- Yes.
- Oh no.
- You don't like being filmed?
- I don't like the idea that person who shows up on the screen is taken for me.
- Because you don't like the way you look?
- If I looked like a movie star I wouldn't mind.
- You do.
- I do?
- You know, when I first said you could come here, I had second thoughts, would you be some kind of religious fanatic? Nationalist?
- And I turned out to be this guy who doesn't do anything and looks like a movie star.
- You don't need to look like a movie star. You can learn to be comfortable with your self image.
- Maybe if you put the camera down.
- You'll get used to it. Why do you want to look like a movie star?
- It's politics. All roles are confining. You are forced to emphasize and repeat some aspect of yourself at the expense of other aspects. You don't get the opportunity to think your way through learning the best way to do things to get the things you've found are best to want.
- And an actor does?
- In freely learning how to take on each separate role, yes.
- Camus wrote something like that.
- Yes. He told one side of the story.
- What is the other side?
- That roles are confining because of a particular kind of politics, the politics of doing things, making things, producing, progress.
- What are the other politics?
- States based on reasoning, like a university, or desire, like cults, can't last long, they don't pay attention to the practical task of keeping things going. Only the part of self dedicated to producing, keeping things going, progress seems appropriate for making a state. We settle for a state based on economics, on doing things, because we can't imagine any other way that is stable to put together all our different ways of acting, our thoughts, actions, desire. Giving charge to doing things, without excluding the other parts of ourselves, but giving them a secondary place, seems the only practical thing to do.
- Is that wrong?
- It's wrong to think of the state as something made up of, expressing, balancing different aspects of our nature. We see the state that way because we see ourselves that way.
- And we shouldn't.
- As I said somewhere on that camera's memory card you should be thinking your way through learning the best way to do things to get the things you've found are best to want. Thinking, doing, wanting. Our different capabilities are not exercised separately, in isolation from each other, but together as part of each creative activity.
- And the image you don't like of yourself is of someone thinking, doing, wanting in an uncreative way?
- Yes. Not because of how I really look, but because the politics of doing things, of money, guides everyone's attention to looking for and finding those separated roles.
- Your attention too.
- Yes. I live in this world of politics. No, I run away from it.
- Tell me how you run away.
- By doing nothing.
- How do you do nothing?
- Nothing that has place in the market of economic politics. I write stories, but am not a writer, am not even good at writing.
- What are you good at?
- Keeping quiet and following ideas where they lead.
- You're a philosopher?
- If you follow Plato's ideas carefully you can read him as saying the images we make of ourselves in conversation and in our own imaginations are unreal. The states we make based on images of ourselves are also unreal. They are representations, like the images you are making of me in your camera.
- What is real?
- My dispute with the politics of doing things.
- "Your dispute": I thought you did nothing. Aren't you contradicting yourself?
- Will you turn the camera off?
- Go on.
- What I do has no value to the world of doing. It's not even a Platonic shadow, a representation. It's unintelligable. Which is to say, to the world of economic politics, it's bad work.
- Why do you do it then?
- To understand.
- And that's enough.
- Yes. It's what I wanted.
- And what you did. The three: thinking, doing, desiring. I got it. That's enough for today.
- Turn the camera off!
