THE EMPTY CHAIR SYNDROME

THE EMPTY CHAIR SYNDROME

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 4, 2012

By now the media has typecast Clint Eastwood the fool, a stereotype of his acting roles from “Dirty Harry” to costarring with an orangutan in “Every Which Way but Loose,” underlining that description by implying he is “a senile octogenarian.”

No question he threw a grenade into the carefully scripted crowded room of the RNC.  Now the fear is that Jerry Lewis, only slightly younger, will be on stage at the DNC in Charlotte, North Carolina in his signature role as the “Nutty Professor.”

Sometimes I get the impression media is vying for comparison to the “Roman Curia of the College of Cardinals,” or the verbal equivalent to the “Spanish Inquisition.”  Not a pleasant thought to be sure.

Philosophers call the distinctly human capacity to know fundamental truths about reality from all the intellectual noise and bric-a-brac to which they are exposed to “sapiential sense” (from homo sapiens), a form of common sense.  

The database of “sapiential sense” is a dynamic interface between thoughts and things that discerns the actual in the perceived by acts of knowledge.  This is a way in which sapiential sense has a lot in common with most forms of common sense, such as intuition, right-reason, first principles and self-evident facts.

We now have a whole industry of "fact checkers" that feels it fulfills a need that is beyond the competence and comprehension of ordinary individual citizens when they hear the histrionics and bombast of politicians on the stump.  I beg to differ.  I feel fact checking muddies up the works if it is not in collusion with some special interest.  Why?  The unbiased declarations of fact checkers are forms of bias.  You cannot separate the two. 

Sapiential sense is the mind’s ability to “see” the truths that constitute reality so as to grasp things as they are in themselves.  Knowledge, not to belabor the point, is basically a matter of seeing things.  Arguments, “Monday morning quarterbacking,” as is currently the media mode, present reasoning from some advantage are processes of secondary importance.  What you see is mainly what you get as empirical knowledge kicks in.  We are wiser than we think.

Viewers of Clint Eastwood’s performance – it was a performance meant to seem impromptu, but for an actor that is an impossibility – got it!  This was not hard science.  This was a gut reaction. 

Scripted high drama attempts to approach science by capturing the empirical with the observable and measurable to fit neatly into what is expected.  The irony is that science cannot proceed at all without making fundamental assumptions that cannot themselves be proved scientifically: that is, that the world exists, that the human mind can know truth, that all phenomenon can be explained, and so on.

Why do media protest so much at Clint Eastwood’s audacity?  For most, it’s in their DNA, spelled “ratings,” but for others the absurdity is recognized. 

One television critic wondered what was the benefit of some 15,000 journalists showing up at the RNC in Tampa, Florida and mainly complaining about the heat and humidity, or Eastwood’s performance.  This critic wrote: “All this money, time and resources to watch an Oscar winner debate an empty chair seemed like an apt metaphor.  Maybe ol’ Clint knew what he was doing better than we thought.”

Deploying sapiential sense sometimes means playing the part of the boy who observed that the emperor wore no clothes.  What Eastwood did was a task that must be undertaken with complete confidence in the essential integrity of the audience’s fundamental perception of the Real and a refusal to be intimidated by the fall out and pretensions of sophists, which the media are proving to be.

Eastwood managed in twelve-minutes of stumbling patter talking to an empty chair to an imaginary friend to set the RNC on its head. 

The friend, who was alleged to be President Barak Obama, could just as well have been RNC’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who was due next to give his acceptance speech, as both men have that condescendingly gracious mechanized manner of superior wit and wisdom that are meant to connote leadership, but unfortunately raise the meter on disingenuousness. 

It is clear no one is satisfied with either candidate.  That is why Eastwood's symbolic theatre is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, the poet of the absurd.  The absurd is our most human aspect.  We are always in danger of forgetting that.  Artists keep us in touch with what is Real.  Cicero said long ago, “There is no opinion so absurd but that a philosopher hasn’t expressed it.”  He could have added, “That is why we are all philosophers.” 

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