that was made to dissolve together with all of the people (Shawn’s
potential children, for example) who would have lived it out. Here’s
the haunting narrative that Agatha delivers in this séance of sorts:
There is so much love in this house… Dr. Hineman once said
the dead don’t die, they look on and help. Remember that, John.
…Shawn. He’s on the beach now. Toe in the water. He’s asking
you to come in with him. He’s been racing his mother up and
down the sand. There’s so much love in this house. He’s ten years
old. He’s surrounded by animals. He wants to be a Vet. You keep
a rabbit for him, a bird, a fox. He’s in high school. He likes to
run, like his father. He runs the two mile and the long relay.
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He’s twenty three. He’s at a university. He makes love to a pretty
girl named Claire. He asks her to be his wife. He cal s here and
tel s Lara, who cries. He still runs. Across the university and the
stadium, where John watches. Oh god, he’s running so fast. Just
like his daddy. He sees his daddy. He wants to run to him. But
he’s only six years old and he can’t do it, and the other man is so
fast. There was so much love in this house.
This is brilliant writing. The way that Shawn running in the
university stadium becomes the six year old boy trying to run back
to his father and away from the kidnapper. The way that Agatha’s
“There is so much love in this house” turns into “There was so much
love in this house.” She is able to sense the ruins of a life that could have taken place largely in this house, a family life full of love that was aborted. Traces are left, though. Shades.
The film is posing a compelling yet controversial thesis: for
us to be free agents to any degree at al , for us to be individuals
ethical y responsible for our chosen actions, there cannot be any
Almighty God. An Almighty God would be even more all knowing
or omniscient than the precogs were made to seem by the lie
that Hineman and Burgess perpetrated when they concealed the
minority reports. Any god [lowercase “g”] whose existence would
be metaphysical y compatible with our having a chance to make
meaningful choices in life has to be a finite god, without much more
precognitive power than Agatha, Art, and Dasch. The same would
hold for any other gods or angels in the service of this most powerful god.
Metaphysical liberty cannot be God-given. The very fact of an
omniscient God’s existence translates into the proposition that all
possible futures are already known, which means they already exist,
which means that we do not now choose to make them come into
being. The idea of God is immoral. We have to choose between
God and ethics. This is the most profound implication of Minority
Report, which anticipates the dawn of a new age wherein the barrier between Science and Religion has been demolished. It will be an
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age wherein Science is no longer materialistic, mechanistic, and
reductionist, and wherein Religion has done away with the unethical
idea of God Almighty and has been reconstructed from out of the
precondition of all ethical life: the fundamental faith in our chance
to make a better future.
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NOTES ON THE TAO OF BRUCE LEE
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, California on 27
November 1940, year of the Dragon. He was raised in the
thoroughly Westernized British colony of Hong Kong
where he at attended English schools until the age of 18,
when he returned to the United States for higher education. During
his teenage years in Hong Kong Lee had received training in boxing,
which was widely available on account of the British culture of the
colony. He could easily have become a lightweight class boxing
world champion. Lee also learned the Western art of fencing from
his older brother, who was a fencing champion. Lee, already a boxer,
had gotten into numerous street fights with his peers at school, and
it is on this account that he sought training in Asian martial arts.
His mother was of half-German ancestry, so the top teachers
in Hong Kong refused to teach him, since he was not a full-breed
Chinese and they were against teaching martial arts techniques to
non-Asians. He had to train privately with the one willing teacher
that he did find, since Yip Man’s fellow students refused to train with him. When Lee, now empowered with martial arts skil s, beat up a
boy who turned out to have been the son of a Hong Kong organized
crime don, his parents decided he should return to the United
States. After a brief stay in his birthplace of San Francisco, he moved to Seattle and studied Drama, Western Philosophy, and Psychology
at the University of Washington.
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Lee then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and opened a
school in Oakland, where he fought for the right to teach Caucasians,
frowned upon in Chinatown at the time. He was concerned with
equality of all people regardless of race. According to his wife Linda, Lee viewed himself “as a citizen of the world.” In 1967, all of the sifu from Chinatown had collectively signed a paper threatening him.
He was challenged to a fight, which he won decisively. However,
this fight also afforded him a flash of insight that drew together the eclectic influences he had absorbed throughout his life. When he
was starting up as a martial arts teacher in Oakland, out of necessity, he worked with teachers from several Asian traditions other than the
Wing Chun style of Kung Fu in which he had been predominately
trained. These included Judo, Karate, and Taekwondo. Lee decided
that his own Wing Chun style and for that matter, al established
Martial Arts traditions were too rigid to be effective under the chaotic real-world conditions of a street fight. He devoted himself to devising a more scientific approach to unarmed combat.
