Snapple, storefronts and silences
The Existentialists from the Forties and the Fifties were out to explore the exotic so as to establish bedrock reality, what was really the human condition. So they looked at the stranger, that man without familial feeling, to show that people were truly alienated. And Sartre saw people who saw gnarled, hideous and frightening trees as looking at the world bare and maybe mad for having looked at nature without its Kantian categories. Twenty years later, Erving Goffman envisioned people as always only performing, their roles used to provide the impression that people managed their lives well, and so neglecting motives of love or loyalty, people just pulling their own marionette strings and so life reflected the Absurdist theater of the previous decade after all. I want to try a different approach. It is the most ordinary and familiar aspects of life that reveal or amount to the human condition, it is just difficult to objectify the obvious even if it is the substance of life, not the abstracted things like justice and God. Politics is just organized suasion, full of bombast and anger. Life is feeling yourself as breathing because without its familiarity you are dead and what could it possibly mean for a person to be alive if they do not experience breathing however much you try to think of metaphors that concern angels walking amid the clouds, in which case they would be breathing, wouldn’t they?
This approach is different from the usual oner whereby profound things are appreciated and explained by consulting the most complex and crafted form of art and literature, going deep into how Goya and Van Gogh and Balzac and Melville reshape our lives by creating objects skewed from what life is thought to be and thence trying to make sense of the discrepancies. In that cased, people engage life with self-consciousness so as to hone a sense of reality. The other path, as it is based on the wisdom of sociology, is that most of life is not filled with self consciousness but with ordinary perceptions and feelings and so free of these higher things, life crowded with the ordinary and so free of the burdens of being enlightened however enlightenment is the necessary task that allows life to be ordinary. And so we shall precede.
Here is an easy example of how an experience has little meaning but is just familiar and therefore part of the human condition even though it is superficial and artificial. Snapple is a soft drink which has a distinctive flavor that combines tea and peach and water and is chilled. The experience is taste and a feeling of cold liquid going into your innards and it satisfies thirst, none of these providing meaning but satisfying pleasure. The ingestion of cold liquids nowadays is quite general,and habitual. For a hundred and fifty years soft drinks depend on refrigeration and the invention of Coca Cola as a particularly tasteful drink. Preceding that there were stimulants, like tea and coffee and chocolate, often because of the use of sugar, and is dated because it was possible earlier to heat rather than to cool and goes back a thousand years. Previous even to that are alcoholic and other potentially addictive liquids. It is curious that the more powerful liquids are by and large given in smaller portions, a cup of coffee smaller than a bottle of Snapple and a bottle of scotch having many portions that would lead to inebriation. Even smaller doses are used for narcotic addiction, so small as to be administered with injection or pills.The exception is that beer is a bigger dose than snapple. It is measured in a pint or a stein, perhaps because beer is such an ancient invention that more efficient doses had not been developed. The fact of the matter is that these ingestive habits are familiar and universal and so allow people to think of these as natural, their way to be, even if they do not convey anything of significance. The same is true with chocolate chip cookies and ketchup.What would life be like without these pleasures?
Stacks of cartons and cans and bottles of soft drinks are stocked in supermarkets. They are so abundant in their variety that a consumer has to be aware of a choice whether to get sugared or nocal or iced teas or lightly flavored waters or just plain water. The consumer can think that consumer choice is a kind of democracy because the consumer is sovereign, each product advertised for its wares and successful only if the consumer prefers which product to buy. But that is misleading in that the decision to buy is merely a preference, of no significance other than to one’s own taste and the company’s bottom line unless there is, let us say, there is a boycott on South African wine during apartheid or because there is a movement to restrict sugar as a bad health thing. That is different from voting, where there is always a moral dimension so that choosing a candidate who will cut your taxes is a choice to think only of economic self interest and whether abortion is an issue worth thinking about and choosing what is a moral decision. Voting is never morally neutral while prteferring Snapple to Coke always is unless, letg us say, the prtoprietgor of some product is morally egregious and one refuses to buy from Hobby Lobby or a baker who won’t buy from gays who are about to marry. Legal issues about the neutrality of consumership arise.
