Essays - Resources http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/ Thu, 17 May 2012 06:49:57 +0000 43200 Original content ranging across the sciences and humanities. Mimetopia and the illusion of meaning in Naboko... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/mimetopia-and-the-illusion-of-meaning-in-naboko-r122 (Continued from Part 1...)

Cincinnatus, at the end of his tether, begins to understand his circumstances for what they are. He recognises the theatricality around him, he understands that "... everything has duped me..." With this, comes the realisation of his own tragic complicity in the whole performance:

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This is the dead end of my life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation...I have discovered the little crack in life, here it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else...


The world around him now has become for him what he has suspected all along, something has been put together, soldered to something else, a makeshift performance, where nothing is real, but where everything fixes, everything spells death. How does language operate in such a parodied world? How can anything that is written, how can the word, be trusted?

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... how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense … it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in – ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all – the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration – no, again I am off the track – all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. (117)


They cannot be trusted. They desert him, or else they are maimed. Silence, then, a hidden language that must sit snugly in the little crack he has discovered, a crack that is at the same time a violent site of conflict and a syncopated world of meaning. He adds: "Everything I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport..." (118) His writing, his inscription must go beyond mere representation. It must go beyond the discourse of the everyday; it must move itself into what Delalande would call "Discours sur les ombres (Discourse on the Shadows)." (119)

There is a second condition. The abyss is that which contains nothing and everything. Distinctions between objects disappear in this space where there are no gods, no idols. It is a vortex that quells its thirst for creation by devouring all that already is. Cincinnatus writes for this reason. Yet, as we have seen, his words are, in his own words, deserters and cripples, forming only the froth of the excitement. In order for his words to have any use, they need to move across a vast site of perception, to be transported to a place where the work can be engendered, or tempered. The first step in this process is the presence of the reader.

Cincinnatus has already expressed the notion of someone who will one day read his words an d who would feel he ha awakened for the first time. His is a revelatory work, but revelation require audience. Therefore, now that he is at the end of the line, he beseeches whoever cares to listen:

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Save these jottings – I do not know whom I ask, but save these jottings ... let them lie around for awhile – how can that hurt you – my last wish – how can you not grant it? I must have at least the theoretical possibility of having a reader, otherwise, really, I might as well tear it all up. (120)


The reader, co-conspirator, a double of sorts must be present in order for Cincinnatus to walk freely toward his mortal hour. The meaning of the work lies, then, not in the distance between reader and writer, but between reader and the work, for long after Cincinnatus has slipped into the chink, the crack, the work will still live under the treatment of the reader. Cincinnatus’ words reverberate in Kafka’s with the undertone of Samsa’s double:

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... I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn’t too great….the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. …indeed in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the attention that the reader concentrates on death... (121)


"(T)he capacity of mine to meet death with contentment" implies that ties with the world have been severed. He is already dead (122), a stone. However, this contentment, this rejoicing over the enacted death of the character, is never complete unless Kafka is allowed "the theoretical possibility of having a reader". This exile in death is linked to writing. In other words, Kafka writes in order to die. Cincinnatus by the end of the novel has begun to see and accept this preposterous proposition. Preposterous though it is, once he has allowed himself the possibility that someone will read his words, he is willing to subject himself to the farce that has been his whole imprisonment. He does so to force a separation, a separation that will finally sever all ties with the material world. Kafka, too, says, "I shun people not because I want to live quietly, but rather because I want to die quietly." (123)

Kafka’s quietude is a desire to become nothing, to die anonymously, to pass into the ether of things without a trace through writing. Through writing, one is ultimately also written. To rejoice of one’s own dying through the enactment of the death of a character, to see your own death in someone else’s is not only to effect a negation of one’s self, but also to be re-written in the form of a text. To enjoy your death seen through another’s death, that is, to die as a character in the eyes of a reader – is to enter the abyss, to become legend, to become ether, to transcend the trappings of the material world. By dying through his characters Kafka dies endlessly, but he is also resurrected endlessly. In short, to rejoice in another’s death as one’s own is to immerse oneself in the text, which is the anonymous abyss where only voices speak, and faces are unseen, like Cincinnatus’ father who leaves nothing but the trace of his voice and his essential quality. He has no face. His face is every face.

Kafka is resurrected in each of his texts – the inmate of In the Penal Colony (124) is Kafka: society writes its demands on the inmate as does the attractive human world on Kafka; Gregor Samsa’s predicament is Kafka’s, for the latter, too, is hounded by societal requierement to be useful. The creature in The Burrow (125) who designs his grand structure but who is still filled with doubt about its efficacy and usefulness is Kafka; Joseph K. believes he can understand and function in the world based on his own system of values. His tragedy is Kafka’s tragedy – he does not realise that he can only do so if he fully embraces the human world; K secures a highly sought-after interview in The Castle (126) yet throws away the opportunity. He vacillates in dissatisfaction – all this is Kafka. All this is the abyss. To become a character in his own texts is to rise above the material. This is the motive behind Kafka’s rejoicing.

It is for this reason that Cincinnatus can say, as his jailers arrive at the cell to take him, in an horse-drawn carriage, to his execution,

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I ask three minutes – go away for that time or at least be quiet – yes, a three-minute intermission – after that, so be it. I’ll act to the end my role in your idiotic production. (127)


A three-minute intermission in a matinee. Cincinnatus has finally seen through the whole affair, and his own part in it. He gives himself over to the theatricality of the material world. He embraces the value system in order to overcome it, as Joseph K does not do. "I’ll act to the end." He has been nothing but a character in an "idiotic production". An idiot’s tale within which Cincinnatus is merely "a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage". (128) He embraces his fictionalising and rejoices in his death.

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This realisation has come after he has written his very last words.

Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of...


At this point, he runs out of paper, but manages to find one more sheet and completes the sentence with the word "death", which he immediately crosses out thinking he must say it with greater precision. A single word sits on a blank page. "Death." It is crossed out. DeathDeath.

The very first words he writes down in his cell are these: "In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all I had premonitions, premonitions of this finale." (129) These words are crossed out as well. "I am." The imperative, to be. An affirmation of life, which he crosses out, nullifying that affirmation. It is a life that isn’t. He sees nothing ahead of him, except death. Now, though, at the end of his life, when he confronts death head on, the affirmation of death he nullifies in a similar manner. What does he see in its stead? Precisely that chink, that crack, the syncope. The written word fixes, cuts off the sentient centres that do not fall within the space of a word. That is how he recognises that some things must be left unsaid. (130) There is no death, no dying, if he rejoices in the death of the other, the death of one of the cast of stage characters that he essentially is. Like Kafka, who rejoices in his death in the death of his characters, Cincinnatus C. must rely on the theoretical possibility of a reader in order to rejoice in his own dying in the death of the literary figure of Cincinnatus.

However, despite this realisation, despite the intimation of a freedom that is already within his grasp, he cannot shake off the fear of the idea of his head being hacked off. He understands that the wave of sickness that followed the thought of his decapitation was drawing him "into a system that was perilous to him." Yet, he can do nothing to stave off the system. He recognises that he is caught in a world of unreality, and that he is headed for a world which will transcend all this. Yet, "the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety." (131)

Cincinnatus is made to lie on the block. He is positioned to meet the down-swinging axe. It is at this point of being executed, like a word that quells all competing forces of meaning so that only one victor remains, at this point where Cincinnatus can just make out the threshold to some hidden space of release, He discovers the hidden mystic inscription:

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... one Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before – at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around. (132)


He rejoices in his death, the death of the other, and walks away from the scene that is now collapsing, disintegrating all around him. He senses voices, like that of his father, like that of characters on a page, that are akin to him, and in that direction he walks, and exits the stage production of Mimetopia.

Cincinnatus’ anonymity is achieved, not from shunning the world completely. The world, to be sure, is seamless, like the endless tapestries of the Gods. Yet, Cincinnatus, like Gregor Samsa, like the Woolfian narrator, like Kafka, has discovered certain omissions within the fabric of language, the language we must all speak in order to be. That omission, the distance between the structure of this language and the apprehended world forms the concentration of ambiguity. However, in order to gain access to this centre of ambiguity, one must be of the world in order to die with the world. In other words, the world, which consists of a language that seeks to define and fix, is already a world that is dead, inasmuch as it believes in its own facticity and truth. The beyond, contained in a crack, is always already the abyss, the outside that speaks, that dies and is always dying, but which must be resurrected in order to die repeatedly. This circularity, like an undercurrent that is always flowing just under the skin of language is where Cincinnatus disappears. He becomes the abyss, not by challenging the world, but by being of it in order to discover the chink within which the voice of his father and the voices of those other literary figures resonate.

Literature, therefore, is this abyss, this anonymous, absent, omitted language that resounds like an invisible inscription, a trace that forces its way to the Outside of fixity and definition. Cincinnatus’ jottings have been saved, and we read them as a text from cover to cover. Who has written the text? Which cincinnatus has written it? Is it the one who was unnecessarily counting to ten, or the one who had managed to move the unmovable table in the cell and who had dissembled himself, skullcap included? What we are left with these musings is not a fixity or definition, but merely a trace of voices. They are all that remain of the text, of Literature, from which nothing is graspable, but from which everything is discernible.

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Footnotes:

(1) Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, 1st ed., vol. 2, 4 vols. (London: Penguin Books, 1998). 148
(2) Foucault, Aesthetics. 149
(3) Foucault, Aesthetics. 154
(4) Foucault defines ‘attraction’ in his essay The Thought of the Outside (Essential Works, Vol.1): "To be attracted is not to be beckoned by the allure of the exterior, rather, it is to suffer – in emptiness and destitution – the presence of the outside and, tied to that presence, the fact that one is irremediably outside the outside (154)." Attraction, therefore, is not a positive movement toward something, but an undeniable condition, a burdensome, existential relation similar to the relation between an unsupported stone and the ground.
(5) Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 19995). 109
(6) Foucault, Aesthetics. 206
(7) Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillain C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 347
(8) Foucault, Aesthetics. 157-8
(9) Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, vol. Part vii (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955). 316-25
(10) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
(11) Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
(12) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(13) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(14) Nabokov, Invitation. 191
(15) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(16) Nabokov, Invitation. 77
(17) Nabokov, Invitation. 77
(18) Nabokov, Invitation. 76
(19) Foucault, Aesthetics. 157-8
(20) Nabokov, Invitation. 27.
(21) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(22) Nabokov, Invitation. 27; (italics my emphasis)
(23) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(24) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(25) Nabokov, Invitation. 38
(26) Nabokov, Invitation. 47
(27) Timothy Langen, "The Ins and Outs of Invitation to a Beheading," Nabokov Studies 8 (2004). 62
(28) Nabokov, Invitation. 11
(29) Nabokov, Invitation. 12
(30) Dana Dragunoiu, "Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition," Journal of Modern Literature XXV.1 (2001). 56
(31) Nabokov, Invitation. 129
(32) Nabokov, Invitation. 130
(33) Nabokov, Invitation. 131
(34) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 56
(35) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 54
(36) Nabokov, Invitation. 61
(37) Dragunoiu, "Nabokov's Invitation." 56
(38) In all four dystopias, the illegality of the ‘soul’ as a spiritual element in the make up of the individual body and the body of the social is manifest in the ostracising of writing, that which calls to existence what is inadmissible in a materialist monism. We shall come back to this at a later stage.
(39) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(40) Langen, "Ins and Outs." 61
(41) Foucault, Aesthetics. 177
(42) Nabokov, Invitation. 150
(43) Nabokov, Invitation. 69
(44) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(45) Nabokov, Invitation. 19 (italics my emphasis)
(46) Nabokov, Invitation. 34
(47) Nabokov, Invitation. 34; (italics my emphasis)
(48) His beheading has already been scripted. The performance, that is, the court hearing, the incarceration, the whole comic episode with M’sieur Pierre, the spider in the cell, the apparent goodwill of his jailers, and so on, is put on merely to provide the already determined ending with a narrative continuity – C is imprisoned; Pierre masquerading as a fellow-inmate befriends him in an attempt to become his brother or double; When thus conjoined, both executioner and prisoner can truly become one when axe meets neck.
(49) Nabokov, Invitation. 60
(50) Nabokov, Invitation. 31-2
(51) Foucault, Aesthetics. 178
(52) Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and the Other, Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature, ed. Malcolm Jones (Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 19992). 167
(53) Nabokov, Invitation. 102
(54) Nabokov, Invitation. 78
(55) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 142
(56) Nietzsche, Birth. 143
(57) Nietzsche, Birth. 149
(58) Nietzsche, Birth. 146
(59) Nabokov, Invitation. 21
(60) Nabokov, Invitation. 23
(61) Nabokov, Invitation. 24
(62) Nabokov, Invitation. 29
(63) Nabokov, Invitation. 27; (italics my emphasis)
(64) Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers Volume 5, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971). 175-180
(65) Nabokov, Invitation. 191
(66) Blanchot, Space. 44
(67) Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Vintage, 2003). 77-83
(68) Woolf, Haunted House. 77
(69) Woolf, Haunted House. 77
(70) Woolf, Haunted House. 80
(71) Nietzsche, Birth. 144
(72) Woolf, Haunted House. 81
(73) Woolf, Haunted House. 81 (italics my emphasis)
(74) Foucault, Aesthetics. 74
(75) Woolf, Haunted House. 83 (italics my emphasis)
(76) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988). 11
(77) de Certeau, Everyday Life. 17
(78) Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 11
(79) Nabokov, Invitation. 12 (Italics my emphasis)
(80) Nabokov, Invitation. 33
(81) Nabokov, Invitation. 27
(82) Nabokov, Invitation. 29
(83) Nabokov, Invitation. 41
(84) Nabokov, Invitation. 104
(85) Robert Alter, "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics," Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 54
(86) Nabokov, Invitation. 44
(87) Connolly, Early Fiction. 173
(88) Nabokov, Invitation. 45
(89) Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923, trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schoken Books, 1976). 295
(90) Kafka, Diaries. 409
(91) Kafka, Diaries. 302 (italics my emphasis)
(92) Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, London, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993). 75-128
(93) Kafka, Stories. 77 (italics my emphasis)
(94) Nabokov, Invitation. 22
(95) Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, ed. Max Brod (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991). 1
(96) Kafka, Stories. 85 (italics my emphasis)
(97) Connolly, Early Fiction. 174
(98) Nabokov, Invitation. 80
(99) G.M. Hyde, Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Writer (London: Marion Boyars Pulbishers, 1977). 134
(100) Nabokov, Invitation. 81 (italics my emphasis)
(101) Nabokov, Invitation. 81
(102) Hyde, Nabokov. 140
(103) Blanchot, Space. 44
(104) Kafka, Diaries. 134 (italics my emphasis)
(105) Connolly, Early Fiction. 175
(106) Nabokov, Invitation. 102 (italics my emphasis)
(107) Nabokov, Invitation. 11
(108) Nabokov, Invitation. 103
(109) Nabokov, Invitation. 103
(110) Nabokov, Invitation. 118
(111) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, 1994 ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 47
(112) Kafka, Notebooks. 1
(113) Nabokov, Invitation. 112
(114) Nabokov, Invitation. 116
(115) Nabokov, Invitation. 180
(116) Nabokov, Invitation. 181
(117) Nabokov, Invitation. 175
(118) Nabokov, Invitation. 176
(119) Nabokov states in his Forward that "the only author that I must gratefully recognise as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book", is Pierre Delalande. A quote from Delalande’s book, Discours sur les ombres, serves as the epigraph to Invitation: "Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels" (As the insane believes in God, we believe we are mortals.). Delalande is a spectre, a Nabokovian invention.
(120) Nabokov, Invitation. 165 (italics my emphasis)
(121) Kafka, Diaries. 321
(122) Blanchot, Space. 92
(123) Kafka, Diaries. 295
(124) Kafka, Stories. 131-160
(125) Kafka, Stories. 467-503
(126) Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957).
(127) Nabokov, Invitation. 179
(128) William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994). 1076
(129) Nabokov, Invitation. 12
(130) Nabokov, Invitation. 175
(131) Nabokov, Invitation. 183
(132) Nabokov, Invitation. 191 (italics my emphasis)

