Beyond a reasonable doubt.

It irks me at times when someone asks me why on earth I did ‘it’. Somehow, that question seems to belong in a lapsed lawyer’s lexicon. Or, maybe, in a Pandora’s box overseen by a proto- philosopher. When I look back at most of my past actions, I detect a total lack of sense or logic. I’m astonished at how random life happens to be. ‘Rational behaviour’ used to be once upon a time an obligatory assumption in Classical Economics. Rational self-interest, I’m afraid, has been a behavioural trait totally alien to my way of living and working. It has been so even before I came to know the pejorative view of it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus taken by such luminaries as Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes and Herbert Simon. Then there’s Albert Einstein declaring his credo http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/credo.html in a 1932 speech to the German League for Human Rights: “I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper." All this probably drives me towards a modern compatibilistic view such as Daniel Dennet’s. His argument goes as follows. “... if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and quantum randomness, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are ‘expectations’. The ability to do ‘otherwise’ only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and unknowable future. Since individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will. Personal experience precludes the inclusion of ‘free will’ in my schema, though. There's nothing beyond a reasonable doubt, so far.

Seinfeld’s nemesis (“Hello, Newman.”) did it, too.

Reading other (preferably famous) peoples’ letters fascinates me no end. There’s something liberating, I find, about letter writing. It sorta lets your guard slip and, for maybe a brief instant, the ‘real’ person can be glimpsed. The last two collections of celebrity letters I read were Graham Greene’s letters to newspapers and Sigmund Freud’s personal correspondence. Freud’s son, Ernst, has selected the letters. (“As a letter writer, my father was unusually prolific and conscientious,” is his fond comment.) Among his world-renowned correspondents were people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Havelock Ellis, Stefan Zweig, Maria Montessori, HG Wells, Romain Rolland, Carl G Jung and Otto Rank among others. The Freud who comes across through in his letters is totally unlike the brooding and melancholy persona I had imagined him to be. He’s childlike, poetic, open, full of joie de vivre, tenderness and wonderment, especially when he’s writing to his fiancée, Martha Bernays. Freud’s obit by (Monday, 25 September 1939) can be found at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/healthmindandbody/story/0,6000,332994,00.html. P.S.: One of my prized finds is After-Dinner Freud by Joseph Aguayo, Ph.D. It’s a set of one hundred parlour cards with questions and answers on the Father of Psychoanalysis, published by Viking. Fascinating stuff![Related link: Saturday, May 6, 2006. Posted at 8:33 P.M. ‘Pen pal. Who me?‘]