no longer care about living. Perhaps that is the danger that Yemi warned Ecko about - not an immediate danger, like the world will blow up if the button isn't pushed, but a less tangible but more deep-seated danger of losing hope.

On some level, however, this conclusion seems to me too froo-froo and rather objectionable. Is faith in God simply an illusion of meaning and purpose that we impose upon an otherwise meaningless existence, as Camus claims? Is religion, as a defender of faith, really just the opiate of the masses, something to keep us happy in an otherwise unhappy existence, as Freud claimed? Is having a sense of purpose, no matter what that purpose is, what is ultimately important? I would have to say No to all of these questions. And the curious thing is that I would expect Ecko to give the same response. Unlike Locke, who has/had faith in the island, Ecko is always talking about God; he quotes Scripture; he carves it on his whoop stick. His faith orientation (how cheesy! but the phrase works) is very different from that of Locke. Yet he seems, in his belief about the importance of pushing the button, to be going further down the unorthodox path than Locke did. Is this new revelation in The Pearl station fitting in to Ecko's master plan? He's building a church for a reason, or so I assume. (But given that he has a penchant for doing things without knowing their consequences or ultimate goal, that probably is the wrong assumption to make.) I wonder what Ecko's got up his clerical sleeve here.

Lord and Servant: Intro, Chapter 1

Having sat on Michael Horton's Lord and Servant for too long now, I'm going back to refresh my every-failing memory on what he's said for the first 150 pages. I figured I might as well write it down somewhere, and where better than on a blog? Expect future installments.

Introduction

Lord and Servant is the second in my three-volume project whose principal burden is to take up some critical questions in contemporary systematic theology with the concrete covenantal structure of the Creator-creature relationship serving as a hermeneutical guide. (vii)

As I have argued in the introductory volume (Covenant and Eschatology), drama is the genre best suited to such a project and analogy is the appropriate epistemological corollary. Throughout this book, I will work out these assumptions. My goal in this project, stretched over three volumes, is to appeal to Scripture as a script for the divine drama and to take up crucial topics and debates in contemporary theology with covenant and eschatology as hermeneutical guides. (xiii)

In Covenant and Eschatology, Horton argued for a way of approaching contemporary theological and philosophical issues, topics, and debates that has a covenantal framework as its locus. Two of the principal assumptions of this framework, as he mentions above, are understanding God and his work in history in terms of drama and analogy. Among the consequences of his dramatic focus is a focus upon the acts of the characters and not just on the script/text that is acted out. Part of his reason for this is to counter the hyper-textual emphasis of postmodern philosophy and theology - the emphasis on meta-narratives that marginalize, on understanding one's relation to anything as an interaction of reader and text, on the indeterminacy of interpretation, on the primacy of visual metaphors (e.g., seeing as knowing). Drama, in contrast, brings in to play much more than just visual and textual elements (although those remain): personal relationship/interaction, emphasis on acts/actions, temporal/historical flow as context of (understanding) actions. For Horton, this is much better suited to understanding God and his redemptive work. We don't just emphasize the script (Scripture), but also God's and our actions in light of that script.

Horton also spent a good deal of time and space arguing that analogy was the best way of describing our knowledge of God. He is not so different from us that we cannot understand him, but then again he is not so like us that there is no difference. As in any analogy, there is both similarity and difference. As Dorothy Sayers attempts to do in her The Mind of the Maker, we can know something about God by looking at ourselves. But such an approach does not exhaust who God is; we cannot know completely who God is or come to a full understanding of his essential nature. Yet insofar as he as revealed himself to us, we can come to some understanding, some true understanding, of who he is.

In this book, Lord and Servant, Horton engages in more straightforward application of the approach argued for in Covenant and Eschatology.

Chapter 1: Meeting A Stranger

In this chapter Horton considers three scenarios about how we encounter God, if we do at all: overcoming estrangement, the stranger we never meet, and meeting a stranger.

Overcoming estrangement
God is a stranger, an other-than-ourselves. One way of thinking about how we might encounter God - about how we might know him - is to see the encounter as one of erasing the estrangement that is present. In this scenario, meeting God amounts to his no longer being a stranger at all. God becomes an expression or manifestation of ourselves and our nature. Encountering God is more like an awareness of something that has always been immanent; it's just that now we are clued in to what was previously hidden but there (in us) all along. This is a scenario of hyper-immanence. There is no transcendence. God is not wholly other after all.