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Bibliography

Alter, Robert. "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics." Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. 1994 ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Beckett, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 19995.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. 1982. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Connolly, Julian W. Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and the Other. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Ed. Malcolm Jones. Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Dragunoiu, Dana. "Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition." Journal of Modern Literature XXV.1 (2001): 53-68.

Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 4 vols. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. Collected Papers Volume 5. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1971.

Hyde, G.M. Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Writer. London: Marion Boyars Pulbishers, 1977.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillain C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Kafka, Franz. The Blue Octavo Notebooks. 1954. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Ed. Max Brod. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.

---. The Castle. 1930. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957.

---. Collected Stories. 1933. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York, London, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993.

---. The Diaries 1910-1923. Trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schoken Books, 1976.

Langen, Timothy. "The Ins and Outs of Invitation to a Beheading." Nabokov Studies 8 (2004): 59-70.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. 1960. Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. Vol. Part vii. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Vintage, 2003]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:44:43 +0000 5516adb142fcb18a017c72602abbdb6d Mimetopia and the illusion of meaning in Naboko... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/mimetopia-and-the-illusion-of-meaning-in-naboko-r121 Niven Kumar (2010)

Literature takes as its space of meaning and operation the void that is created when language tries to move away from itself, to move away from the "mode of being of discourse" (1), that is, representation. The language of discourse is one dimensional, linear, and works towards itself. Instead of approaching itself until it reaches the point where it can only express its own truths, Literature is a language that finds a passage to the outside, where a gap in meaning is formed, where it disperses (2), where it speaks. This challenges the transcendentalism implicit in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". This Cartesian formula is predicated on the principle that in order for existence to exist, thought or conscious thought, the thought that knows it is thinking, must first exist, a priori. Literature is the neutral space where the transcendental subject is no longer a priori; it is the anvil upon which the subject of Literature (what speaks, and what it speaks about) is laid bare, like an inmate of a penal colony is made to come under the harrowing regime of redemption.

This outside, the neutral space from which Literature speaks, is not one dimensional, but a multi-layered treasure of meaning, a palimpsest. As such, one is never certain of its centre, never able to apprehend its essence, since the outside never yields it. (3) The silence of Literature, then, is not its inability to speak, but its dispersed, non-linear temporality, its ability to transform thought into a material energy, forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness. The outside, the neutral space of Literature, is also the void, the death of transcendental truths.

In such a situation, where the neutral space we speak of is a void that reveals nothing of its essence, but which we go back to over and over again, attracted (4) as we are by it, we are faced with an absence. It is not merely a physical, spatial absence; it is also a temporal absence, since in Literature, the “here’ is nowhere as well; the "present" is not present. However, the "not present" does not refer back to a past, since the past has the force of the "here" and "now".

The dialectical self-negation inherent in the language of literature calls to mind Beckett’s formulation of this theme: "What matter who’s speaking, someone said, What matter who’s speaking." (5) The absent present that is the site of the language of Literature (writing) encapsulates Beckett’s formulation. Writing frees itself from expressing the views of an author, who disappears once the first word is written, and creates a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Writing, then, is an anonymous process, a withdrawal that leads to a hollowness, which in turn leads to the erosion of the person who speaks. Writing carries the mark of death wherever it goes. Writing is an effacement of the writing subject, the murderer of the author who ceases to exist as his or her first word is born. "The writing subject cancels out the signs of his individuality." (6) The murder of the writing subject, the self-effacement, is the supreme act of Anonymity. It is the point at which Death meets and marries Anonymity, a turning away that denies itself even as it turns away, like a Christ who is thrice denounced before the final denouncement on Golgotha. By doing so, it speaks freely.

This zone of effacement speaks but silently, it writes but invisibly. In a sense it is a forgotten space that is always caught within the liminal space between the inside and the outside, or as Irigaray puts, like "the forgotten vagina", the "passage that is missing, left on the shelf, between the outside and the inside, between the plus and the minus." (7) For Irigaray, this constitutes the drama of concealment and unconcealment, visibility and invisibility, anonymity and individuality. Of course, this drama unfolds upon the battlefield of the relations of sexual difference. However, her metaphor of the concealed, yet ever looming orifice is Foucault’s "always receding" law, the intangible God that is always waiting on the day of judgement. For, if the law were self-evident, it would no longer be the law. If the law were decipherable, then, one could choose to follow it or disobey it. The "presence of the law is its concealment." (8) Just as Plato sees light as invisible, and which can only be seen as eidos, "an idea, or sight with form", in the things that are brought into existence (9), for Foucault, the invisibility of the law can only be 'seen' when it is provoked and appears in the form of punishment, or any other manifestation.

The law always resides on the Outside, and the Outside is always concealed in the web of its own complexity. In other words, the Outside negates itself even as it writes itself into the action which it envelops. This anonymous rendering of its own interiority dissolves all solidity that its manifestations seek to emphasise. In order for Literature to speak free from the secret interiority of the Outside it, too, like the law, must reside in his own concealment.

What arises from this cloaked drama is a contestation that revolves around the concentric circles of anonymity and individuality, between which lies the notion of Self, of Knowing. It is not the Knowing of the subject conscious of its own knowing, but the Knowing that seems to negate its own consciousness; in effect, a non-Knowing, a subjectivity that must also be a mystery to itself in order to be itself. This is not Gnostic mysticism, an all-encompassing wisdom that, being aware of itself, declares to the world that it is the inside, the centre, but the essence of writing, where language continually retreats within itself.

This predicament, which is pre-empted and fore-grounded in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, is the consequence of writing’s silence, its inaccessibility from the outside of itself where meaning is trapped between two poles. Cincinnatus C’s only recourse to this non-discursive space is through writing. Indeed, it is only when, through his writing, C becomes the text itself that he begins to break free from the discursive apparatus of the everyday. The gap within which C resides is the gap that cannot be accessed by Discourse, that being which resides at the very centre of the Dystopian Outside that absorbs all language and regurgitates it as its own.

In other words, then, the story of Cincinnatus C and his beheading is the story of Literature, its self-concealment in the place of its own presence. Cincinnatus may write the text that we read, or the text we read may be the story of what Cincinnatus writes, but it is still the story of his disappearance, of his eventual submergence into the liquid ether of voices, what Blanchot would call the "space of death." (10)

The Mimetopia of Invitation to a beheading

Materialist Monism and the desacralisation of the Body

Cincinnatus C (11) exists on the fringes of his society. C, "the son of an unknown transient" and a mother he had only met once in his early twenties, and "who had conceived him one night at the Ponds when she was still in her teens", (12) spends his childhood in a "large institution". (13) Even at a very young age, he becomes aware of a strange and unique quality about himself, an opacity that sets him apart from the others around him. This strange quality allows him to retreat from the living world of physicalities into a place occupied by "beings akin to him". (14) Who these beings are is never made clear, but we do know that Cincinnatus’ childhood was filled with dreams within which the world was "ennobled, spiritualised ... the world would come alive, become so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life". (15) This free and ethereal dreamworld is a "burning blackness" (16) where he "spins like a top, with such propelling force, such tongues of flame" that he can feel "that primordial palpitation ... the mainspring of my 'I'". (17) Cincinnatus describes this point as the "final, indivisible, firm, radiant point". (18)

However, his difference, his unique ‘absence’, his ability to remove himself from his immediate physical environment becomes increasingly difficult to disguise. The more he is identified as belonging to the outside, the more he is made to conform. The law, as we have seen, resides in its own concealment (19), and as long as it is not awakened, or confronted with recalcitrance, it remains all encompassing and anonymous. C is brought under surveillance when his opacity begins to thwart the law’s perpetual yet imperceptible presence. At the age of twenty-two, C becomes a kindergarten teacher (his duties include "keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or cross-eyed". (20)) but a "second-degree complaint" (21) is made against him. He is put through a rigorous examination in which he is made to "write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades, and maladies." (22) The material must triumph, and the key to conformity is the ability of all individuals to mimic the material, to embody in both body and mind the materialist supremacy over things. C, however, is young, and the resourcefulness of youth enables him to pass these tests. He is released and is allowed to "continue working with children of the lowest category, who were expendable..." (23)

Cincinnatus is therefore already distanced, pushed to the outside by a "world of souls transparent to one another". (24) The novel depicts a dystopian-like world where, as Cincinnatus says, "matter was weary. Time gently dozed." (25) Matter, all that is material and discernible through the medium of matter, the order that is established via a system of empirical facticity, the ordering of things which is implied through the prioritising of the material over the idealist or metaphysical, in short, the system of materialist thought, is only arbitrarily and randomly categorised. The books in the prison library from which Cincinnatus is provided reading material are not arranged in alphabetical order. They are sorted according to the number of pages in each book. (26) Clearly, there is no essential order to this world, but merely "an ordering algorithm" (27) instituted by the ethic of the system in operation. Order disintegrates into entropy.

This entropy, however, is denied, staved off through the emphasis of an enlightened ordering that permeates Cincinnatus’ world. The novel opens with an austere rule of law: "In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper." (28) In his prison cell is a list of rules for prisoners, and even the spider that he finds within the four walls of the cell is described as the "official friend of the jailed". (29) Everything, therefore, that exists or occurs has already been mandated and prescribed, or else forbidden. Physical and material needs are given priority over everything else.

The legal system in Invitation rests on the assumption that a man condemned to die can and will remain content if his physical needs are met leading up to the execution. (30) The needs of the soul are overlooked and the immateriality that characterises the soul and all other concepts such as love, spirit, etc, are denied. Hence, M’sieur Pierre, the executioner, can extol the "pleasures of love", (31) the "pleasures of a spiritual order", (32) and "gastronomical pleasures" (33) by reducing them to the level of physical impulses. (34) In this world which mirrors that of the Soviet State (it shares a "materialist and epistemologically realist world view" (35)) a shadow like Cincinnatus C must keep hidden what will surely be his undoing.

Because he is opaque, because his soul is inaccessible to the intrusive rays of the collective, Cincinnatus is found guilty of "gnostical turpitude", "the most terrible of crimes". (36) Terrible because, his ‘gnosticism’ is a fortress of knowledge and knowing that allows him to penetrate the world beyond the empirical. The "material monism" (37) of the world of Invitation insists on the standardisation and regulation of souls. It seeks to establish and maintain a world that reeks of apocalyptic simplicity, reminiscent of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (38) His "basic illegality" (39) is that unlike the rest of the world, he refuses or is unable to remain within the strict codes of the regulated materialist system. (40)

Materialist philosophies propound a mechanistic reading of the world, and of our inner experience; the soul is merely a manifestation or an extension of the body and its practices. They also suggest a ready acceptance of the observable as real: the official friend of the jailed, the spider in Cincinnatus’ cell, is a toy, placed there for the purposes of authenticity. The spider, like everything else in this prison world within which C is caught, is mimesis, a grand production, it is representation of a ‘real’ reality, hence, a simulation. That the spider is not real does not matter to those who are its authors; that much of the events and procedures within the prison are scripted (which go awfully wrong) is of no consequence, however, since what is essential is the material and all its manifestations and representations.

