Caleb Gallemore

Address to MSSU Honors Convocation

May 2nd, 2006

Just this morning, on NPR on the way here, I heard a story about Mexican illegal immigrants in Los Angeles. That s not a big surprise: the immigration question has risen to a boiling point, marked by numerous walk-outs, strikes, boycotts, and marches yesterday. All in all, the day counted over a million protestors. NPR interviewed three children of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. They told various stories about crossing the desert, searching for a better life. now they face deportation, refusal, rejection. They, it seems, cannot be part of American life. Yet the fact is they are already a part of it, as the boycotts and the strikes showed.

Several other political and social issues revolve around this question of a life---its limitations, its purposes, its meanings: Terry Schiavo, the justices of the Supreme Court, the question of marriage in Massachusetts. The definition of life, very intimate and personal, is also public and political.

Aristotle, as the world s first thinker one might legitimately call a biologist, may shed some light on this issue. He points out that life is composed of two elements, a form and a substance. The vital stuff it s made of, and the soul that actualizes it. In Shakespeare s King Lear, we find a similar structure. Towards the end of the fourth act, one character tells his father:  Thy life s a miracle. Speak yet again. 

Here again we find this substance and form dualism. First, there is the vital, powerful essence of life:  Thy life s a miracle.  Then there is, inseparable from it, its actualization, its potential, which is fulfilled by acting:  Speak yet again.  It is this potential, this freedom, which cannot be separated from the definition of life itself. It is this free potential that defines a life.

Henry David Thoreau lamented that this free potential is too often undercut by the very society that should cultivate it. In Walden, he observes his neighbors breaking their backs to make money and get ahead and so fulfill their lives, and he opines:  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  We can expect this trap to lie in wait for us at every turn. It is one of the unfortunate drawbacks of our society that it must rely upon a certain materialism. As Georges Bataille observes,  Capitalism, in a sense, is an unreserved surrender to things, heedless of consequences and seeing nothing beyond them.  To give into the materialist temptation is to define ourselves by our possessions and our future possessions. When we give into this temptation, Bataille says, we make things of ourselves and of others. Perhaps this is why we seem to want to answer the immigration questions the way we do. Labor is a thing to be imported and used and then exported when that use has expired. People are things. If that is our logic, then Shakespeare s Macbeth is right, and life is  a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

How do we escape this seduction that threatens to make a dead thing of a vibrant life? Well, we have been escaping for some time. At least for the past few years. When Rene Descartes chose to deny the existence of everything he could possibly doubt, he doubted the external world, his senses, even his body, but there was one thing that Descartes could not doubt: he could not doubt that he was thinking. For Descartes, thought was what he was. Thought was the source of his freedom and the definition of his life, and---I think---at least in this one sense, Descartes was probably right. Thought is the definition of our freedom and in turn of the potential that defines us as humans and living things. And thought is always both personal and intimate and political, like a life. No matter who we are or what we think, there will always be people---and frequently powerful people---who would rather we didn t think or wouldn t be that. But there is nothing they can do. We go on thinking----go on being.

It is only by thinking for ourselves---even and especially if this means thinking differently from everyone else, that we can break out of the trap that Bataille warn us about. It is only by thinking for ourselves that we can reject the logic of a system that tells us that we need a Jag, that we need a Lear Jet, that we need a swimming pool on Rodeo Drive that we can drive by in our H-2, and that, if we don t get any of these things, if we don t get all of these things, then we have failed in our eyes and the eyes of others. Fortunately, we don t have to accept this logic in passing. As the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti observes,  we have created this society and then blame the society for what it demands. 

This society is ours. It is the sum of all our lives and our thoughts. This is why we have been doing what we have been doing the past four years or so. We haven t been learning what to think. I think our professors hope we never let anyone teach us that. We have been learning how to think, and, by extension, we have been learning how to act freely, if we so choose. We have been learning how to resist making ourselves into things.

So this is what I hope we will do. I hope we won t ever think we need a Jag, or an H-2, or a swimming pool on Rodeo Drive. We may want those things, but I hope that we never come to believe that we need those things. I hope, instead, that we will all remember that what we need is freedom and that we need it because it is the criterion that defines us as free, living, human beings. I hope that we will see that only by thinking for ourselves can we preserve and actualize this freedom. I hope that we will never allow things to determine our living thoughts and never make things or ourselves or others. I hope that we will each change the society we are always creating by thinking, speaking, and acting for ourselves. I hope that we will say our piece, show what we can think and be, and, so, fulfill the miracle that is our life by speaking again, and again, and yet again.