Existential coffee-making.

Idle query: Had Jean-Paul with his pipe clenched firmly in his teeth stood in front of a microwave oven to make instant coffee and peered myopically at the seconds ticking backwards on the LCD clock dial, would he have cracked the existential riddle: pre-reflective consciousness, free will and whatever else it might be? I doubt it. Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize the thing-in-itself – coffee in the making, LCD clock marking time backwards, etc. – Sartre would have termed "reflective consciousness". By the time the coffee was ready and the micro beeped its customary warning, his concentration would have been broken and he would have hurriedly pressed the open button. After which the aroma would have completely shattered the spell of his existential reverie. Actually, my whole staging of his hypothetical thinking process is faulty, as you must have noticed. Being a true Frenchman with an Algerian mistress who later became his adopted daughter, Jean-Paul would probably have insisted on the real thing. No instant stuff, merci beaucoup. "I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time," wrote a bloke called Steven Wright. http://www.notso.com/wright.htm. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” is the fifty-first line in the lament – er, love song – of another curious bloke called J. Alfred Prufrock http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html who earlier on in the poem (line 34) shows a distinct preference for “tea and toast” and a scant 45 lines later (line 79) changes his fickle mind in favour of “tea and cakes and ices”. He keeps reiterating his strong leaning toward tea in lines 88 and 102, though. This leads us to an important question worth pausing and pondering. Why should the treacherous teatotaler (who may or may not be a teetotaler) have access to a coffee spoon even if the scoundrel professes to use it only to measure out his life with? http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html. Pray tell, after a reflective sip of instant coffee.

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.