Materiality in Invitation, then, has more in common with verisimilitude. The incarceration of Cincinnatus, the rights conferred upon him as a citizen, human being, and condemned man (his food is that which the jailers themselves have; visitation rights; privacy; delightful company, etc.), his eventual execution – all these have only a likeness to the truth, and therefore, the appearance of being true. This verisimilitude is what lends the world of Invitation its apparent inherent authenticity.

These premises, then, dominate the world of Invitation where the private, the inside, the interiority of the subject is open to public scrutiny, where space is desacralised (41). M’sieur Pierre, Cincinnatus’ executioner, can claim, therefore that "the structure of Cincinnatus’ soul is as well known to me as the structure of his neck". (42) It suggests a false engagement with the empirical world. It imposes upon the empirical a set of specious assumptions. This also true when the ubiquitous M’sieur Pierre’s very first words to Cininnatus are: "You bear an extraordinary resemblance to your mother. I myself never had the chance of seeing her, but Rodrig Ivanovich kindly promised to show me her photograph." (43) Cincinnatus’ "extraordinary resemblance" to his mother is taken on faith, since there is always some resemblance between mother and son, however remote it might be. Materiality is abstracted, isolated from itself – negated – and reapplied as a ‘new’ truth, a generic facticity, in short, it is ideologised. Verisimilitude. The Work, that is, the scripted world of Invitation, is made authentic. M’sieur Pierre is made to look the picture of credibility. What M’sieur Pierre has achieved here, is that he has become the personification, the embodiment of Discourse.

The language of Discourse, as we have seen earlier, is that which speaks of itself, of its own truths. To put it in materialist terms, it is the body that performs in order to represent itself to itself. A significant idea emerges from this statement. If representation is merely a substitution of the thing itself, then, the representational qualities of the Work within Invitation to a Beheading are, in essence, the only certainties. In other words, the materiality of the society that has incarcerated Cincinnatus C is predicated on its ambiguity, its haphazard claim to truth, which it imposes upon its populace. By communicating with itself, then, reality merely simulates the real. It is mimesis that produces the transparency of souls, because it is the endless simulation of the same. The living, physical reality is an empty shell, meaning-less and devoid of any form of substance, and therefore, authenticity. Reality, or the real, is nothing more than the mimetic impulse, that which Cincinnatus himself describes as "semi-sleep". (44)

Hence, the ritualised order that permeates all thought and action requires that the sentence be whispered. In accordance with this, the judge puts his mouth close to C’s ear and whispers the sentence. This theatricality is further matched by the ‘arena’ of the court:

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... (H)e could see the gaudy pantaloons of their fops, and the hand-mirrors and iridescent scarves of the women of fashion... The defence counsel and the prosecutor, both wearing makeup and looking very much alike (the law required that they be uterine brothers but such were not always available, and then makeup was used), spoke with virtuoso rapidity the five thousand words allotted to each. (45)


The legal system is, therefore, a parody of itself, a caricature that revels in its own interiority, its own ‘self.’ In such a situation, noble principles of justice and morality become vacuous words, with no other life other than their own.

His own lawyer, a certain Roman Vissarianovich, is non-existent in the sense that he is merely a parody of the law sent to protect Cincinnatus. On his first entrance, he is ruffled and sweaty, and visibly troubled because he has, moments before, lost one of his cuff-links. When C asks him why he is being refused knowledge of the exact execution date, Roman exclaims, "Can’t you even now remain within legitimate limits? ... I dropped in merely to ask if you didn’t have some legitimate wishes ..." (46) In the middle of this interview the Prison Director, Rodrig Ivanovich, enters to return Roman his lost cuff-links, despite the sacrosanct confidentiality between lawyer and client.

However, it is here that a significant shift occurs in the narrative. In an exchange between the Director (Rodrig) and the lawyer (Roman), the conventional definitions that distinguish one individual from another begin to disintegrate:

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'Listen to him', chuckled the director. 'He has to know everything. How do you like that Roman Vissarionovich?'

'Oh, my friend, you are so right', sighed the lawyer.

'Yes, sir', continued the former, giving his keys a rattle. 'You ought to be more cooperative, mister. All the time he’s haughty, angry, snide. ... No need to mope as you do. Isn’t that right, Roman Vissarionovich?'

'That’s right, Rodion, that’s right', concurred the lawyer with an involuntary smile. (47)


In an instant, the distinctions between the director of the prison, Rodrig, and the bearded jailer, Rodion who, at the beginning of this episode in C’s cell was not even present, disintegrate as in a burlesque. The rapid-fire exits and entrances belong to the world of farce and the commedia d’ell arte. Not only must C contend with the uncertainty of a beheading that has already happened (48); not only must he contend with a materiality whose vacuousness is hidden by the many masks it wears; not only is he a prisoner of a materialist regime that delimits the world of potentialities into a world of fixed outcomes; Cincinnatus must also struggle to interact with a materiality that is arbitrary, artificial, a materialist vision predicated upon that which belongs firmly in the realm of vraisemblance.

Similarly, a little later on, Rodion the jailer rushes into the cell to say that C will be allowed to see his wife the next day. He leaves the cell, bumping into the director as he does so. The director repeats the same message ad verbatim. Rodion the jailer has left the cell, now occupied by the prisoner and Rodrig the director. But C spots "leather apron and red beard, apparently left behind by Rodion ... still cluttering the chair." (49) The director speaks of cleaning up the cell for the wife’s visit the next day. Wishing to hear no more half-truths and the insignificant preoccupations, C requests that he leave the cell. However, it is Rodion who answers, "Quite impossible." The leather apron and the red beard that were cluttering the chair a little earlier on, are now missing, and comfortably affixed to Rodion’s person.

Cincinnatus recognises, therefore, that he is

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... surrounded by some sort of wretched spectres, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life. In theory one would wish to wake up. But wake up I cannot without outside help, and yet I fear this help terribly, and my soul has grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes. (50)


These spectres rule the land; they are the law. His own death has already happened, and yet he does not know when it will occur. Knowledge of this most significant detail in the story, a detail that is brushed aside by everyone he comes in contact with is, in essence, the kernel of his most intimate self, the point of his subjectivity, the very coordinate upon which all other points of his life so far, and his life hitherto, hinge.

Like an Elizabethan parade of apparitions, the "wretched spectres" that pass for real life, then, are part of an elaborate performance, a grand theatrical experience that can culminate only in the demise of the performance. This is so because the performance itself leads to no resolution. In other words, it is pure performance, a pure staging, a representation of itself for itself.

The defamiliarised, desacralised world of Invitation is a Dystopian world, an imaginary world gone wrong, even if its founding principles hold the promise of the establishment of a utopia. The other classic examples of dystopian fiction already mentioned all depict societies whose goal is a paradisaical state of being. The Utopian vision sees the world as perfectible, that humanity can be perfected, that a state of divinity and grace can be established on earth, that human society and humanity can be made in the image of itself. While utopian spaces are essentially unreal (51), the vision which they are constitutive of are present in all societies, the creation of a better place to live, the establishment of a ‘good’ society. Dystopias, essentially dysfunctional utopias, are the manifest failure of this utopian vision, even though they are predicated upon the same fundamental principles of perfectibility. Indeed, that is what the ‘system’ in Invitation is geared towards, a society of ‘good’, ‘moral’ beings whose lives are in some way conditioned and determined for them. That is why, the reticence of Cincinnatus, his inability to suppress his opaque double, the "I" that sees beyond the desert plains of materialist myopia, the self that cannot be fashioned by any moral code or state dogma, the soul that fails to fall within the limits of the already prescribed mode of being is frowned upon, made to conform, by all the means possible, hounded by the conformist pressures of the surrounding society. (52)

The entire world of Invitation is performative. That is why the world of Invitation is a mimesis of a utopia, a dystopia that aspires to perfection, and therefore, mimics it. It is a Mimetopia, a simulation of itself. It stages itself in what can only be described as a farce, a tragic farce that plays with the life of one man, one human among spectres.

C’s mistake is that he is opaque, impenetrable, not because he has a resilient; his is a "fleshy incompleteness ... a greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here – a poor vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble, and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during his sleep – still, still – his real life showed through too much." (53)

Two Cincinnatuses, then; two sides – one that operated in the materialist "semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind", and another that finds meaning and sense of wonderment in "a more genuine reality". (54)

The doubling (which we shall look at in the next section) is itself a mimesis, but this time, the mimetic qualities of this coupling is a critique of the Mimetopian materialism of the Work. We have seen above how its arbitrary materialism delimits the possibilities open to an objective, or wholistic apprehension of the world. Instead of allowing for a pluralistic engagement with things and ideas, ‘reality’ is curtailed and contained within defined borders.

Rodrig and Rodion are practitioners of the "art of dissimulation", as Nietzsche would have it, wrapped in the drapery of convention, where perception glides "across the surface of things and sees forms". (55) In their world, where language is ‘legislated’ (56) to establish the first laws of ‘truth,’ there is no "sensuous perception". (57) Instead, things are named, that is, they are given form. They are made to conform to a system of signs. However, form is a prison that obliges the use of customary metaphors; that obliges practitioners "to lie in accordance with firmly established convention", (58) an endless simulation of an empty form. This becomes the sole concern of a system of empirical reality. It is a parody of the highest order, a Sisyphusian ritual that is pure form.

The two Cincinnatuses are heirs to what Nietzsche would call "sensuous perception", a non-schematic impulse that cannot be named. Therein lies the crack in the armour of the Work, the anonymous impulse that Cincinnatus must suppress in order to remain a functioning element in "a world of souls transparent to one another". (59) In his prison cell is written an anonymous "Nameless existence, intangible substance", (60) which he finds on the wall where the door covered it when open. An open door, a free passage outside, an anonymous missive, a clue to his own potential. Another scribbled message in the wall reads: "Measure me while I live – after, it will be too late". (61) Again, the crack appears, and there is a possibility of one of the two Cincinnatuses slipping through this crack. "Measure me while I live", but which of the two Cincinnatuses is to be measured?

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‘What a misunderstanding,’ said Cincinnatus and suddenly burst out laughing. He stood up and took off the dressing-gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly colouring the air. At first Cincinnatus simply revelled in the coolness; then, fully immersed in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to ...

The iron thunderclap of the bolt resounded, and Cincinnatus instantly grew all that he had cast off, the skullcap included. Rodion the jailer brought a dozen yellow plums in a round basket lined with grape leaves, a present from the director’s wife.’ (62)


Who is it that dissembles himself? Earlier, Cincinnatus moves a table to position it below the barred window. He places the chair on top of it, and clambers on to look out through the window onto the scene outside, but is unable to see anything. Rodion comes in and tells him to get off the table, and he does. But later, when Rodion has left the cell, Cincinnatus tries again to move the table "for the hundredth time ... but, alas, the legs had been bolted down for ages". (63)

Who speaks? Who writes? Cincinnatus. However, his writing is double, like Freud’s Msytic Writing Pad, a writing machine that allows what is written to be erased by lifting the double sheeting that rests on a wax slate, yet leaving a trace of the inscription on the slate, which can be discerned under special conditions. (64) In other words, the two Cincinnatuses work in tandem, first one, then the other, writing themselves with the already-present knowledge that despite this act erasure will occur when (t)he(y) meet(s) the mortal hour. However, at his beheading he (the other Cincinnatus) walks away from the erected platform upon which his beheading has been performed. As he notices the swing of the executioner’s hips guiding the axe down towards his neck, he steps away, but Cincinnatus has already been beheaded because he sees the pale prison librarian "doubled up, vomiting" on the steps. The execution is performed, the erasure is complete, but the inscription on the wax slate persists in the form of one Cincinnatus, who walks towards "beings akin to him". An event that is not – cannot - be anticipated nor comprehended, by the system of empirical reality:

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He was overtaken by Roman, who was now many times smaller and who was at the same time Rodrig: ‘What are you doing?’ he croaked, jumping up and down. ‘You can’t, you can’t! It’s dishonest towards him, towards everybody … Come back, lie down – after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished!’ Cincinnatus brushed him aside and he, with a bleak cry, ran off, already thinking of his own safety. (65)


This anonymous abyss is a welcome release from the prison managed by spectres. Cincinnatus moves outside of a mimetic stronghold, moves into the abyss, into its centre, "the concentration of ambiguity" (66) where, before he enters he must renounce all idols. Cincinnatus’ double writing not only allows him to slip through the cracks. Not only does it allow him anonymity. It allows him, through this anonymity, to inscribe his presence within the abyss, where it remains, resonant. It is inscribed in the double-sheeting of the mystic writing pad that is Cincinnatus’ body/soul. In short, Cincinnatus inscribes the abyss upon his secret skin, thus, becoming the abyss.

Becoming the Abyss

In Virginia Woolf’s short story The Mark on the Wall, (67) two worlds are described, a double world, each with its own stipulations, each with its own codes, its own premises and foundations of truth. The narrator in The Mark, like our Cincinnatus, traverses these two worlds and is more comfortable in one, and alienated from the other. Which is the inside, and which is outside? Both characters, Cincinnatus and Woolf’s narrator, ‘belong’ to both and yet they are also caught within the two of them, vacillating between two extreme poles, like a Kafka unable to live in a world of men, yet unable to stray too far away from it.