The Stranger We Never Meet
Just as we were faced with hyper-immanence above, here we have a hyper-transcendence - God cannot be encountered. Horton brings in the notion from Derrida that hyper-immanence does a certain violence to the other. In that scenario, the self's and God's being are compared, rendered the same, which is how we can overcome estrangement (through an ontological connection). The violence is that the other is no longer the other but is tantamount to something in ourselves, something that is us. The other is murdered in overcoming estrangement. Derrida rightly finds this distasteful, but opts for the complete avoidance of presence altogether, so as not to risk the violence that presence would bring. God's presence, meeting God, is forever postponed. God is wholly other and not to be encountered.

Meeting A Stranger
Horton argues for something of a middle ground between these two scenarios, one in which God remains a stranger but one who we can meaningfully encounter. His two assumptions - drama and analogy - come into play in this scenario. God is a stranger, an other, in the sense that his being is not our own; he is qualitatively ontologically different from us. We do not meet God by seeing him as a manifestation of our nature, yet we must acknowledge that we meet him and know him as he reveals himself to us. This is the analogical account of the epistemological situation.

Horton's dramatic emphasis brings out the relational aspect of meeting God. Recognizing God is an ethical and relational enterprise rather than an ontological or metaphysical or epistemological one. God's essence, his being, is hidden from us. We cannot know it. Does that mean that we cannot know God? Absolutely not. We know him by his acts, by the drama he has been and is even now unfolding in redemptive history. He is the primary actor as well as creator of the story that is played out. We know God insofar as he has revealed himself to us. It is not a matter of ascending to God but of his descending to us.

Where does the covenantal framework fit in? The context of such a meeting, of this knowledge of God, is the covenant. The way in which God makes himself known is in terms of creating relationships through a union based on oaths and a relationship based on sanctions. Thus,

one implication of a covenantal approach is that divine "presence" and "absence" are ethical and relational rather than ontological categories. (12)

Immanence, God's presence, is not in and of itself a good thing. The question of its goodness or badness is connected to our ethical relationship to him. Given the encounter, given that God reveals himself to us, how are we to respond? Having been summoned, the Word having been proclaimed, do we then call on him for salvation and redemption, thereby receiving his favor? Or do we turn our heads, close our eyes, and cover our ears, thereby receiving just judgment? How we think about God's presence (and absence), the categories we put this in, should be primarily ethical and relational. In Scripture, and for the federal theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, God's presence signified his actions within a covenantal framework and our ethical response to them; it does not primarily signify a set of characteristics ascribed to God's being. The attributes of God in Scripture are intimately tied to concrete, historical covenant and not to some abstract essence. This also is the way in which we need to understand him.

In the next chapter, Horton deals with what are traditionally regarded as the incommunicable and the communicable attributes of God, placing their understanding within the covenantal framework he defends.

Lost: Miscellaneous

AL is gone. Perhaps Libby, too. Is Ecko next? I really like that character. It would be a shame to see him go. I'd be about as happy as I was when Gandalf went down with the Balrog. Not very. Not very at all.

Sawyer was reading the Bad Twin manuscript. If you go to the amazon.com page for the book, you can click on an interview with the author and hear mention of Alvar Hanso. Hmmm.

Who is the daughter of Jack's dad? I seriously doubt that it's Claire. The mother looked too young. BTW, "Sarah," the name Jack's dad gave AL, is also the name of Jack's ex-wife.

How did HG know that AL killed Goodwin? That guy is creepy. I hope we see more of him.

Lost: Yikes, Mike!

Honestly, I didn't see it coming. I wasn't even close to thinking it. I was taking Michael at his word about the Shoeless Others. I was thinking maybe he'd seen HG at some point and we'd get more info out of (or at least about) that bug-eyed baddie. But I didn't think Michael would do THAT.

I assumed Michael was telling the truth about what he found. I figured he was talking about a different group of Others that has been theorized about - a group not including Mr. Friendly, Ethan, Goodwin, and the medical hatch folks. His description certainly matched what little we've seen of them traipsing through the jungle (with kids in tow). Of course, his description also matches Mr. Friendly on the boat and at the campfire and those clothes and makeup the girls found in the medical hatch - which is probably why Kate gives Jack a look when Michael describes them. But I find it hard to believe that the Others would stage a fake campsite just in case someone came wandering by. Although they've supposedly done other rather unbelievable things, those unbelievable things seem to have more plan and purpose and to leave very little to the off-chance of someone stumbling onto their plans.

