It's a fucking tragedy is what it is

7. Trobule and Desire

"Ned: I want adventure! I want romance!
Bill: Ned, there is no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire.
Ned: Trouble and desire.
Bill: That's right. And the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you're in trouble you don't desire anything at all.
Ned: I see.
Bill: It's impossible.
Ned: It's ironic.
Bill: It's a fucking tragedy is what it is, Ned."
~Simple Men

Hal Hartley is a cornucopia of philosophical conundrums. And the constant theme of "Trouble and Desire" is not only ironic, it's a fucking tragedy. And as it states in another Hartley film "The trouble with us americans is that we want a tragedy with a happy ending." And that's where this next theme comes into play. For this situation, I turn to none other than the great David Hume and his text The Treatise of Human Nature. This good old text looks at passion and the will. And when we look at passion, there is no avoiding desire (which is a synonym for the word.)

Hume looks at passion as a positive and not a negative in the way that Hartley does. Hartley sees passion, romance and desire as something that leads us down the path of destruction. His viewpoint will be looked at a bit later, but for now, the positive look of Hume. So let's begin.

"Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates."

Yes. It's true. It is far easier to stick to reason. Be a businessperson, an accountant, something secure that pays well or gets you somewhere in the money world. Conform to the everyday mundane lifestyles that are easy to fall back on in a reasonable way. But who wants to live in a world where your hopes, dreams and desires take the backseat to security? A lot of people. One of them is not me. Hume continues to say how this is the main focus of moral philosophy. Reason trumps desire. He then states a bold statement:

"I shall endevour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will."

Now that's a bold statement, Sir Hume.

In a nutshell, Hume proves that "reason alone can never produce an action." We use math to get us to some ends, but math without our thought processes and application is useless (damn straight.) There is a desire to find an answer, to discover the end result of a problem or a desire to use math to figure out things that will lead us to what we ultimately need or want. Desire is the driving force, reason is the equation that makes that desire come about. Both reason and desire are meaningless, but when both are applied together, it gives both inertia or meaning.

So what is the purpose of that? Well it gives me drive to follow the passions and desires that I find in life: music, film, writing, etc. But than we get into trouble here and that's where Hartleyism comes in.

Think back to the quote in the beginning of the post. We all want romance and adventure but it seems that those are more catagorized by what Bill says: trouble and desire. And there is that ultimate paradoxical event where we desire something, we get it, we get into trouble and then we don't desire things anymore. Now, this doesn't happen all the time, but in human exisitence, it happens more times than not. And thats no good. We fall in love, run into problems, and break up. We think we find a great job, he get stuck in a rut, and you either become unhappy or move on. This is a tragic look at desire. But it happens so frequently, that its hard to not think of it that way.

So the best way to approach the trouble and desire factor? Apply earlier thoughts. Think of what we can control as the good. We know what we have control over. Ourselves and thats about it. Then we need to see that we are not fully complete until close to death. We are constantly changing; a synthesis if you will. Continuly growing and fulfilling our desires. Sometimes we run into trouble, but that is out of our control.

Again, nothing is perfect in this thought. We run into problems and ideas that will always show that this is the hardest path, but it helps to think this way.