The two worlds of Woolf’s narrator collide in the realm of thought. It is in this realm that she wanders, across a vast space of possibilities, confined by nothing except her own inner potential to dream. However, her silent meanderings begin with a mark on the wall, a mark she has never seen before and which now fascinates, intrigues, troubles, perplexes her. "How readily", she says, "our thoughts swarm upon a new object." (68) With this, she is swept away, transported into a world where the mark on the wall not only takes on the essence of other beings – a nail, one that hangs miniatures, not paintings – but also a whole universe that is implied by this one initial premise - a miniature of a lady with "white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way – an old picture for an old room". (69)

Such a standardisation of things is immediately undercut by the narrator’s own seemingly aimless wanderings in her mind. Things in the physical world, in the ‘reality’ of tangible objects and phenomena develop a fixity, thinks the narrator. As she says, "The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers – a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation." (70) Language, then, becomes a game, a convention that attempts to pour life into the thing as the word is uttered.

The scepticism of the narrator, her flight into a world away from the language of "military sound", her movement away from the fixity of things towards a "nameless damnation", the space where no word exists, no standards dominate - that scepticism is not that of existence, of life, but a scepticism of death. It is a scepticism that questions the limits to understanding, in short, it is a distrust of knowledge, of truth, of verification and summation, a knowledge that is based on what Nietzsche would call "empty husks" with which "they will for ever exchange illusions for truth." (71)

The various possibilities open to her investigation on the nature of the mark on the wall lead her to conclude that "nothing is proved, nothing known." (72) Only a physical examination of the mark, only if she got up from her chair, walked to the wall where the mark was and inspected it, only this would reveal to her the true nature of the mark on the wall. But, she argues, what would she have gained.

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Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? (73)


This, above all, is a scepticism of death because it defies the fixity that is given to the language of empiricism or materialist thought. Rather be curtailed by the unknowability of things, she enters a space on the outside of ‘language’, the space of death which is not death but, always through dying, passes into a space and time where and when "nothing is proved", but everything is possible, where death does not finalise, but keeps on coming forward and then retreating, an eternal recurrence that can only end in a becoming from nothing.

Her reveries (they are reveries since they are celebration of a unfettered imagination, but being beyond mere imagination and fantasy, are also native to a realm of knowing that escapes the "military sound" of the word) recall Cincinnatus’ own, since both reveries belong to the same realm of wonderment, a forever seeking new limits, new borders to transgress, a real in which limited being is affirmed. (74) The two ‘modes of being’, sitting and standing, are emblematic of the duality of worlds – of thought and action respectively, of silence and noise, of invisibility and visibility, imagination and facticity, creativity and conventionality, fluidity and fixity, fecundity and stagnation. Woolf’s narrator’s creative impulse is facilitated by a freedom of movement in and out and around objects of contemplation. She attains a fluidity of thought, and hence, a prolific creative outburst of associations and possibilities. The mark on the wall, therefore, is no longer merely a mark, an empirical phenomenon, grounded and therefore, fixed in its own facticity. It is also, through the seated narrator’s imagination, all things at the same time, a point in which that has come before, and all that will come are present and reflected in it.

However, this infinity into which the Woolf narrator slips is a precarious point that must always defend its own limits, limits that are themselves indefinable. In other words, the flight to the outside is not only an escape from the harness of the fixity of the inside, the common space, the system. It is also a burden that must be mindful of the constant danger of the collapsing of its fluid walls. As she sits, lost in the outside, drowning in the abyss of the aleph, she is suddenly aware of an interference.

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Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying –

‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’

‘Yes?’

‘Though its no good buying newspapers... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!…All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. (75)


No sooner has the material world intruded upon the reveries of her otherworld than the mark, hitherto a conduit of meaning and pathways to other spaces outside, is reduced to an empirical certainty. Now it has shape, definition. The mark is no longer a troubled area of conjecture, but a fixity, an identity. Yet, with this identity comes a certain loss of presence, a quality that is required for human experiences to be what they are. That is, human experiences cannot be reduced to what can be said about them. (76) This inarticulabilty provides "the possible with a site that is impregnable, because it is a nowhere." (77) Scientific language, the language of empirical realities ‘captures’ the meaning of this ‘nowhere’ but it stays within the inside, within the wall that separates it from apprehending the object of its desires completely, and in its essence. The ‘capturing’ of the object is always already a flawed project because it invariably pins it down, clips its wings in order for it to be apprehended, in order for it to be articulated.

What the Woolf narrator fails to achieve - complete autonomy from the forces that threaten the world of fecundity and creativity – Cincinnatus C attains, but only after he confronts his own execution, his mortal hour. The ultimate escape is revealed to him only at that hour when the axe falls upon his neck, like the merciless methodologies of the scientific regime which cull its object of inquiry into a form that can be apprehended.

In order to reach that "threshold of revelation", Cincinnatus must, can only write, since "meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning." (78) However, his very first jottings are hapharzard, discontinuous words that are far from the depths into which writing must go in order to speak, in order to become presence:

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On the table glistened a clean sheet of paper and, distinctly outlined against this whiteness, lay a beautifully sharpened pencil, as long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus, and with an ebony gleam to each of its facets. An enlightened descendant of the index finger. Cincinnatus wrote: ‘In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all, I had premonitions, premonitions of this finale.’ (79)


The length of the pencil will be whittled away till what remains, when Cincinnatus is finally taken to be executed, is a tiny stub, the pencil depleted, and now un-usable, but where all that needs to be written has already been written, the way out to the Outside open, and no turning back. No sooner are they written down than he scratches them out. His words are hollow, disjointed. They recall the words on a piece of paper concealed in an envelope that his lawyer, Roman Vissarionovich, presents to him as hope of some kind of reprieve. Cincinnatus tears the envelope to pieces, but when he tries to reconstruct at least one sentence from the scraps of paper he finds that "everything was mixed up, distorted, disjointed." (80) Cincinnatus’ first words, therefore belong still to the stilted performativity of the Mimetopia. His efforts to reclaim his interiority dissolves into a mimicry of that very structure which has taken his interiority hostage. Later, he will find his voice, but till then, he can only speak and write with the voice of the spectres that imprison him, and he will struggle with his death, with his dying, which now, at the beginning of the pencil’s life, he sees no way of transcending.

Cincinnatus, still considers his secret anonymity, his otherworldliness, a "basic illegality" (81) and the instruments of his incarceration insurmountable: "The iron thunderclap of the bolt resounded and Cincinnatus instantly grew all that he had cast off, the skullcap included." (82) Cincinnatus, at the initial phase of his imprisonment, stands between the world and the Book, between Mimetopia and writing, between the Inside (which is always shut out from the Outside by a fundamental error of judgement, or way of seeing: in order for the Inside to grasp phenomena, it must always delimit them to their discernible form only) and the Outside.

The prison Librarian is a welcome oasis in the desert of the fortress, for it is the only way Cincinnatus can while away his time in the cell, awaiting his unknown hour of death, with books, with writing, with reflection. However, books, which are his only solace, are scoffed at by Rodion the jailer. (83) They are the antithesis to the meaning of the Mimetopia. The latter is, in its essence, a simulacra of the book, all that is exterior of the book, which is forcibly separated from the world of the book. It is separated from the Book because it has ceased to recognise the Inside (the soul) as anything but as a manifestation of physical impulses. The only kind of writing that this society favours is epitomised in the novel Cincinnatus is given to read, one entitled "Quercus". The title figure of this novel is also its central hero – an oak tree that forms the focal point. The author of this novel interweaves activity within the oak’s surroundings with scientific descriptions of the tree itself. "Quercus" represents the "acme of modern thought." (84) It is empirical historicism that claims that the history of the world can be gleaned from recorded events occurring through a linear passage of time. This, Robert Alter argues, represents the quintessential "naturalistic novel", a novel of "photographic realism" that is devoid of humanity,[ 85) whereas, what can possibly save Cincinnatus is a writing of a different kind, one that goes beyond the mere facticity of things.

Cincinnatus’ struggle to position himself within this pull, within the extremes of the Mimetopia and Writing leads him to a self-realisation of his own essential self, his own disappearance from the world of named, and therefore, colourless objects. He writes:

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Oh, my anguish – what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me ... I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallour - I am no hero anyway ...), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I ... am gradually weakening … the uncertainty is horrible – well, why don’t you tell me, do tell me – but no, you have me die anew every morning... (86)


There is no escape from death. Even his writing is a shallow exercise in futility. It is only impatience that goads him to write, the interminable wait for definition, for death, which defines, which fixes. Yet, lurking amidst this impatience is a shadow of an insight into the salvation contained within the pencil:

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On the other hand, were I to know, I could perform ... a short work … a record of verified thoughts ... Some day someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strange country. What I mean to say is that I would make him suddenly burst into tears of joy, his eyes would melt, and after he experiences this, the world will seem to him cleaner, fresher.


He senses the possibility of history: "Some day someone would read it ..." He feels the vastness of that interior vision. More importantly, Cincinnatus imagines the existence of another. This hypothetical other, for whom he must write, is the necessary outlet for his emerging inner sight, the abyss, which he will become later. (87) This other, a visionary double, he who would see the world as he, Cincinnatus, does and it would "seem to him cleaner, fresher", also writes, for in this double, this other who will one day read his words, lies the inscription, the trace of another world, like the anonymous inscription left on the wax slate of Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad. It is this thought of the visionary double that lights his path toward the one creative germ required to embark on the road to the Outside.

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No, I still ought to record, to leave something. I am not an ordinary – I am the one among you who is alive – Not only are my eyes different, and my hearing, and my sense of taste – not only is my sense of smell like a deer’s, my sense of touch like a bat’s – but, most important, I have the capacity to conjoin all of this in one point – No, the secret is not revealed yet – even this is but the flint – and I have not even begun to speak of the kindling, of the fire itself. My life. (88)


This recalls Kafka’s diary entry of July 28, 1914:

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I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth... If I can’t take refuge in some work, I am lost. (89)


Kafka’s inner turmoil, his dissolution, his increasing alienation comes in direct conflict with the fact that "the attraction of the human world is so immense, that in an instant it can make one forget everything." (90) He vacillates between this human world and the world of writing, the abyss where, even though a salvation, leads him to a never-ending death:

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What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life had dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me. But the strength I can muster for that portrayal is not to be counted upon: perhaps it has already vanished forever, perhaps it will come back to me again, although the circumstances of my life don’t favour its return. Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that very purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying. (91)


Both states of being are states of death. Kafka is lost, a stone, dead-weight if he bathes in "the attraction of the human world", but his writing is the pathway to "the eternal torments of dying."

The doubling that occurs here is the Kafka of The Metamorphosis, (92) the vacillating from one realm to another, the identification of one’s self in both realms. Gregor Samsa is forever shut out from the attractive human world. Yet, he is still very much a part of the world from which he is forcibly shut out. This is the error his family members make – they do not realise that Gregor has retained his human impulse, and relinquished only his human form:

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Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment and then rose up reverberating around them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly. (93)


The Double exists alongside Gregor. He is that Other who sees the world for what it is, who would, like Nabokov’s "gangrel" (94), do what he would like to do but cannot. The insect that gradually takes over, who is the only one among the family who would later think Grete’s violin playing is excellent, when in fact it is not, also houses or carries Gergor the son and brother, whom the attractive human world unfortunately cannot see. Kafka repeats this idea elsewhere: "Everone carries a room about inside him." (95)

What is so attractive about the human world? The Chief clerk and Gregor’s boss are loveless figures who make demands on him and his family. His parents, who demand a life based on Gregor’s own efforts; his sister Grete who dreams the dreams that he is in fact the author of so that he is now responsible for her life; later on Gregor discovers that their debts could have been paid off a lot sooner but was not done so, forcing him to work as hard as he had been. Expectations, obligations and dishonesty. Where is the attraction? It can be found in the hesitation Cincinnatus displays in the matter of his execution. He does not want to die. He does not want to be banished. It is also mirrored in his need to be understood. He beseeches his wife Marthe to open her eyes and understand him and what the authorities were going to do to him. This wanting to belong is echoed in Kafka’s narrative:

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But Gregor was now much calmer. The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps his ear had grown accustomed to the sound of them. Yet any rate people now believed that something was wrong with him, and were ready to help him. The positive certainty with which these first measures had been taken comforted him. He felt himself drawn once more into the human circle and hoped for great and remarkable results from both the doctor and the locksmith, without really distinguishing precisely between them. (96)


Yet, Gregor is imprisoned in his own room. The two doors in his room, the one that connects him with the living room and the other with Grete’s room, open into his room, not out. The world he so desperately wants to belong to, that he so desperately seeks understanding from, has easy access to him. Gregor, as a human, has access to them only as an instrument at the service of the family and his employers. However, Gregor the insect has lost his access to this world, no longer is he of any use to it. He is now a burden. His materiality has been judged and it is found lacking. His ‘imprisonment’ is a result of his inability to conform to the demands of the world he wishes to be part of.

Similarly, Cincinnatus’ imprisonment, as we have seen, is a logical consequence of his inability to conform to the demand for translucency. His opacity becomes for him, what the arthropod form is for Gregor – a door that shuts him off from the world of spectres, but at the same time a door that opens onto the abyss from where he can speak at last.