Lee studied Newtonian physics, examining how its principles
relate to the techniques of European fencing and Western boxing
that he learned during his youth in Hong Kong. With a total
disrespect for traditional formality and guided solely by the criteria of practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency, Lee worked to merge the strongest elements of diverse Asian martial arts traditions
together with Western techniques. The latter not only included
boxing and fencing, but also an exercise regiment of weight training
for strength, running for endurance, and stretching for flexibility.
Lee called this “style of no style” Jeet Kune Do or “The Way of the Intercepting Strike”, and adopted “Using no way as way; having no
limitation as limitation” as its motto. These phrases were emblazoned
in Chinese calligraphy around the Taiju, together with arrows
depicting the constant flow back and forth between yin and yang.
At first, Lee taught Jeet Kune Do in his schools, but by the
end of 1969, he grows concerned that his students look to his art
as containing a secret way of special techniques. So in January of
1970 at height of popularity in Martial Arts world, he closed all of
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za jorjani
his schools. As he put it in one of his lines in Longstreet: “I cannot teach you, only help you to explore yourself – nothing more.” He
decided to privately train only a handful of students, getting to know each student well enough to help him free himself from his own
psychological limitations. The Sportsweek in the Washington Star printed in Washington DC on August 16, 1970 captures the essence
of this period in Lee’s career:
Three of Bruce Lee’s pupils, Joe Lewis, Chuck Norris and Mike
Stone, have between them won every major karate tournament
in the United States at least once. Lewis was Grand National
champion three successive years. Lee handles and instructs these
guys almost as a parent would a young child. It’s like walking
into a saloon in the old west and seeing the fastest guy in the
territory standing there with notches all over his gun. Then in
walks a pleasant little fellow who says: “How many times do I
have to tell you, you’re doing it all wrong.” And the other guy
listens, intently.
They were listening intently for a reason. Lee’s ‘physical’ ability was nearly paranormal. He routinely performed one-finger pushups, on
one hand. He could sit elevated in a jackknife position for longer
than a half hour, while watching television. He could send opponents
flying several feet back from a punch delivered from only 1 inch
away. Lee’s sidekicks made recipients feel as if a car had hit them.
On one occasion, he was able to strike a formidable Karate master
opponent 16 times in a fight that lasted only 11 seconds. The fight
ended with Lee knocking him the full length of a handball court. He
was pushing the body to its limits and he final y found them when
he strained his fourth sacral nerve in his back. Although he would
defy the expectations of his doctors and rehabilitate himself to being an even better martial artist than he was before the incident, Lee was nonetheless bedridden for six months. He decided to channel his
pent up physical energy mental y, by researching the many volumes
on martial arts, philosophy, and motivational psychology that he
had collected in his extensive library. He read and reread Buddha,
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Alan Watts, Karl Rogers, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Pearls, D.T. Suzuki,
and Jiddu Krishnamurti. In dialogue with these thinkers, above all
Krishnamurti, the bedridden Bruce Lee filled seven notebooks with
The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
In this magnum opus, Lee criticizes traditional martial arts forms
as “thousands of years of propaganda.” Someone bound within the
systems of karate, judo, or kung-fu, is incapable of even accurately
perceiving the combat actions of a street fight, let alone effectively taking part in one. The training of such a “classical man” consists
only of simulated combat, wherein flowery forms and artificial techniques are rehearsed ritualistical y. Faced with an immediate
threat to one’s life, it is absurdly impractical to make sure that one is adhering to proper method. Lee demands that students of martial
art forget winning or losing, and be prepared to sustain an injury
and even death in the course of their training. Lee saw it as a farce
that judges at martial arts tournaments awarded points for blows
that never touched an opponent, based on who would probably
have hurt the others. He referred to these rehearsals as “organized
despair” and “dryland swimming”. Lee was the first martial artist
to have taught his student through full contact sparring, borrowing
boxing gloves and headgear from Western sports. At the 1967
International Karate Championships at Long Beach, where he was
first noticed by Hol ywood, Lee introduced this into what were
hitherto non-contact martial arts tournaments.
