Philosophy and Buffy

[chani]

Yesterday the Baccalauréat, our national exam, started, like every year, with the Philosophy test. Among the topics, there was a text by Malebranche  from De La Recherche de la Vérité (On the Search Of Truth).

 

Sapientis occuli in capite ejus, stultus in tenebris ambulat.

 

The eyes of the wise are in his mind, the demented walks in darkness.

 

And I thought of Buffy.

 

 

In that text Malebranche uses an analogy between sight and discernment (insight) to argue about truth. Most people only use their corporeal eyes to rule their lives while they should use their mind. By doing that they only see through the others’ eyes which means they actually don’t see at all. That’s why the demented are truly blind. I would add, that’s why they aren’t free.

 

In the Jossverse the matter of  sight and insight was recurring. William only wanted to be seen by Cecily, and Dru showed him in the alley that she could see his glory and that effulgent goal he was chasing. BTW there were so many seers in that show!

 

Sometimes you couldn’t trust what your corporeal eyes see. By the way the vampires were supposed to prove that. They looked like the human they they were demons hiding their true fanged face, their game face. But the metaphor could also work the other way round. There could be a man (or a poet!) behind the game face (Angel the Souled One and later Spike the Anomaly). Anyway from the beginning we were told to beware the appearances.

 

Buffy was taught that lesson with Angelus and she learnt to use her mind’s eyes later in A New Man. She was able to recognize Giles behind the Fyarl body, something she pointed out later when she was in Faith’s body.

A spell helped Buffy to overcome the monks’ magic and to see the actual lack of a sister. And in Sleeper she saw Spike hunting but she was able to see the truth about him…unlike Giles the watcher! Giles whose blindness was metaphorically revealed in Something Blue. Yet Giles was supposed to be the mind in Primeval/Restless. Giles couldn’t see because he was confused in season 4. In a way Giles’ blindness came back when he took on his role of watcher again during season 7.

 

Xander is a very good example. He tended to see/witness a lot of things without completely understanding them. He saw Buffy’s stakes in Welcome to the Hellmouth, later he was there in the library and found out about the Slayer, and he was also the one who saw Buffy and Angel in season 3. Xander was THE witness since episode 1. He even witnessed himself in Restless during the sandbox scene. He saw but he was like the demented walking in darkness. He ran from room to room, always ending up in the basement and showing us the whole set, but he was lost in a labyrinth. The labyrinth is the perfect metaphor of  what it means to see only with corporeal eyes. If you don’t use your mind (Ariane’s thread) you’re lost.

 

In season 5, during The Replacement he saw his double without getting the truth about him. He noticed a coin that was pointless and completely missed the truth. Same with the Buffybot in Intervention (“Already got the visual”).. Of course Xander wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell Buffy apart from the robot. But later in season 6 he displayed his blindness during Gone in Spike’s crypt when he walked in on the shagging couple. In SR he saw the aftermaths of the bathroom scene but didn’t really understand it. Well Buffy didn’t help him for sure.

Xander didn’t really see because he only used his eyes, because he often lived in denial. BTW in Something Blue when facing the Spike/Buffy couple he already asked for that blindness “can I be blind too?”. That flaw was shared by many people in Sunnydale, and above all by Joyce who couldn’t see her daughter as the Slayer despite all the clues, who was fooled by the evil kids in Gingerbread and who chose to stay behind a wall in Restless (that wall called to mind the broken door from School Hard when Joyce tried to make out the outside before buying the official explanation in the end). Yet all those people had potential and could see when they wanted to. The umbrella Buffy got from the students kind clued us. Even Joyce was able to see the truth sometimes, about Spike or when she got that Dawn wasn’t hers.

 

But it’s Xander who had the most obvious journey IMO because he was the eyes that didn't see during a long time. In season 7, Xander started to really see with his mind. Beneath You might be pivotal, and after Selfless Xander was no longer blind. No matter that Caleb took one of his eyes in Dirty Girls. One-eyed Xander could see better, know better nonetheless. And he did see Dawn in Potential when nobody else did.

 

DAWN

Maybe that’s your power.

XANDER

What?

DAWN

Seeing. Knowing.

Of course I could go on and talk about the insane people that could see the Key but 
I shall be quiet now.

Comments

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

That still gives me headaches.

But everytime I see the word discernment I get this chill because fundamentalist Christians de l'Amerique think they have ownership of the word and the practice. To them the only discernment that counts is that provided to the person after receiving the 'holy spirit.'

But even atheist enjoy myths/fantasies. It's just people being people. Having that individuality of a sentient being means we have to develop ways of dealing with others whose behavior can be unpredictable due to that sentience. And yet the human animal has so many instinctual behaviors also, which are often not acknowledged because they are tempered or filtered through our sentience. Thus the myth.

My thinking is that our myths primarily explore the interplay of those competing behaviors. It is a way for us to educate ourselves about those competing behaviors and give us an experience from an extrasomatic source - which is so very only human an activity. And myths bolster us for that time when we meet such a 'similar' experience in person, which could be a life altering event.

That was, of course, just a high-brow way to say they teach us a lesson - what some would call morals. Though the lesson or moral taught in the modern fantasy is often looked upon with disdain by those in fundamenetalist religions, whose fantasy life is set in the stone of that religion. But I believe that it also points out what many call morality to be based primarily in our instinctual behaviors. Our historical myths and also our religions are those vehicles by which our instinctual behaviors are brought forward and inculcated into the realm of the sentient mind of the individual. In doing so for the individual and for that society in general the 'correct' mix of those instinctual behaviors and intellectual responses is then elevated to the rank of morality or even a religion when combined directly with any deity or the incorporation of the ideas of a persons whose life exemplified those morals (i.e. Buddha) or perhaps both (i.e. Jesus Christ and Mohammed).

Individual humans then must necessarily blur the source of their behaviors and discount the instinctual human animal once that has been elevated into the realm of the conscious mind of their sentient being. The natural law of Aristotle and "Summa Theologica" of Aquinas are very good at blurring the source of these behaviors and then putting the complete burden upon an individual's sentient mind for behaviors which might be instinctive. Thus these works draw upon what is 'seen' as good in nature and demean the rest. That is often quite obviously due to instinctual behavior, for instance, a mammalian instinctual response to reptiles which in myths and religious stories equates evil with a snake.

Even today among moralists the exhortation is that some human behaviors are not natural. Then when that behavior is pointed out in other natural settings, the complaint of those same moralists is that the human should not act like the animal and use his intellect - thus his sentience - to correct his behavior to that of the norm. If you think I am talking about homosexual behavior, I am. Sure wasn't Buffy was it!

...

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I understand why Chani keeps insiting your her "trésor".

Lovely opinion. :-)

*hugs*

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

Heeeheeee...... something of that order has been rattling around my brain for the last few years. When I read the above discourse de ma maîtresse with that word, 'discernment,' stuck in my head from the beginning and then got to your imput about myth... it just flowed out of me.

Ma maîtresse got me started, itching about the statements I had so long sought to make; but your mention of 'myth' was the key from which I unlocked the idea. Thank you.



Chani will probably want me for whipping now.... or so I can only hope!

LMqAO!!!

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Getting you started and itching is just my job as a teacher, trésor!

Myths aren't only about morality, they are there to explain where we come from and what we're supposed to become.

And the goal of a story isn't only to edify or to teach the way to deal with certain behaviours. At some point the tale, the characters, the words to tell, the events themselves exist beyond anything else, beyond good and evil, beyond faith or it's lack of, and then the story becomes a Myth.