Cincinnatus, then, like Gregor, who vacillates between his own interests and the interests of the family that enslaves him, like Kafka, who vacillates between the world of humans and the world of the abyss, like the Woolfian narrator, who struggles to protect the walls that surround the world of thought, fights an on-going battle with the temptation to fall back on conventional ‘wisdom’, especially since he is raised in a society that discourages original creativity (97) As long as he harbours the belief that salvation can be found in the confines of the materialist world, he will never find a way out of it. However, the more he writes, the more he is shown, or made to see that there exist pathways leading out from the Inside:

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There, tam, la-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure ... There, there are the originals of those gardens where we used to roam and hide in this world; there everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; there everything pleases one’s soul, everything is filled with the kind of fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here... (98)


Writing, art, is the most important instrument of liberation, precisely because its symbolic structure and metaphoric texture obliges it to abandon the one-dimensionality of the discourse of the everyday (99):

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I have as yet said nothing, or rather, said only bookish words ... but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. (100)


Then, a little farther on: "there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something ..." (101)

It is clear that Cincinnatus senses a presence, as does the Woolfian narrator, a presence that she locates deep within the hazy realm of conjecture. Gregor Samsa, likewise, can claim to be aware of an "undertone", a double nature, an inscription, a trace of a ‘nowhere’, a mystic writing that lies on the Outside, a mirror that "now and then sends a chance reflection here". It is significant that Cincinnatus introduces the mirror image in his writing. The classic theory of mimesis claims that art is a mirror held up to nature, that art does nothing, says nothing more than what is already ‘said’ in the material world. The novel "Quercus" that Cincinnatus reads in his cell conforms to such a theory of mimesis. Its comprehensiveness and positivistic attitude to the facts merely perpetuate the illusory idea that the material world has an autonomous existence distinct from the sentient centres of experience within or giving rise to it. (102)

Kafka, like Cincinnatus who is slowly awakening to them, has seen these sentient centres, these points of ambiguity where "language coincides with its disappearance. (103) This concentration of ambiguity, as Blanchot would have it, the abyss that one must enter in order become language, become the abyss (Kafka: "...I have a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely." (104)) is not the mirror that is held up to nature, which reflects everything like a one-dimensional linearity implied and espoused by the materialist monism of Cincinnatus’ world, but the refractive nature of the artistic imagination. (105) It is the double, that shadowy space that when held up to nature changes the path of our perception, disrupts the modes of seeing and apprehending, and which allows Cincinnatus C and his con-sociates – the seated Woolfian, Kafka, and Gregor Samsa – to disappear, to evanesce, to syncopate.

Indeed, now that his writing had gripped him, in the sense that he struggled no longer with the awkwardness of the word, that his poetic imagination had begun to rise from some unknown place, we see that the thematic concern of his writing

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... will now be the precious quality of Cincinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here – a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep... (106)


We now see a gradual shift in Cincinnatus’ physical presence. Whereas at the beginning of the text, Cincinnatus is described in terms which suggest awkwardness, encumbrance and oppression –

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... he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were to fall through like a man who has dreamt he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt... (107)


- now, at the sudden discovery of that absent space from which everything can and must be said, into which one merges, becomes submerged in a nullity, he begins to take on the appearance of an apparition:

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... it was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension ... as though at any moment … Cincinnatus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlessly through some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disappear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the room and suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth of ether. (108)


This recalls the stepping away of Woolf’s narrator and Gregor Samsa’s otherness. Cincinnatus’ ghost-like countenance - "... the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters..." (109) - coincides with his realisation of the inventedness of the beings around him – "I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth." (110)

The distorted, simulated forms of his jailers, the mimetic performativity that underlines their spurious existence is "infected" with truth. Their septicity has made his escape impossible, but he realises now that they are merely inventions, borne out of that "rotated mirror" that can both invent and make vanish, the machine of the abyss of which he is the engine. The refraction of this rotated mirror cuts into pieces the ‘reality’ of beings and objects and at the same time gives rise to a kaleidoscope of possibilities.

Whence comes this realisation that he embodies the machine of the abyss? Cecilia C, his mother arrives for a visit one day, unexpectedly, He has only seen her once in his life. She has ceased for him to be of any significance in his life. Even his father is nothing but a "legend" to him. That his own mother has no knowledge of the father’s identity is laughable to him. Cincinnatus accuses his mother of being a parody, false. If even his own beginnings are suspect, like everything around him in his prison world, his own visions must be groundless. The origins - the ballast of a life, the mother-function, which is the primordial script, that which engenders and brings forth - is the double of the abyss, that which concludes, becomes nothing, a returning to the depths of a ‘nowhere,’ the inarticulability of language itself. This binary constellation – origin/conclusion, birth/death, surfacing/descending, affirmation/negation – is constitutive of that we have been calling the abyss. The same conditions apply to both states of the binary – the mother function brings forth to the surface from the beginning, the starting point, an unknown place but which is always the first place; the anonymous body descends into an unknown space that is already the last place, the only place from where all can be said. This doubled writing begins deep within the first stirrings of life within a body, secret inscriptions that are carried within a person (111) as one carries one’s room with wherever one goes. (112) The inscritption remains, carrying forward its trace, like an invisible signature. However, this signature can only be read anonymously, deep in the recesses, or depths of the abyss.

If, then, his mother is as false as the spectres all around him, Cincinnatus push to the Outside is jeopardised: "... I have pinned my hopes on a distant sound – how can I have faith in it, if even you are a fraud?" (113) Yet, Cecilia C brings with her a secret. She discloses that his father too, was like him, absent, evanescent. That is why all she remembers of him is his voice, for he had transcended the gaze of the empirical. She tells him about objects called nonnons which she used to play with when as a child. These incomprehensibly-shaped nonnons came with a special, distorted mirror that, when held up to ordinary objects, reflected nonsensical distorted objects. However, when they were held up to these strange distorted nonnons, they were transformed into beautifully-shaped things, like a flower or a ship, a person, a landscape.

The nonnon mirror, therefore, is that refractive force of the artistic imagination, the chink in the air which Cincinnatus often felt himself slip into, that syncope within which contained a world of distorted objects made wondrous by a mirror which negates, and in the negation, brings forth a new form, a new way of seeing. The distance between the distorted mirror of the nonnon and the nonnon itself is the space of absence, the liminality that transgresses the origins of language, but which speaks with the clarity of visionaries. It is also the distance between mother and son, between the falsity of her mirror, and Cincinnatus’ nonnon-like incomprehensibility. Faced with her mirror, shining for a second through her eyes, Cincinnatus "suddenly saw that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also." (114)

The abyss is now at hand, awaiting his final transformation. That can only happen if two conditions are fulfilled. The first condition requires that he must recognise that the word restricts, fixes; it is nothing but a normal object that when held up to a nonnon mirror is distorted, like the spider in his cell, which in actual fact "consisted of a round plush body with twitching legs made of springs", (115), or like the cell itself, "which in fact was no longer there", (116) having somehow been dismantled as Cincinnatus was leaving it to go to the place of execution (they are distortions of reality, staged representations that have no meaning other than the fact they are merely distorted simulations of what is considered ‘real’), or that it is itself a mirror that merely reflects a material reality that is autonomous and a priori.

(Continued in Part 2...)]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:41:09 +0000 70f250e2d762fbde8a2e70eabf6eb953 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophy/an-introduction-to-the-philosophy-of-time-r102 Robert P. Taylor (2007)

It would not be amiss to compare the mystery of time with the mystery of the divine (should any such thing exist). On the one hand, it seems everyone is aware of it. The transition from morning to afternoon conveys a sense of time. The ongoing aging process conveys a sense of time. Change, or rather the perception of change, conveys a sense of time. Yet, in spite of all this, and when even the simplest and the most brilliant minds agree that there is at least an inference of what might be called ‘time’, it is not at all apparent what time is. More interestingly still, it is not at all obvious that time itself even exists.

The Non-Existence of Time

It is not uncommon for philosophers to use spatial analogies when describing issues relating to time, and I think one would be apt here. Consider that there is a room with no doors and a small window looking in. When you look through the window, you see a red cube; and yet, you later discover, the cube is not there at all. What is there is a trick of the light - a result of mirrors and infrared light-waves and a host of other things that create the illusion.

From the experience, two things should be clear: first, it is obvious that there is no actual red cube; and second, if there is no red cube, then there must exist some sort of entity that is capable of producing the illusion of a red cube. At the macroscopic level, and by ordinary experience, the illusion of an object is bound to the same physical laws as an actual object. Hence, if there is nothing to determine the existence of the object (mass of particles formed in such a manner as to create a solid, liquid or gaseous form of certain size, shape and structure) then there is no object. Likewise, if there is nothing to create the illusion of an object (refracting or reflecting light-waves, distorted light-beams, hallucinations caused by psychological defects, et cetera) then there is no illusion. As it were, nothing comes from nothing.

As to space itself, Solipsists contend that the world is illusionary: it does not exist, at least not as perceived. Taking this to the extreme level, one might assert that space is not real, and this would apply whether space is a substance or a relation between spatial objects. If space is a substance, then the laws of illusion apply to it as well as to spatial objects: something creates the illusion. It might be cognitive processes going on in a brain imprisoned in a vat, or it might be an elaborate computer code. On the other hand, if space is a relation, then the exposé of spatial objects as illusions themselves should be enough to deal with the apparent existence of space. Quite simply, there cannot be an existing relation between two non-existent objects. As with spatial objects, the illusion is there because it has a source. Either the thing that makes one perceive spatial objects is the thing that makes people perceive space, or space is a coincidental consequence of the perception of spatial objects.

For example, in the room with the red cube, suppose that another object – also an illusion – exists. Anyone looking through the window will perceive a red cube and (say) a blue cube. One will also perceive a fixed distance between the two cubes. When the illusions end, the distance will no longer exist, because distance, being relational, requires spatial points to relate to. If there are no cubes, there cannot be distance between the cubes.

What about time? Is the illusion of time possible even without a source for the illusion? If so, then one must ask what the illusion is. How do we differentiate between actual time and perceived time, if either of them exist? If we cannot differentiate, how can we say time is illusionary? On the other hand, if there is a source for the illusion of time, what is its nature? Is there a super-time so beyond human comprehension that a simpler form of time is required? Is time the consequence of a fallible perspective of reality? Is it necessary to posit entities or phenomena to explicate time?

Already, just by asking if time exists, I have been forced to compare time with space and ask, if time does not exist, what gives us the perception of time? If time is real, what is it? If time is not real, what do we perceive, and is that thing externally located or internally located? If it is internally located, does it bear relation to external entities or phenomena, or internal brain states? If it is externally located, is it spatial, or does it stem from something altogether unfamiliar? These are the sorts of questions asked by philosophers interested in the subject of time.

A- and B-Theories

The A-theory, put in simple terms, states that time flows. The theory also states that there are tensed propositions relating to unfixed temporal points. That is, there is a past, there is a present, and there is a future.

What exactly is meant by the proposition "time flows" is a complicated issue, and some philosophers would even reject the notion of the flow of time as ridiculous: if time does flow, then how fast does it flow? A second per second? A second per supersecond?

With the A-theory, truth-apt statements such as "Hitler stole power in the past", "I am typing an essay about time now" and "There will be a seminar on Quantum Existentialism in the future", have their truth values determined by their position in the time-line. That is, the state of a proposition is determined by its referent being in the past, or in the present, or in the future.

The B-theory states that time does not flow, and that time is tenseless. The implication of this is that there is no past, no present and no future. That is not to deny any of the events in time; rather, it is to claim that "past", "present" and "future" are indexicals. Points in time are more like "here" and "there" than fixed geographical locations like "Liverpool", "New York" or "Melbourne".

According to B-theorists, the proposition "In the past, Hitler stole power" would actually mean "At some point in time prior to the one I presently occupy, Hitler stole power", and "I am typing an essay about time now" would actually mean "From my perspective I am now typing an essay about time". However, it would not be contradictory to say "Hitler is now stealing power and I am now typing an essay", given that the scope of "now" is not constrained to any one perspective. In other words, in relation to my position in the time-line, Hitler is not now stealing power, and in relation to his position, I am not now typing an essay. In a similar sense, a person in Manchester is "here" as much as a person in Liverpool is "here", but neither one of them could honestly say "We are both here", for the referent of "here" is not identical in both cases.

The A-theory, and the B-theory, are often confused with related theories. Perhaps this confusion is down to a subconscious insistence that a theory needs to be complete, and that neither the A-theory nor the B-theory are complete. Perhaps the confusion stems from the fact that many ideas relating to time potentially overlap, or are contrary to one another. Since, for example, Presentism makes claims contrary to claims of the B-theory, it is understandable that Presentism might be confounded with the A-theory. Likewise, since the B-theory is often explained with spatial analogies, and since Four-Dimensionalism goes some way in making such analogies less unclear, it is understandable that the B-theory might be confounded with Four-Dimensionalism. I will now look at each of these in turn.

Four-Dimensionalism

Four-Dimensionalism may refer either to the view that time consists of real parts, like spatial parts (this contrasts with such views as Presentism), or to the view that spatial objects have temporal parts (such that the objects are extended through time, as well as through space). For the purposes of this essay, the view that time consists of real parts will be referred to as Eternalism, while the view that objects have temporal parts will be called Perdurantism. One should note that Four-Dimensionalism is not identical with the B-theory, though the two are compatible.

