On the thought of Cimrman

Kırmızılar, 11 August '24

Bertrand Russell describes philosophy as starting with something simple that is not worth saying and ending with something paradoxical that no one will believe. He talks about the need to not be afraid of nonsense. But Cimrmanism is not absurd. It just gets its power from its non-seriousness. It may be possible to define it as surphilosophical with two characteristics. Because it is fictional against philosophy and also because it approaches it with humor.

Cimrman is a philosopher, inventor, writer, composer, educator, detective, mathematician and athlete. A character who appeared in a radio play in Czechoslovakia in 1966. The radio play first includes an interview with a musicologist who claims to have discovered documents belonging to Jara Cimrman, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the renovation of a country house. After this, this joke is continued in new programs, with other documents mentioning other features of Cimrman being found in many different places. Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell saw three missed calls from Jára Cimrman when he invented the telephone?

Cimrman reduced the number of Chekhov's Three Sisters to one and presented Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves as lonely Ali Baba. Since his masterpiece in this field is considered Hamlet without Hamlet, the other actors on the stage constantly say "Hamlet hid himself once again" and try to guess what he will say.

So what does Cimrman say as a philosopher? Cimrman's thought is generally explained as the opposite of the theses of Solipsism. While Solipsism emphasizes that the individual self exists and the external world does not exist, Cimrman argues that the external world exists and his own individual self does not exist. He describes the world as a place where he does not exist, with a small gap in the middle. If we take a piece of paper with a hole in the middle, we can compare the paper to the outside world, and Cimrman like the hole. Stretching and contraction of the paper causes a change in the shape of the hole. This move can be seen as Cimrman's thought process. But Cimrman is beyond the philosophy of Externism described here. It has a fictional position against unauthentic truth claims. This was the first condition for being surphilosophical. And he tries to laugh at them.

In La vita è bella, Guido was telling his son things he made up instead of what the Nazi officer said. He was saying that what happened in the concentration camp was actually a game, if you played this game you would get a gift on your birthday. He rebuilt the camp for his son.

Paul Auster also has a story. Auggie Wren, a tobacco shop owner in Brooklyn, reaches a house by tracking the wallet dropped by the thief he was chasing. At Christmas time, an old, blind and lonely woman opens the door and embraces Auggie as her long-lost grandson. Auggie continues the game, they eat together, and to make her happy, he tells her that he has found a job and will get married soon. The woman pretended to believe and was happy.

In both of these, there is a fiction against painful reality. I think that's what Cimrman is doing. Against philosophy that tries to understand the world, surphilosophy that smiles at the world perhaps for the last time...