Sorry, I had to use that line — we of course don’t know if anyone (other than Sei) is gay or bi.  

My sci-fi professor talks about epistemology every so often; given the nature of science fiction and its tendency to examine how we know what we know, this makes sense.  It also means the topic is on my mind, and I owe you folks a Marimite post.  So we’ll get a six-pack of theory and see where the night takes us.

Who’s familiar with Descartes?  Anyone?  Good, good, you in the back?  No?  Okay.  

Descartes is the guy who said “I think, therefore I am.”  Except he wrote it, and in Latin.  Originally it’s “cogito ergo sum.”  This was the result of two thought-experiments.  Being a huge nerd, but with no internet, Descartes seems to have sat down one day and asked himself, “What do I really know?”  He came to the conclusion that, due to their fuzzy and not very reliable nature, he couldn’t know anything that came to him through his senses.  What does that leave?  Not much.  The only thing he could be sure of was that he was thinking.  The entire world might be an illusion, there might not be any people in it, but he was thinking.

The next day (in his next essay, at any rate), he sat down again, and rather than spent twenty minutes arguing about whether the girl down the road was moe even though he didn’t feel the urge to protect her, he instead asked, “What does it mean that I’m thinking?”  Ultimately he came to the conclusion I quoted at you above — that if he was thinking, it meant, necessarily, that he was.  That is, he must exist, or he could not think.  

Now, whether your ascribe to Descartes’ theories or not (Cartesian Dualism, for example, isn’t thought too rad any longer), this is a great place to begin examining thought processes.  Which leads us, like a river to the sea, to Marimite.

Specifically, episode seven.  I watched eight already as well, and there are notes of this in that episode, but seven provided me with the spark of inspiration for this post.  In it Yumi tries to get Touko to become her little sister and is rebuffed.  In both episodes seven and eight Yumi spends some time figuring out what Touko might be thinking; she is distracted, sometimes, by a party, and seriously considers going to Kashiwagi, who knows all about Touko’s past and her circumstances, and finding out all about her.

Yumi comes to the conclusion she shouldn’t do that, it would be…  well, she’s not very clear on the problem, but most of us would agree with her that it would be unfair, or wrong, or prying, in some way.  Yumi should learn about Touko, the proper line of reasoning goes, from Touko.  This is the reason for the constant thread of Noriko running through this plot line — she is a way to get at Touko as well, and Yumi tries it once, and is rebuffed.  She quickly realizes what the problem was — Yumi should ask Touko to the party herself — and recants.  So yay, huzzah, so on.  But the rest of the problem hasn’t dawned on her yet, it seems.

You may be wondering why I spent so long jabbering about Descartes and epistemology.  Here’s where I (try to) make sense of it:  Yumi knows, truly, only that she exists.  She has a lot of beliefs — she assumes she’s right in thinking there are other people around, for example — but can only know she exists.  All other knowledge is filtered, for her, through unstable means.  Not only her senses, now, but her society and her surroundings.  She’s getting a lot of conflicting signals, from Sachiko, Kashiwagi, Noriko, and of course from Touko herself.  Here is the key question:  how does she know anything about Touko?  My answer is through the metaphorical equivalent of her senses — other people.  She is assembling an image of Touko from the fragments of the world around her, rather than the equivalent of thought, which is direct contact with Touko herself.  

The show, while highlighting this, seems also to be preparing Yumi for a better understanding.  It takes her a while — as it’s not part of her image of Touko yet — but Yumi finally figures out the dramatic monologue delivered at the party; Yumi doesn’t catch the significance of the speech, though, illustrating she’s still not figured things out well enough.  

How does this comparison between thought processes and personal interactions bear any fruit for us?  It highlights something I think is true:  the relationships of the sister-pairs make of them something like a single unit, much like Plato’s speculation on destined pairs that “complete” each other.  A pair of sisters who are good for each other function on a level of shared thought and understanding that makes of them nearly a single person, and thus describable to each other through Descartes’ self-awareness.  They are aware that the only truth that governs them is that they simply are — Yumi and Sachiko, at this point, want nothing more from each other than to simply be together, hence Sachiko’s decision to attend Lilian University.  Yumi and Touko have agendas, even though they are close to being in the same dialectal space as Yumi and Sachiko.  

~~~

If you don’t think this makes any sense, keep in mind that I wrote over 2000 words of thesis earlier today, and am reading a novel by Stanislaw Lem, which is excuse enough for mental fatigue.  But I think there’s something useful in there, though maybe it’s buried.

Tags: descartes, epistemology, maria sama ga miteru, marimite

Thus spake Cuchlann on Thursday, 5 March 2009 at 7:48 pm, and Anime expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.