Eternalism

Eternalism states that, just as all spatial points are equally real, so too are all temporal points equally real. This view is compatible with both the A-theory and the B-theory.

Under A-theoretic Eternalism, an event in the future will flow from future, to present to past. It exists in all three temporal states – what that means, exactly, is unclear – rather than coming into existence in the present. For example, consider that a sprinter is being observed running past a slit in a wall. The observer can only see a slice of the racing track. As the sprinter passes the slit, the observer sees the sprinter, but the sprinter exists on the track even when he is not being observed. Obviously this analogy does not distinguish between past and future events, but it is sufficient to differentiate Eternalism from the view that only present events exist.

Under B-theoretic Eternalism, all moments are equally real, and have equal validity in terms of their status as a temporal frame of reference. This contrasts with A-theoretic Eternalism, which contends that past and future events are real, but have a less valid reference frame than present events. Often, Eternalism is simply equated with the B-theory, since both theories present a view of time that grants equal ontological status to all temporal points. Furthermore, it is not obvious what an Eternalist A-series would entail. What does it mean to grant equal ontological status to the past, the present, and to the future, but give ontological importance to the present? This question has been explored in philosophy, though not always (if at all) successfully.

Presentism

In brief, Presentism contrasts with Eternalism, in that where Eternalism posits existing temporal moments beyond the present (such that the past and/or future exist in addition to the present), Presentism posits that only the present exists.

An A-theorist Presentist might state that time flows: a potential future moment t3 becomes an actual present moment t2, and then a conceptual moment t1. This t3 is potential: it has the potential to become an actual moment. For instance, a driver speeding towards a wall will either crash or will not crash. Both the crash and the aversion of the crash are potential moments in the future. The t2, being present, is an actual moment. For those who understand Modality, t2 exists in the actual world; it is real. Therefore, the driver may crash. The event of the driver crashing into the wall is an actual present moment. The t1 is, for lack of a better term, a conceptual moment; it does not actually exist (any more) but can be conceived through memories, historical documents, and the like. One may thus remember being in a car crash. This memory is a conceptual representation of a moment that did exist, but does not now. The flow of time, then, is the passing of temporal points in and out of actuality.

It might be objected that the potential future and the conceptual past have no place in the ontology of a Presentist. However, Presentism does not need to abandon any of its premises to acknowledge the existence of potential/conceptual temporal moments. All that needs to be done is to establish that the past and the future do not have the same ontological status as the present. The future can, perhaps, be foreseen. The past can be remembered, but these are no more real than a notion of an object being as real as the object being thought of. That is, representations of the past, and of the future, can certainly exist without contradicting Presentism.

I have distinguished between past and future moments as "potential" and "conceptual" moments. However, some cases suggest such terms cannot be so readily applied. Fatalism, in conjunction with the notion of accurate prediction (e.g. infallible foreknowledge), would make the future conceptual, rather than potential. Likewise, backward causation or backward counterfactual agency could make the past potential, rather than conceptual.

[A brief note: counterfactual agency takes the logical form "If P had occurred, then Q would have occurred". The antecedent of a counterfactual conditional necessarily involves some event that did not occur, but could have. Therefore, "If Hitler had not invaded Russia, he would have taken Europe" would be a counterfactual.]

It is apparent that no B-theorist can adhere to Presentism, since by its nature the B-theory denies the existence of the present. Certainly, denying the status of "present" to what we experience to be "now" would not work, because without some other time to reference, "now" would not be "now" indexically, and this is precisely what the B-series depends on. It makes no sense to deny status of present to a point in time that has ontological precedence over other points in time.

Endurantism

Endurantists maintain that objects simply are three-dimensional entities extended through the three dimensions of space. Further, objects persist through time in that one is wholly located at some point in time (t1), and passes to other points in time as a whole entity.

Perdurantism

Perdurantism states that objects extend through the three spatial dimensions, as well as through a fourth dimension. Therefore, objects have both spatial and temporal parts. This means that while a temporal part of an object may exist at t1, a distinct temporal part exists at t2, and another temporal part exists at t3, which is distinct from the temporal parts that exist at t1 and t2.

Perdurantists can be divided into two main subclasses; viz. Worm Theorists and Stage Theorists (Exdurantists). Worm Theory states that temporal parts are segments (analogous to segments of a worm). If one imagines the entirety of an entity as a worm extending from future to past, then each segment of the worm would be a temporal part, suspended in a temporal moment. Stage Theorists hold that each temporal part of an entity is, in fact, a temporal counterpart to the same entity. Consequently, an entity, under Exdurantism, exists only during a single moment. In the next moment, a different, but identical entity exists as a counterpart.

Exdurantism is a relatively novel theory, which appears to be an attempt to reconcile Endurantism with Perdurantism, by positing temporal counterparts rather than temporal parts per se.

Ender

With this section of the essay, I hope to have provided the reader with a basic overview of some of the ideas tackled by philosophers interested in the metaphysics of time. Consideration, and indeed, discussion of these ideas is to be encouraged, and suggestions for research are always welcome.]]> Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:54:14 +0000 2c26f9a59b0ba61233e6fc0af8e47f14 <![CDATA[Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Part 2]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophy/schopenhauers-philosophy-part-2-r101 Awet Moges (2006)

(Continued from Part 1...)

Book IV

The fourth book, regarding ethics in general and particular context, is the "most serious" discussion, largely because it is the most relevant for everyone. However, Schopenhauer is perceptive enough to recognize how ineffective systems of morals are in the production of virtuous folk, just as poorly as aesthetic theories are capable of generating geniuses in art. Consequently, "philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is present... " (WWR § 53 p 271). The only true method of philosophy asks about the what, instead of the whence, the whither, or the why - what lies beyond phenomena, beyond the PSR, what is the inner nature of the world (p 274).

Schopenhauer then launches into a discussion about time according to phenomena and explains how the "now" is the only actual aspect of temporal existence while the past and the future are mere phantasms. Like Epicurus, but with a more sophisticated argument, Schopenhauer argues against death as a source of anguish. While the idea of death inspires a holy terror in most people, if we realize that only the "now" matters - because the present is the only true form of the phenomenon of the will - then we can dismiss death as a "false illusion" and an "impotent specter", and both the past and the future are "empty mirages" (p 284). The fear of death relies on our anticipation of the future, and the future is an aspect of time. Death concerns us only as individuals, and since our existence as individuals is only an illusion from the world of appearance, therefore death has no ultimate reality.

If the phenomenon is completely conditioned by the PSR, which entails necessity, then the will as the thing-in-itself is utterly free. But the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself cannot and does not extend directly to phenomena, and especially not in the highest grade of phenomena - man - for he is already conditioned by the form of all phenomena, the PSR. We consider ourselves a priori free, once we consider the number of potential choices available to us, but it is only after experience and reflection, a posteriori, that our action does follow our character and motives with necessity (WWR p 289).

The appearance of freedom of individual action comes from the point of view of the intellect. the intellect knows the conclusions of the will after the fact, empirically. In other words, the intellect cannot predict the choices of the will. Rational deliberation takes place once a hypothetical situation is entertained, and oftentimes promotes a solution, but direct inclination usually leans towards another solution, and always overpowers rational deliberation once the opportunity of action actually arises. The intellect can only meditate between the possible solutions, and then it passively awaits the true decision of the will. From the view of the intellect, both choices are equally possible, and this potentiality inspires the appearance of the empirical freedom of the individual. Nevertheless, since the will is inscrutable and impenetrable, the intellect, which is little more than the examination of the motives of different point of views, cannot determine the will.

The assertion of an empirical freedom of will depends on the presumption that man's inner nature is a knowing and abstract thinking entity, and consequently, this abstracta becomes a willing subject. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer thinks the will is the primary and original aspect, and knowledge is the by-product of the phenomenon of will - just an instrument. Then people are what they are according to their will, and they learn of themselves only through experience - experiencing what they are - and they discover their character after the fact. For the free will advocates, the individual wills what s/he knows, but for Schopenhauer, s/he knows what s/he wills (WWR p 293). Motives, however, can influence character through knowledge, and that is how a person's manner can change while his/her character remains the same. Motives can influence the will, alter its direction, but not change the will. Therefore, pace Seneca, willing cannot be taught, and always remains inscrutable. Motives themselves are concepts, abstract representations of reason, and through the conflict of several motives, the strongest emerges and determines the will with necessity.

Schopenhauer also notes that the ability to discern motives, deliberation, is precisely not only what distinguishes the human from the animal; it is also what makes human existence much more agonizing and tortuous than the animal. The greatest suffering isn't limited to the immediate present as representations of perception, but as abstract concepts that haunt thoughts and cause mental anguish and suffering. The animal has no such troubles for it lives in the present.

After elaborating on the intellect and the empirical character, Schopenhauer begins analyzing the third aspect of human behavior, acquired character, which is social - something articulated only within society - where someone is praised for having character or condemned for lacking any. But the acquired character is not like the empirical for it isn't unalterable or consistent. From the second book, where the will is described as a ceaselessly striving universal force, doubly omnipotent and omnipresent, and in human beings, the will underlies everything - actions, desire, beliefs, etc. The foundation of all willing is need, lack and once something is deficient or found to be dissatisfactory, striving ensues, and as long as this striving desire isn't satisfied, this is suffering; otherwise, the achievement of the goal is called satisfaction. But since satisfaction is always temporary, finite, and always yields to a new desire, then there is no final resolution of desire, no ultimate goal, and suffering is ineradicable. Therefore, all life is essentially suffering (WWR § 56 p 310).

Even though from birth, life is a "continual rushing of the present into the dead past" (WWR § 57 p 311) human beings live vicariously, just as much as a soap bubble is blown as large as possible with the full knowledge that it will pop. To will is always to desire and, in extreme cases, to desire the perfect satisfaction is a matter of delusion. Both excessive joy and extreme pain are erroneous, delusions, for they are the anticipation of the future; but pain is essential to life - excessive joy comes from the belief that permanent satisfaction of the desires has been achieved, inasmuch the nadir of sorrow comes from the vanishing of such potential "perfect" satisfaction. Schopenhauer, along with the Stoics, suggests equanimity whether the situation is horribly adverse or exceedingly fortuitous.

All happiness is essentially negative, for satisfaction is merely the absence of desire (WWR § 58 p 319) for gratification delivers us from a particular desire. This indicates that suffering is the immediately given, the positive aspect of willing. Schopenhauer points out that the great poems illustrate a struggle for unattainable happiness, and even once the hero, in the epic poem, actually achieves his monumental goal, happiness remains elusive and he remains no better off than before. In other words, true happiness, because it is impossible, cannot ever be the true object of art.

There are three extremes of human life, Schopenhauer notes: the great passions, found in the historical characters that populate epics and drama; the life of genius, those who achieve pure knowing and comprehend the Ideas by emancipating knowledge from its slavery to the will; and the empty longing of the bored. People, at very rare times, if ever, do find themselves close to one of the aforementioned extremes but rush back to the average everydayness of life (p 321).

When observing an individual's life in its entirety, at a distance, it becomes a tragedy, and up close where the trivial facts are magnified, it is a comedy (WWR § 58 p 322). As for the self-conscious person reflecting upon him/herself, Schopenhauer adds that "as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but.. Are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy" (p 322).

That life is essentially suffering is reflected in the great work of Dante Alleghri, Inferno, where he easily acquires material for his description of hell. Unsurprisingly, when it came to heaven, Dante found the attempt far too difficult, for there is no Paradise anywhere in existence. Instead, Dante fell back on the attempts of other saints and offered a botched composite.

Schopenhauer also goes after optimism, and found it a "wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind" (WWR § 59 p 326). While it is true that entropy is irreversible, that nothing lasts forever, people live as if they will never die. Schopenhauer is remorseless when he insists the true and sole hope of humanity is to achieve the insight that existence, as an individual, is worthless. Despite being an atheist, Schopenhauer recognized the truth of the major religions (Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism) that ordinary existence is overrated, that their ascetic practices actually denies the purposeless will by stifling the desires and needs of the body. The ascetic is just one step away from self-renunciation, which is actually a more powerful version of the aesthetic experience that serves as a repose from the will. Once the tyranny of the desires of individuality is abandoned then one gains a viewpoint on the world that recognizes the fundamental unity between the subject and the external world. "The double sided world is the striving of the will to become conscious of itself so that, recoiling in horror at its inner, self divisive nature, it may annul itself and thereby its self affirmation and then reach salvation" (John Atwell). Prosaically stated, cognitive self-awareness turns into self-destruction.

The first and most basic/primary affirmation of the will to live is the affirmation of the physical body, where the will manifests itself through action (WWR § 62 p 334). It follows that the principle morality of the majority is egoism, for their will to live predetermines the choices they make and conditions the actions. The concept of what is wrong describes when the individual extend the affirmation of his will far enough that it becomes the denial of the will in others. What is "right" is merely the negation of "wrong," which is original and positive. Ergo, what is right is merely the lack of denying another's will for the sake of the affirmation of one's own will (WWR § 62 p339).

Temporal justice resides in the state, or precisely within its power of punishment, and is intended to prevent such actions from recurring in the future. The conception of retaliation implies time, and so, temporal justice is fundamentally concerned with the future. On the other hand, eternal justice is free from human institutions, free from chance or change, and "infallible, firm and certain" (WWR § 63 p 350).