Now here it gets tricky. Is there a difference with regard to consciousness between a preference and a moral dilemma, each considered on their own, or when the two are compared? Both of those analyses, the separate and the compared, are generalizations of facts, and so can be considered what we might call “raw empiricism”, people noticing the choices they make as moral or not and also whether to prefer moral to preferential or not, while the other view is that it is quite different to consider comparing preference versus morality rather than Snapple rather than Coke. Persons just engaged with a preference are aware of what they are doing. To think otherwise is to be a robot or a lower form of animal. But comparing or deciding whether morality plays a role or not requires self consciousness rather than just awareness because perhaps it posits referring to concepts outside the empirical world, people enshrouded with invisible categories, as in the case of Kant, which make these decisions meaningful rather than just experiences of which one is aware. We have to, as the expression goes, “step back” in order to consider such categories, not only ordinary preferences, however much it may be to be rational in choosing one soft drink because of its taste or advertising slogan. So that is a way to say that a soft drink beverage choice is an experience but does not have meaning because it has no reverberations with a high level concept.
Here is another ordinary feature of life which can elaborate the idea that much of lifer is rational in that it is fully aware without being self-aware, which means inverted with meaning. I am thinking of storefronts, which are retail businesses which may not be as old as the cavemen, but are available for millenia, even if one stall is separated from one another by a cloth or nothing at all so as to buy or sell goods, like flour or rice, or services, like barbers and hairstylists, to a consumership in enough number that people will cross their thresholds to buy out of pickle barrels or stacks of dry goods. There are storefronts in Near Eastern bazaars way back and a small town on the American Western frontier had a general store and Jim Bridger had a fort back in the wilderness where he bought furs and sold general supplies to the indians and the other mountaineers that passed his way in Oregon. The storekeeper is invented but ubiquitous, opening up as soon as a battle ens so as to provide staples and disposables as soon as a supply customer to arrive in the slow midday hours, his shelves stocked with bottles, separating wines from liquors and scotches from gins and brandies, chain is established, even among the rabble. Storefronts survived in London during the Blitz, so resilient is that form of enterprise.
I notice how similar to one another are storefronts to one another of a similar type. I remember in my youth a liquor store proprietor who had trained to be a lawyer who had fallen into this business waiting for a customer to come across the threshold during the slow midmorning hours, the bottles all lined up on the shelves, wines separated from liquors and gins and brandies separated from brandies. A liquor store was considered a clean business in that all you had to do was unpack boxes of shipments, while there was a lot of cleaning up that had ro be done in produced and dairy stores, so much to be trimmed or refreshed or made waste, so long as a liquor store needed a considerable initial capital to stock its wares. After that, it was easy sailing, except how to judge who to give credit to and how to turn away drunks or potential thieves out to get the register’s abundant cash. Liquor stores don’t look very different: filled with open boxes of bottles and special sale items, whether the liquor store is a sole proprietor or a state liquor authority. Consumables of small quantities are also ubiquitous and subject to state regulation.
On the other hand, some storefronts come and go. There was a rage for ten or twenty years for storefronts that rented tapes of movies that could be played on home VCRs. It took little capital to start them up, only rent and inventory where people went in because, as I gathered, they hadn’t made much of something else. There were also larger stores in the Blackbuster franchise which also sold popcorn and movie candy but did not have any more variety of movies to offer than the smaller ones which carried recent releases rather than “classics'', which meant black and white movies from the Forties. All bit the dust when movies become available on cable and then by streaming, just as late night network movies had given way to talk shows. I remember “The Late Show” and “The Late Late Show” that made Patsy Kelly, the one with her distinctive nasal voice, a star to me.
The thing about storefronts is how much they come and go, much more frequently than the buildings where the storefronts were placed on their street entrances, at least on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I lived for many years. I would know which pizza parlor shut down and which barber shop,m a breed that seemed to me ever to diminish. For a while, every block had another bank branch, maybe because people like branches close by because the services available are all pretty much the same. It was difficult, however, to create big supermarkets for a while because it was too expensive to get a large enough space until places like specialty shops, gourmet places like Citerella, were sufficiently capitalized. I would measure out the changing storefronts over the course of my years there. Remember when a particular chinese restaurant to which I took my kids closed down? Kids in Manhattan all learn chopsticks early.
