Philosophy of Alan Watts (Final Report, Installment Two)

In the first installment of this final report, I touched briefly on Alan Watts' early life, as well as some of his lifetime achievements eventually ending, as it does for everyone, with his untimely death.  Now I will go into what has enthralled me of his Philosophies.  This will mainly feature brief summaries of his more interesting ideas, accompanied with a video or a link, so you may hear his beautiful voice for yourself.

So the first idea of his that I want to talk about, which stunned me when I first heard it, is the philosophy of things.  Watts says there are no such thing as things in the real world.  He asked high school students what things are, and they seemed to just give synonyms at first: like objects.  But, as he says, one clever girl raised her hand and said "a thing is a noun," and he takes this to be the best answer.  For Watts, things are not in the real world; things are only a part of speech.  He continues, adding that the natural world is "wiggly" and only when humans create things, do we start to see straight lines and perfect edges.  He concludes with a kind of silly sentence that makes me laugh every time I hear it: "But here are we, all sitting in this room, built with straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get out."

The second idea that I enjoy, which I touched on in my midterm report, is when he talks about "Whether or not to commit suicide."  Before tackling that topic, he talks about the idea for deists, that God is all around you, all the time.  And at a certain point, you tell God to go away, and you become an atheist.  But by doing so, you turn into a machine.  This is where he cites the Albert Camus theory, saying "Camus said there is really only one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide."  He follows this with a joke about how he believes there are at least four or five serious philosophical questions.  But he goes into this idea, saying if you have no theory of the universe worth betting on, then just give up; commit suicide.  But if you have a theory of the universe worth betting on, then you have a plan, then you have a reason to go on.  I believe this was his way of saying that atheism is the same as having no theory of the universe worth betting on, which may not sound very appealing to the majority of this class, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.

He does not seem to be a firm believer in an afterlife, however, because he has another theory about the most frightening thing about death.  I think he believes it is possible, but not certain.  He says we all think we are afraid of death because we cannot imagine everything becoming nothing.  He says no, "the most frightening thing about death is there might be something beyond it, and you don't know what it is."

In one video I found, he pretends he is God for a bit, allowing people to ask any and all questions they had for God.  When asked "What is death?" Watts answered incredibly: "Death is an undulation in consciousness.  How would you know you were alive unless you had once been dead?"  This blew my mind.

Its around the 8 minute mark, but the whole video is interesting.

 

 

Finally, he has this idea: what if you could go to sleep tonight, and control your dreams?  Not necessarily lucid dreaming, but more of this: what if your dream was a 75 year lifetime?  Then you wake up, and maybe the next night, you dream again, this time another lifetime sized dream, living out all of your fantasies.  And this happens again and again, until after a few months, you desire something else.  So you get adventurous and decide to save a princess from a dragon, and face danger head on.  Then after awhile you would get bored of that, and figure out how to forget you were dreaming.  So you'd think it was all real.  And you'd eventually ask yourself how far you can take it.  How much can you abandon this power to the point of forgetting it was a power?  Finally, "you would dream where you are now.  You would dream the dream that you are living today.  That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have: Of playing that you weren't God."  This is where he states his idea that we are all God pretending we are not.

 

 

I have another idea.  This one has less to do with a theory of God, but more with a theory of sleep, and dreams.  What if this life is a dream.  What if you were once someone else, possibly named F. Scott Fitzgerald, or some other person, and that was a dream as well.  And before that, you were a woman during the American Revolution.  Perhaps our knowledge of history is really our own memories of past dreams.  This would certainly explain and make more appropriate the vagueness of history.  But let me throw in a little of God in there.  What if you are God, like Watts says, and these dreams are you running through trial and error in the idea of a Universe.  This, of course, would mean you are only God in the sense of being a creator, rather than an all perfect being.  I believe this to be an atheistic view in the sense that if I am God, there is no God for me.  It wouldn't make sense.  Which leads me to the coolest thought I think I've ever had: Is God, if he/she/it exists, an atheist in that sense?  This would have to be true, unless there is something I am overlooking.

So this concludes my final report on Alan Watts.  I hope it was enjoyable, and I certainly hope everyone has a theory of the universe worth betting on.  After all, according to Alan Watts, you'd only be figuring out yourself.