A person who lives in the moment, utterly within the folds of the veil of Maya, sees only phenomena, individual and particular objects, innumerable dichotomies: pleasure is distinct from pain, the murderer is distinguished from the victim, yet the person seeks justice or retribution. Mired within Maya, the superficial person, a prisoner of the will, is incapable of realizing that wickedness is actually an aspect of the will to live, for s/he thinks such evil must be opposed to nature. In other words, the veil of the Maya is the metaphysical underpinning of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuality.

Yet at the bottom of his/her consciousness there lies an "obscure presentiment" that there is a connection between him/her and everything else, and this very connection inspires a "dread", a fateful terror that undermines their presumptuous individuality. Once the illusion of such temporal happiness and other temporary pleasures cracks and shatters, the global miseries and relentless suffering of life is grasped, and then the optimistic faith of redemption is finally exposed as a pretense, a very effective self-deception that is necessary for the will to live. Beneath the pretense, there are no dichotomies, for the will encompasses both pleasure and pain, both the sadist and the masochist, the tormentor and the prisoner, cause and effect, for it "buries its teeth in its own flesh". Schopenhauer notes the great insight of the Upanishads, where the formula for each individual is as follows: "tat tvam asi" (This art thou).

Eternal justice surpasses the temporal limitations of phenomena, the particular instances of suffering, far beyond all individuality. While it remains inaccessible for most people, myth can translate the profound truth of eternal justice into native language, within the bounds of the PSR, in the form of religious teachings, especially those of Vedas and Buddhism. Christian ethics, in particular, indicates a special class of knowledge consisting of virtue and nobleness where retaliation is conspicuously absent. It is worth noting that "eternal justice" is often misunderstood and falsified by the individual once s/he fails to realize that the offender and the offended are one, and instead, desires to return the pain of the offended to the guilty party. Yet Schopenhauer is careful to detect a distinction between common revenge and the mania of retaliation that also stakes the individual's life with that of the perpetrator. The goal of common revenge aims at punishment in order to mitigate suffering, while the avenger goes far beyond self-love in order to prevent such outrageous acts from happening ever again (WWR § 64).

Whatever is agreeable to the will and achieves its goals is considered as good. When something is taken as good, such as good food, good books, good weather, good people, we are indicating two things at once: agreeable, the immediate satisfaction of the will in each case, and useful, the delayed satisfaction that concerns the future (WWR § 65). When we call someone "just," we are identifying a person who, in the affirmation of his will, never denies the will that manifests itself in another person (WWR § 66).

On the other hand, we attribute detrimental objects as bad, and in abstract cases, evil, when that object detracts from the striving of the will. When a person goes too far in the affirmation of his/her own will to live by denying the will in other individuals, and demands their abilities to serve his/her will or else they will be eliminated, he is called "bad," even though the source of such activity is egoism. The excess of affirming one's own will to live and the slavish devotion to one's own individuality that demarcates his/her own person from all others are "two fundamental elements of bad character" (WWR § 65).

The wicked takes pleasure at the suffering of the others disinterestedly, and the extreme cases are instance of cruelty. The suffering of another is no longer a means to the ends of the malicious person, but an end in itself. Wickedness is similar to vengeance, but vengeance at least has the semblance of right, that if the same action of revenge is mandated by the law, and sanctioned by a society, then it would be just punishment.

Despite the omnipresence of the veil of Maya, guilt or the pangs of conscience take place because deep within the consciousness of the person, s/he knows that everything is one, and the distinction between the sufferer and the tormentor is a superficial one, even though space and time separate him/her from all other individuals. Guilt is an "inward alarm" of the wicked's own actions, and contains a faint sentiment of the intensity of the will, of the potency of the death grip the wicked has on his own life, and, simultaneously, the recognition of the misery of the oppressed and that s/he remains a part of the same force that inflicts pain upon itself. The stronger the person's affirmation of life, the further s/he is from the surrender and denial of that self-same will.

The person who offers help, support, and approval is considered as good, and relatively so. Nevertheless, when a person has a character of benevolence, friendliness and charity, on account of their choice of conduct to the will of others, they are also called good as well. Yet Schopenhauer does not consider "absolute good" as anything but a contradiction, for it is the highest good, the final satisfaction of the will where, once achieved, no new willing takes place, for the satisfaction has become imperishable. Once the will is satisfied, the cycle of desire and satisfaction restarts, and craving begins anew, making the "absolute good" an impossible fantasy.

Schopenhauer insists that morality absent of reason is mere moralization, and persuades nobody. The only motivation comes from self-interest, but virtue never comes from such origins. Therefore, abstract knowledge can never produce authentic virtue. Faintly echoing Plato, the concept of virtue lacks the tangible effect of the intuitive knowledge, and virtue can never be taught. All abstract knowledge is capable of is identifying the motives, and perhaps redirect the will, but never the will itself.

The only possible means of virtue is the reorganization that the inner nature of all individuals are the same. That is why there is no difference between the pious inquisitor who burns the heretic and the assassin who earns his pay by killing a high profile target. People delude themselves with customs and dogmas as the chief reason behind their deeds, but good actions are exceedingly rare, for they do originate in a "direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be... arrived at by reason" (WWR § 66 p 370). Here, Schopenhauer admits the limits of philosophy and claims that the concept can only express the conduct in the abstract, but never supply the intuitive knowledge itself. More interestingly, Schopenhauer shrewdly points out that since it isn't necessary for a sculptor to be beautiful in order to create beautiful art, nor isn't it necessary for the moralist to possess the very virtue he theorizes, and the philosopher doesn't have to be a saint. I leave the ironic conclusion for the reader to draw him/herself.

Whereas the wicked is incapable of seeing past the distinction between himself and another, the altruist immediately recognizes that his individuality is a "fleeting, deceptive phantom" (WWR, § 66 p 372) and intuitively knows that his essence (inner being) is the same as that of others, and extends this "essence" to all other living creatures. Thus, he will refrain from causing suffering to anyone, and forgo himself comfort and pleasures in order to alleviate the sufferings of others. The veil of Maya does not deceive the just, for he recognizes himself in every creature.

Good conscience is the satisfaction felt at the completion of a disinterested action, which takes place only with the recognition that one's own inner being in itself is also another's. If egoism merely limits the interests to the phenomenon of a particular individual, then shared inner being enlarges the interests to all living things, and nurtures a calm and serene perspective. The egoist will be suspicious of everything, and puts everything in one basket - his/her well-being - and constantly be anxious. Therefore, the direct path to salvation is the formula of the Veda - "this art thou!"

Love is essentially compassion and nothing else. The Italians call pure love pieta, which is also the word for sympathy. Unlike Kant, who claimed that all good and virtue originate in abstract reflection (duty and categorical imperative) compassion is the sincere participation in the other's suffering and includes the disinterested sacrifices required. Schopenhauer distances himself from Kant when he argues moral laws are not independent of institutions and customs.

Schopenhauer defines "weeping" not as a positive instance of pain, but sympathy with ourselves, when we cry we are repeating the pain during reflection. "Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture ...of it; then we find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him" (WWR § 67 p 376).

The difference between the egoist who is wedded to the principium individuationis and the person who is aware of the inner nature of everything is that the former knows only particular objects and their relations to him/herself, and renews motives of his/her will, and the latter quiets the will by shuddering at the pleasures that affirms life and turns away (WWR § 68 p 379). Most of us desire the end of such suffering, but the veil of Maya is very potent, for its illusion of hopes and pleasure restarts the cycle of the will and traps us. Those of us who are no longer fooled by temporary reprieves will withdraw from the vicious circle and denies the inner nature of all things by becoming an ascetic. In this renunciation, the ascetic stops willing, resists bodily impulses of thirst, hunger, sex, avoid making new attachments, and becomes utterly indifferent to everything.

The first stage of asceticism is found in the Gospels, where we are commanded to love others as we love ourselves, return hatred with good actions, patience and the endurance of all insults and injuries without resistance. At the next stage, the Christian saints and mystics added complete resignation, voluntary poverty and utter indifference to all earthy matters, which will resolve in the annihilation of the will while in the throes of the contemplation of God. Meister Eckhart's Theologia Germanica is a profound example of the denial of the will-to-live. However, a more sophisticated example is found in the Vedas, Puranas, and other poetical works of Hindu literature where the love of others is extended to all life, resistance to animal food, and, among others, a "deep unbroken solitude spent in silent contemplation with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the complete mortification of the will..." (WWR § 68 p 388).

That the biographies of the saints are full of conflicts, temptations, and failure should reflect the fact that their struggle with the will to live is a perpetual one, a constant wrestling match with the indefatigable force of the universe. Usually, these sort of enchanting temptations are seen as the devil's snares, and the more intense the will is, the more obvious the conflict, and thus, the more profound the suffering. However, if and only if the sufferer stops and observes the entirety of his life as a series of sufferings, and goes beyond the surface level where those individual sufferings were caused, from the individual to the universal where his pain is merely an instance of the whole, he is brought to resignation and becomes revered.

Schopenhauer insists that this portrait is no "philosophical fable", but the actual inner, direct and intuitive knowledge of the great saints of Christians and the distinctive Hindus and Buddhists, despite the superficial differences between their dogmas. Therefore, the conduct of the ascetic comes from their intuitive grasp, not their professed dogmas. Although there is a huge chasm between this intuitive knowledge and the abstract kind, philosophy can bridge such and only the philosopher can articulate the concrete truths of intuition in abstractions, through reflection (WWR § 68 p 383).

Suicide, Schopenhauer is careful to note, is not identical with resignation, for it is actually an instance of the affirmation of the will. Where resignation gives up the pleasures of the will, rather than its sorrows, the suicide is expressing dissatisfaction with the conditions of his/her life and ends his/her own life. Since the thing-in-itself is not affected, and suicide is merely the termination of the life of an individual, Schopenhauer considers it a futile and foolish act. (WWR § 69 p 400) Since the individual cannot stop willing or stop suffering, he quits life. Yet the act of suicide actually affirms the will itself. The only thing that can abolish the will is knowledge, which means the road to salvation is the unchecked manifestation of the will for the sake of discovering the inner nature of phenomena.

Although freedom belongs only to the will itself, and not phenomena, once the will arrives at the knowledge of its own inner nature, it gains a 'quieter' and that eliminates motivations or at least subsumes them into the background. Even though the self-suppression of the will comes from knowledge, yet the denial of the will cannot be planned. This great insight comes from out of the blue instead, and as the actual example of the freedom of the will it transforms the individual's entire inner nature, and turns him/her into a new person. Here, Schopenhauer applauds the Catholic Church's distinction of grace or salvation and the natural man. Where Adam as the affirmation of the will forever cursed everyone with original sin as suffering and death, Christ symbolizes the freedom of sin as the denial of the will to live. Thus, we ought to interpret Christ not as the individual in the Gospels, but as the universal personification of the quieter (WWR § 70 p 405).

Schopenhauer closes the first volume with an objection that he cannot redress: the denial of the will is a transition from existence to nothingness (WWR § 71 p 409). He asserts that the idea of nothing is relative, and is a reference to a particular something that it negates. Of course, the idea of an absolute nothing cannot even be conceived. Therefore, the idea of nothing is always a relation to something else.

The permanent solution to misery is once there is a naked, honest and complete awareness of the abject wretchedness of life the person loses the desire for existence and gratification. This takes place with the saint or ascetic who doesn't have any concerns with life or prosperity. The will to live, through him, has denied itself, or is greatly reduced to a faint whisper that no longer maintains a concept of reality composed of spatiotemporal objects. Upon his death, this whisper will vanish as well as the world/reality of his consciousness. Therefore, since this concept of world/reality is merely the Will's delusional artifact of itself, it comes to an end once the Will ceases to desire.

Yet even if I, as a manifestation of the will, including reality-for-me, vanishes upon death, irrespective of achieving the level of the ascetic, the Will continues in the life of others. Then, given the ascetic's death, his particular grade of Will expires, whereas the ordinary Joe's death does not entail the expiration of his grade of Will. Therefore, suicide is pointless and self-defeating, for it is a superficial complaint about the current conditions based on one particular grade of Will. If all men became ascetics, will everything cease? Sometimes, Schopenhauer seems to hint that something inconceivable to most excepting the ascetic (mystical contemplation) will be left. Schopenhauer admits that whatsoever remains after the complete abolition of the will is nothing. Yet, the same also goes for those where the will has turned against itself - "this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is - nothing" (WWR § 70 p 412).[

Appendix: Critique of Kantian metaphysics

Schopenhauer devoted the final section of the first volume to a thorough critique of Kantian metaphysics. The critique was intended in order to highlight the greatness of Kant and the quote by Voltaire said it all: It is the privilege of true genius, and especially genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity. Plato and the Hindu are the other intellectual muses, but Kant is the chief golden calf Schopenhauer genuflects before in the majority of the World as Will and Representation, and at the end of the book, he wields the hammer of Uru to clear away the rusty flakes. It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value (WWR p 415).

Interestingly, Schopenhauer often laments Kant's decision to edit his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason, in an overreaction to the charges of naïve idealism. As explained in Book I, representation is compatible with Kant's transcendental idealism, where the spatial, temporal forms are how the objects in experience are (re)presented, and the basic structure of the concepts we think and judge with and the category of causality are the reflection of the structure of our perception or concept of reality. Nonetheless, when Kant argued that TI prevents us from having any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer disagreed and insisted that our experience of willing is actually the mode of access to the nature of reality that complements our spatial/temporal/causal framework for representing objects.

