Andy Dufresne: That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you… Haven’t you ever felt that way about music?

Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn’t make much sense in here.

Andy Dufresne: Here’s where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don’t forget.

Red: Forget?

Andy Dufresne: Forget that… there are places in this world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s something inside… that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch. That’s yours.

Red: What’re you talking about?

Andy Dufresne: Hope.

Red rebukes hope as a dangerous thing, hope will drive a man insane, it has no use in prison. However for Andy who is in prison for a crime he did not commit, the injustice of the whole situation forces him to latch on to what cannot be taken from him since everything else; his dignity and his freedom, have already been taken and were not coming back anytime soon.

Warden Sam Norton made sure of that when he forced Andy to launder his money. He would not let the accountant go free, and for his stunt of trying to give the inmates hope by playing the opera music for them in the yard, he sent him to the “hole”. The hole is a place of solitary confinement, no visitors, hardly any light, just you and your thoughts for usually a short amount of time. Geez have a heart man, how can you send your accomplice who is laundering your money to that sort of torture? Not quite the experience Andy would have liked. But there’s a gift and that is Andy’s memory of a place, a time and circumstance that is not of the world he is currently in, but of a time when things were better.

Edmund Hursserl the founder of phenomenology would suggest that Andy’s recollection of music is due to his recognition of a previous consciousness from an experience he felt from music. He is able to recall such an experience subconsciously and relive the moment in the present.

From Wikipedia ( don’t use Wikipedia as a source says college professors, well this is my blog I do what I want ): “Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.”

Meaning in the sense that the observer observes the world and experiences the world from their perspective. Hursserl developed a notion of epoche, or bracketing an experience. Picture this you are traveling down a road and encounter a break in the road in which there is a structure that is between the path you are traveling and your continued destination. From the perspective you are currently at you see a structures opening and what appears to be the road continued on this structure. From your viewpoint you can kind of discern that this is some kind of bridge. This analysis would be bracketing the experience to understand the meaning of what you are observing. This would be a “local” bracketing in which from your observed perspective you are able to recognize an entity in its current form from your stance, if you were to float laterally and see the structure from another perspective you would identify that indeed this is a bridge. But each bracketing exposes the meaning of the observed, the bridge in this case.

Phenomenology is opposite of naturalism. In naturalism the observer is part of nature, the body exists as part of nature and meaning and understanding come from a pure empirical sense of observing the world. The world is, and we observe it. As opposed to phenomenology we experience the world, our being makes the world. We take our experiences and foster them into our conscious minds. We can and we do and we will because we are able to hope.

Author: admin

Obviously my interests include philosophy. I think thinking and thought are the beginning of every great thing. It’s how we understand and perceive the world. Periodically I’ll change things up and blog about something math or computer science related or even a blog about mythology. I am not political, trendy, or savvy, but I do like a good story. That is why I try and find a movie clip that hints or encompasses what I want to blog about. Sometimes the relevance is there, sometimes it’s a reach and I just really love the movie that I put in the post. The intent and purpose of my blog is to make you think, make me think and together our thoughts can be shared in a collection of material.