(While perusing forum threads, I found some pics of part of the Lost set here and here that somone took on the sly. They fit nicely the description Michael gave of the Others that he saw. You can see a Dharma logo on the "hatch door" in the second pic. Perhaps we'll see this in a future episode...)

Anyway, Michael's flip-out makes me question everything he said. Let's talk about the flip-out. It seems so out of character for Michael to kill "his own" rather than the Other in the gun closet that he could have been brainwashed by the Others into going commando and getting HG out of enemy territory. He did not look in good condition when he collapsed in front of Kate and Jack, when they dragged him into the hatch, or when he groggily gained consciousness, so I guess being drugged is not out of the question. We know from the Claire affair that the Others are capable of it. But I just don't buy it. It doesn't explain why he said "I'm sorry" to AL before popping a cap in her belly. Would he really have been remorseful about that if he truly believed that he was doing the bidding of the Man? Admittedly, he didn't seem all that sorry when he pulled the trigger, though he did seem so after the fact and after offing (as far as we know - though Hurley didn't seem all that upset when he says to Michael "Glad you're okay, man") Libby. Perhaps it was then that he realized what he'd done and figured he couldn't go back now.

I like the theory that the Others made some kind of deal with him that if he got HG out of there, that they would give him Walt. His actions would be explained by the now-rather-annoying single purpose that has been driving him for all of Season Two: getting Walt back. (If I hear him say "I'm gonna get my boy back" one more time...) But then how does this square with making it look like HG shot him, Libby, and AL? If he didn't have HG in hand, he couldn't be assured that he would get Walt back, if that was the deal that was made. He wouldn't be assured of attaining the goal that he's been so bent out of shape about. It also doesn't seem to square with the promo for next week's episode: AND ONE MAN (shot of Michael in the gun closet, hand in sling, looking like a bad***) NOW CONTROLS (closing in shot of Michael in the gun closet, hand in sling, looking like a bad***) THEIR DESTINY (close up shot of Michael in the gun closet, hand in sling, looking like a bad***). Man, what the heck? Did Michael know all along what he was doing and that he is now in control of the situation, which is really in the Others' hands? Is he in control now because he'll have everyone up in arms, literally, to kick some Other tail, to get Walt back, and only he knows how to get to them? Ugh.

Lost - Don't Skip The Commercials

I don't have time at the moment to opine about the insane episode last night, but here are a few goodies that I've been wasting my time with of late. The writers/producers are now in full swing connecting the show (past, present, and future) with various other avenues of information-gathering and clue-hunting. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.

1. A commercial for The Hanso Foundation appeared during the airing of the episode. There's a number you can call to get the voicemails of Hanso and the Board of The Hanso Foundation. It's pretty interesting. 1-877-HANSORG.
   
2. The Hanso Foundation website. It was up and running early last fall, but has been latent until yesterday. Try to sign up for the newsletter and see what happens. (Hint: the password is on one of the voicemail messages) Also, try sending Joop a message. Flippy.
   
3. I don't know how long this website has been up, but it's a real time-killer. It has some interesting extras besides all of the short montage clips, if you can spend enough time on it. I managed to find a "game" where you try to put sticks of dynamite into a leaf; whenever you touch one of the sticks to another stick, there's a huge explosion. Love it.
   
4. Here is an older website, but it is still fairly interesting. Hit "Find" and then start clicking on the seats (esp. those in "the numbers" rows 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42). Whenever a seat lights up green, either single or double click it (or both) and see what happens.
   

Mind and Body

I usually have a lot going through my head as I'm lying in bed trying to get to sleep. I usually turn over a lot in order to get comfortable - from lying on my back, to lying on one side, then the other side, repeat. I've noticed something odd during this ritual behavior: my body position seems to have a marked effect either on what I'm thinking or on how I'm thinking about it. I'll be turning something over in my head in a certain way (I'm not sure quite how to explain this "qualitative feel"), but when I turn over, I find that I can't think of it in the same way, from the same perspective, with the same "feel." Now, at this point it is just anecdotal evidence with the occasional attempt to test the hypothesis. But I wonder if body position really does have a measurable effect on one's thoughts. Could it be a right brain-left brain thing? Or maybe I'm just making it up. Regardless, there would certainly be too high of a likelihood of researcher bias to put credence on whatever results I might gain from tests. Sigh.