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'Lost,' a la Descartes

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STEP 2: But if Lost is filled with Enlightenment...how come it isn't very Enlightened?
Good question — and maybe EXACTLY the question Lost has been wanting us to ask. Truth is, the armchair analysis of Lost's philosophers hasn't made enough of the fact that its connection between character and namesake is purely ironic. The John Locke of Lost is at best a bad twin of John Locke the philosopher. Lost Locke believes in a kind of fate and destiny that transcends the facts of his experience — a way of thinking that runs counter to Enlightenment Locke's ''blank slate'' empiricism. And certainly Lost Locke's ''I'm on my own journey'' selfishness seems very anti-''social contract,'' Enlightenment Locke's other intellectual claim to fame, and judging from recent events, Lost Locke is paying the price for his solipsistic life. (The latter half of the Lost mantra, ''Live together, die alone,'' is really biting John in the butt right now.) But nobody spits in the face of his philosophical namesake like Desmond David Hume. Enlightenment Hume was a skeptic; he didn't buy into miracles, didn't believe in simple cause-and-effect. My guess is that, if he watched ''Catch-22,'' and saw how Desmond clung so fiercely to the belief in his own miraculous powers and his one-event-follows-another logic, Enlightenment Hume would be left shaking his head in disbelief.

So how do we make sense of Lost's insistence on mocking the Age of Enlightenment, which ended, like, more than 100 years ago? Glad you asked!

STEP 3: Mikhail the Monkey Wrench
There is one Lost character who respectfully embodies his philosophical namesake: Mikhail ''Patchy'' Bakunin. In real life, the radical Russian was all about anarchy — the destruction of all authoritarian agencies that regulate human free will. Lost Bakunin has expressed the simple subversive values of his namesake by defying the natural order of life and death — or at least, appearing to. Either way, his antics make a mockery of Enlightenment-minted reason and empiricism and formalizes the spirit of subversive irony within the philosophical matrix of Lost. (Looks like John Locke got some vengeance last episode when he humiliated Bakunin with a public beating.) And now, it becomes clear. For by adding Bakunin with Enlightenment, Lost has created a clever mathematical formula that adds up to our current philosophical milieu: Postmodernism, Enlightenment's mirror twin, the shadow ''yin'' to its sunshine ''yang.''

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