And so to the theme. Store fronts are an ordinary occurrence and people can appreciate the different types. You know not to buy meat at a haberdashery store (also now extinct or very rare, included in sports goods clothing stores. That is a reasonable inference, a raw empirical observation , an experience of everyday life. But there is also an outside and abstract concept which turns storefronts into being a matter of self awareness and possibly deep contemplation. That, as I have already suggested, is the idea of time, a category so abstracted by Kant so as to rid it of its everyday experience as a change in the material settings whose alterations show change in time. Who and when was Ebbets Field demolished so as to be replaced by a housing project? This event or the memory of it displaces a person from a time to being “above” or “beyond” time and that makes you like God, however fragile might be your earthly existence. Think of emptied storefronts or even those in reconstruction, new fixtures put in place as old ones are carried out even if ones that had elaborate plumbing was retained or altered so that a restaurant would probably be retained as a restaurant, a video store becoming anything, like a shoemaker because all you have to do is bring in the equipment, even if shoemakers are dying out because cloth sneakers replace leather and people prefer to replace rather than repair. We savor time in changing storefronts.
A perfectly ordinary experience that can give people comfort is listening to, as the phrase has it, “the sound of silence”, which is an oxymoronic if accurate observation, though you can make it odd and even eerie by giving it an Existentialist edge, making it strange that the absence of something is there. You lie in bed and your breathing slows down to barely if anything is being heard, not even a heartbeat. There are no cicadas or wind or fire engines rushing down West End Avenue or a soft rain that can lull you to sleep. It's so quiet that you sense silence as a wave of it, one after the other assaulting us because it insults us not to be otherwise, to be like music and so having rhythm and tone. And you edge into self consciousness as you contemplate the profundity of the thing, associated with sleep, another ordinary experience, erven as sleep is hardly silent, filled with dreams screaming to have their sexual and other dreams announcing their insights with startling invention and clarity, as when I dreamed how old my young wife would look forty years late and she did. Self-consciousness arrives, develops, out of making comparisons, just as in “Sesame Street”, one thing like or different from another, though the decisive event is even earlier when a terrible two year old recognizes the power of “no!”, negation particularly a way to process thought by both Marxists and Existentialists.
The thing about silence is that you don’t really hear them unless you are deaf. Otherwise, silence is an “ideal” almost always violated so that listening to silence is not literally true and such an assertion is a “no!” to silence and so makes it a metaphysical assertion or, more modestly, a concept that denies what overwhelmingly is and that mediates the experience of silence so that it helps self-consciousness to arise in that it generates the idea of possible events rather than just things that have happened, which is the bugaboo of positivists who only examine what has happened, as if there could not be representative democracies before any had been constructed, where people said it only happened in small nations until the United States invented itself and so made itself possible. That is worthy of the heavy burden of being self-conscious even if it is very difficult to define what the term means in that a director looking through a camera lens is self aware of what he or she is seeing but the looking through the lens isn’t what does it but the mind of the director does and so the best that can be said is that Snapple, storefronts and silence leverage minds to become self conscious rather than constitute that.
The program in this and many of my essays is the Pragmatist one of eliminating philosophical words as either meaningless or to be reduced to simple empirical facts. That is different from regarding philosophy as a set of universal invisible terms that are inherent in existence and cannot be done without like justice or cause and effect, the first of which can be done without to explain social life and the second can be substituted with “context”, which means the conditions under which things happen. Pragmatism is also different from the idea that most people are expert enough to clarify these essential terms but rely on custom and expertise to do the work for them when in fact people can provide a perfectly adequate explanation of their situation and the Entire Situation by referring ton facts, including experience. People are more enlightened, become freer, by getting rid of their philosophical baggage.
That is the case in the examples provided. People can do much to avoid moral terms if you treat much of it as preferences to kinds of soft drinks. Time, such a formidable concept, is reduced to changing storefronts and negation, that deeply profound matter, is reduced to noticing that silence is not absolute. All these are matters of everyday lifer and only because there is philosophy, which arises out of self-consciousness, is it possible to retain self-consciousness because of being rid of philosophy.
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