Only in the face of real danger will the martial artist recognize
that practicality is the ultimate criterion. This does not mean an
“anything goes” recklessness, but the ability to adopt any tool that
functions in the simplest and most direct manner to attain one’s
objective in a given combat situation. For example, in order to
respond to an opponent’s attack immediately, one must be able to
strike from wherever one is, without repositioning. Hooking and
swinging techniques from boxing can be useful y adopted by the
martial artist to this end. Lee colorful y refers to these unassuming
attacking tactics as “the un-crispy stuff”.
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Patterns of rhythmical classical blocks – such as katas of karate –
are not suited to the broken rhythm of a street fight. It is not simply that they are not physical y versatile enough. Stereotyped technique psychological y mediates one’s relationship to one’s opponent, thereby interfering with a direct perception of the combat situation
and precluding an immediate response. Consequently, a process of
un-conditioning the mind is required in order to replace a “this is
the only way” attitude with what Lee cal s “choiceless awareness”.
According to Lee, “awareness has no frontier” whereas “all thought
is partial.” Systems are established out of fear of uncertainty. So
as to be secured against being disturbed by the unexpected, one’s
relationship to others is fixed within a pattern of conduct. These
patterns are sustained by thought, which is a mechanical process
whereby memory frames every new experience in terms of old
habits and prejudices. It is here that Krishnamurti’s influence is
most apparent.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, although born and raised in India (another
British colony), took an irreverently Western approach to Eastern
spirituality. He was an iconoclast who resisted attempts by the
Theosophical Society to turn him into an Eastern Messiah. He
advocated individual authenticity and open-minded, dynamic
creativity against what he saw as the backward fascination of certain
Westerners with the guru-worship and obscurantist ritualism that
held Indian society in a spiritual straight jacket. Krishnamurti
taught that outward revolution aimed at a sane world society
beyond intercultural warfare was only attainable through freeing
the mind from all cultural conditioning, by cultivating an intense
awareness wherein Thought’s conceptualizing function becomes
transparent to itself. Krishnamurti’s ‘method’ for this involved the
aporia of Socratic dialogue. He referenced Socrates repeatedly and had mocking contempt for Eastern sitting meditation.
Agreeing with Krishnamurti, Lee explains that there is a
different kind of knowing than the piecemeal knowledge afforded by the thinking intellect. It is clear that Lee does not mean a mere
regress to animal instinct, since cultivating such ‘intuition’ also
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means “to destroy your own impulses caused by the instincts of
self-preservation”. We see this juxtaposition of a call to retrieve
something like animal instinct together with a transcendent teaching
of reconciliation with death, in this famous scene from Longstreet where Bruce Lee (L) has his student (S) on the ground in a choke
hold, and the following exchange ensues
. It centers on the Taoist
imagery of water as a metaphor for the yielding, dynamic strength
of the formless:
L: What is your instinct?
S: To pray.
L: In this position, your arms are useless.
S: Yeah. (coughing)
L: Can you kick or stomp me?
S: (coughing) No.
L: Then, if you wish to survive, what do you do?
S: I don’t know.
L: Bite.
S: Bite?!
L: Are we not animals?
(Lee releases him, checks if he’s ok.)
S: Bite, huh?
L: Biting is efficient in close quarters. But don’t make a plan of
biting. That is a very good way to lose your teeth.
S: There is so much to remember.
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L: If you try to remember you will lose. Empty your mind. Be
formless. Shapeless. Like water. Now you put water into a cup, it
becomes the cup. Put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now
water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Be water, my friend.
S: Yeah, why don’t I just stand in front of Bull and recite that to
him, maybe he’ll faint – or drown.
L: When is it?
S: Tomorrow.
L: You are not ready.
S: I know.
L: Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never
to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat, to learn to die is to be
liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes you must free your
ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying.
Lee cal s for the cultivation of immediate intuition through non-
judgmental introspective observation, wherein an alert and sharply
focused consciousness beyond the limits of thought becomes aware
of the limitations that deliberative thought has placed on oneself. This cannot be done in monastic isolation. It requires an interpersonal
relationship, which is “a process of self-revelation.” The other is
“the mirror in which you discover yourself.” Even at an ontological
level “to be is to be related”. One can only become aware of one’s
unconscious conditioning by observing one’s reactions in living
relationship with others, and then subjecting these reactions to “a
continuous state of inquiry without conclusion” which dissolves the
judgmental convictions upon which they are based. Of course, Lee
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