The chief reason for the disagreement between Kant and Schopenhauer lie with their choices of method: Schopenhauer agreed with Kant to the extent that we do have transcendental knowledge of the fundamental conditions of experience, but did not share in Kant's convictions that transcendental knowledge is dependent on transcendental proofs or arguments. That is why Schopenhauer says we are not bound by Kant's conclusions about the limits of knowledge and advocated a more practical method that dances close to Hume's empiricism and Husserl's phenomenology where direct experience indicates a dual approach to understanding it: the representations of spatiotemporal objects, and the capacity to will. Kant's method of discovering the fundamental principles of knowledge as a special sort of reflection is mistaken, for we can know this through direct and immediate scrutiny of our experience.

"An essential difference between Kant's method and that which I follow is to be found in the fact that he starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, whereas I start from direct and intuitive knowledge. He is comparable to a person who measures the height of a tower from its shadow; but I am like one who applies the measuring rod directly to the tower itself." (WWR I pp 452-453)

Thus Schopenhauer's transcendental philosophy dispenses with transcendental proofs. Schopenhauer continues: "Philosophy, therefore is for [Kant], a science of concepts but for me a science in concepts, drawn from the knowledge of perception, the only source of all evidence and set down and fixed in universal concepts" (ibid, p 453). Once Kant abandoned the realm of perception, he errs magnificently especially when he insisted that all the abstract categories of logical theory must be present in our knowledge of objects.

The main charge Schopenhauer lies at Kant's feet is the complete lack of any distinction between abstract and discursive knowledge and intuitive knowledge (WWR I p 473). Yet, later on Schopenhauer then criticizes Kant for making that very distinction. Recall the famous dictum, "thoughts without content are empty; intuition without concepts are blind", which means there is no possible cognition of objects unless the two are combined. Schopenhauer says Kant blundered by bringing "thinking into perception", meaning an object is not perceived meaningfully until it is thought. Nevertheless, we do not think in order to see an object, for no reflection is required at all. Yet Kant actually says that the concept emerges spontaneously, not deliberately.

Schopenhauer is quick to dismiss Kant's categories as a sham; given the sole function of the understanding is causality. Moreover, Schopenhauer argued that all twelve categories are reducible to causality. This seems problematic, for we cannot think about causality without the notion of substance. The thought of something being caused already includes a substance of some kind. We are also incapable of thinking of causality without the assumption that all substances must behave in the same way under the same circumstances. we cannot think of causality without having the notion of quality. One could argue that Schopenhauer did not reject the categories altogether, but instead he took causation as the function that connects separate perceptions of distinct objects, a function that conditions perception of objects. The categories or the capacity of making judgments is secondary to perception because they are aspects of reason, which is in itself entirely parasitical on the originary cognitive activity of perception.

Animals do have knowledge of objects via perception, despite lacking the ability of making judgments. Therefore the forms of judgments are structured by reflection, a secondary cognitive activity.

"Forms of categorical judgment is nothing but the form of the judgment in general", i.e., the form of the abstract expression of the knowledge of objects, which is founded on perception. "Disjunctive judgments spring from the law of thought of the excluded middle... therefore entirely the property of reason." (WWR I p 459) They show the basic form of the activity of comparing objects in the abstract. Schopenhauer concludes that all forms of judgments and the categories are the inherent structures of the activity of abstract thought, to which Kant might have conceded that the expression of abstraction is secondary to perception of the object, but he would have argued that we are capable of making judgments because of the synthetic nature of our conscious perception of objects - that which forms sensations as well as the conceptual structure.

Schopenhauer's most enduring criticism of Kantian philosophy is on causation. For Kant, the knowledge of the determinate temporal order of objective states of affairs depends on the knowledge of causal laws, whereas for Schopenhauer the knowledge of the temporal succession is independent of any such condition because it is already immediately given. This issue about the relation between the phenomenology of our experience of temporal order and the transcendental conditions of our experience remains unresolved today.

The Kantian scholar Paul Guyer indicated (in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer) three of Schopenhauer's objections to Kant's treatment of causality, that it marginalizes immediate perceptual knowledge for the sake of conceptual elements of the understanding:
  • 1. The sequence of perceptions are events and our knowledge of the sequence of these perceptions cannot and do not depend on the causal laws that entails change in these represented objects.
  • 2. The knowledge of the succession of states of affairs contain some earlier events that did not cause the later ones, so, the knowledge of succession does not depend on the knowledge of causality.
  • 3. Kant's treatment of causation: Schopenhauer said that if the knowledge of temporal succession wasn't immediate, but actually depends on the knowledge of the laws that determine the speed and timing of those successions, then we must have nearly unlimited knowledge of the causal laws.
Guyer defends against the first two objections to rest on a misunderstanding of Kant's argument, and a failure of distinguishing between the phenomenological method and Kant's transcendental method. Nevertheless, he admits that a reconstruction of Kant's position must deal with the aforementioned third objection.

Criticism

The philosophy is, of course, not free from criticism, and the following instances are among the best.

The mathematical critique:

The will is supposedly "singular", or more precisely uncountable because numbers in arithmetic, which is an operation of the intellect, apply solely to the world of appearances. This limitation implies that numbers are inapplicable to the essence of reality. Now, since the Will is uncountable or numbers are inapplicable then it does not follow that it is singular. Schopenhauer could have said that since causality does not apply to reality itself, then it can no longer be considered as the "cement of the universe" and that the unity of the cosmos does not depend on the external relations between its components. Other philosophers have attacked the singular conception of the will. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche points out that the very word "will" is merely a concept that implies unity-as-a-word, while referring to something very complicated - a plurality of sensations, often conflicting and struggling - that either affirms or negate. A thousand pinpricks of quanta fluctuating at all times...

Knowledge of the will via inner sense:

If the thing-in-itself is will, and we know this through "inner sense" given that there are less phenomenal forms between the thing-in-itself and the knowing subject, then this presupposes that a lower number of phenomena reveals the true nature of reality better or truer than a higher number. Schopenhauer does realize this difficulty in his later writings.

Moral judgment of existence:

Another problem is the entire metaphysical interpretation of existence as will: it seems plausible that an alternative rendition could be cast differently, where the will is not necessarily an evil force, but a dynamic force of power, of difference, something worth affirming. Instead of the solitary hermit who starves himself into unconsciousness, the brave and the defiant warrior who struggles against the overwhelming odds of fate could actually withstand the heaviest burden, a Sisyphean hero who pauses and wipes his brow. Affirmation as the inverted attitude of pessimism remains possible, even if the will is insatiable as the present is a continuous vanishing. Schopenhauer is easy prey for Nietzsche's criticisms, where the fatal error of subjecting existence to a moral judgment has merely repeated the error of the past metaphysicians. "A pessimist who negates both God and world but stops before morality - who affirms morality and plays his flute, affirms laede neminem morality: excuse me? Is this really - a pessimist?"

Music as the copy of the will:

Could the copy of something so purposeless and evil ever be anything but the same? How can music possess an anesthetic quality that "quiets" the raging torrent, when it is already a copy of that inferno? Perhaps Schopenhauer should not have eliminated the representation aspect of art when it comes to music.

Summary

There are two readings of a text: the surface, where the actual words of the text are analyzed, and the symptomatic, where the problematic that enlighten or regulate the actual meaning of the text is identified and clarified. The text's problematic is the horizon of the text, of its thoughts, the "forms in which problems must be posed". This horizon is the limit of the language and the concepts that were available for Schopenhauer at a certain historical period. What makes symptomatic readings very insightful is its transcendental status, for the problematic constitutes the definite condition of the possibility of the theoretical structure of the text. Schopenhauer was limited to the concepts and the language that is derived from the problematic that was already present.

However, given the mastery of the German language and the relentless precision of the thought, identifying what Schopenhauer meant by looking at what he did not say seems a fruitless exercise. As a "thoroughly explicit writer", Schopenhauer maximized the style and the significance of his language in order to deliver the philosophy. In the introduction to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, George Simmel is correct that a "creative interpretation" of Schopenhauer is not possible, unlike Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz and others.

Volume 2 contains more technical elaborations and extensions. There are several reasons why Schopenhauer's philosophy is breathtaking and a fascinating reprieve from the staid and stodgy crap peddled in the universities. He wrote very clear, simple, directly, and never without force, always animated and suffused with personality. On top of such loquacity, he also was erudite, possessing a remarkable grasp of the classics. Schopenhauer arrived at the same conclusions as the eastern thinkers but through the road of the western philosophers, and was the very first to actually represent their insights to the western audience but clothed in the garb of philosophy rather than mystic balderdash. The philosophy's central concern was with existence, the tragedies and the problems of life, which is far more significant than the scholastic quibbles of ivory tower residents. Instead of chickening out like most thinkers by painting an all-harmonious portrait of the universe that resolved the petty differences into a shallow smudge, Schopenhauer took the actual sufferings of people seriously, all the brief instances of passions, emotions, all the eating, the fighting, the drinking, etc. He corrected the mistakes of the last great thinker, Kant and made several advances beyond his epistemology by claiming that inner experience is the key to knowing the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer replaced Kant's labyrinthiine program of concepts with a plausible model of the understanding: the principle of sufficient reason. The theory of aesthetic seems more penetrating than those of the other philosophers, except probably Nietzsche's, and possibly because he did not succumb to the temptation of reducing art to superficial functionalism. Schopenhauer's sense of morality and philosophy of religion retains much of the insights of the major religions, yet he was a staunch atheist, and the first of all philosophers to be openly so. The previous ones, Hobbes and Hume, could not afford such political suicide, so they kept quiet or spoke cryptically. Most importantly, the pessimist's philosophy anticipates a great deal of Darwin and Freud and Einstein, where he recognized that nature always favored the species over the individual (because the species is everything and the individual, nothing), that the sexual impulse was omnipotent, that the consciousness was a latecomer to the scene of evolution - just the tip of the iceberg of the psyche - and that everything in the universe is fundamentally a force, since energy and matter are indistinguishable at the subatomic level. Finally, Arthur Schopenhauer was none other than the greatest philosophical influence of the two major thinkers of the 20th century, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. In order to understand both, we must read Schopenhauer.

After completing the first edition, Schopenhauer summed up the reception of his book: "I dispatch [the world as will] calmly resigned to the fact that it, too, will fully endure the fate which truth has suffered at all times, with only a brief victory celebration between the two prolonged periods where it is condemned as paradoxical and disparaged as trivial" (Preface, first edition). The paradox is that in his era the metaphysicians of the absolute actually resurrected the thing-in-itself and, in doing so, they regressed from the transcendental critique to transcendent sophisms. Instead, Schopenhauer turns from transcendental philosophy but away from transcendence and towards a nihilistic conclusion where existence, or being, is essentially the blind will, utterly purposeless. The triviality is the obvious reductionism of the natural sciences where nothing lies beneath the phenomenal world, and Schopenhauer's discovery of the metaphysical answer, the will, is all-too-often misunderstood.

In closing, I leave you with the words of the "Last German": "A philosophy in between the pages of which one does not hear the tears, the weeping, the gnashing of teeth and the terrible din of mutual universal murder is no philosophy."]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:21:28 +0000 48f7d3043bc03e6c48a6f0ebc0f258a8 <![CDATA["Consciousness... the dagger in the flesh”]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophy/consciousness-the-dagger-in-the-flesh%e2%80%9d-r100 Awet Moges (2010)

After 7 years, I was burned out by philosophy, yet I continued to haunt the philosophy section in search for anything radical and profound. Amidst the expected titles commonly found at any bookstore, sat A Short History of Decay. I pulled it off the shelf in the faint hopes of killing time until the cigar shop opened in 20 minutes. After a couple of hours disappeared savoring the salacious prose, I begrudgingly closed the book and hurried to the checkout counter, cackling in glee in the wonderful fortune of uncovering a new thinker that spoke blasphemous music to my eyes.

Within a year, I had acquired the remaining books of Emil Cioran, and devoured them with extreme relish. In Cioran not only had I found a thinker after my heart, but also a kindred spirit who experienced chronic insomnia for 7 years, and poured the results of long white nights on page after page. I myself experienced severe insomnia where I could not tell the difference between being awake or asleep, and nothing ever felt real. When I go to sleep, my consciousness is at rest, and I begin a new life the next day. But when I stayed awake all night, there was no interruption of being conscious. No new life. In the morning I'm exactly the same as I was last night. Some of his writings cut cleanly through the flesh to the bone:

Quote

“…Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture... the hours without sleep are at bottom an interminable rejection of thought by thought itself.”1


A genius of apothegms who also doubles as a “monster of despair,” Cioran (1911 – 1995) remains the best-kept secret of intellectuals today. A self-exiled Romanian who wrote his best work in French, Cioran has carved a niche on the bookshelves as a “fanatic without convictions” with a wry wit and stylized prose that savages rationality with trenchant irony.

First, I will highlight existentialist elements in Cioran's works to argue that he belongs in the canon of existentialism. Then I will expand on boredom and insomnia, the major concepts that pervades Cioran's books. Finally, I will juxtapose Cioran's thoughts against those of the other existentialists.

For existentialism


Many of the modern themes that recur in Cioran's work come from the garden of existentialism: despair, absurdity, alienation, irrationality of existence, the need of self awareness. His gnomic tone oscillates between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – Cioran explodes with the lyricism of the former in his early works (Tears & Saints, On the Height of Despair), and gravitates towards the depraved cynicism of the latter in his mature works (A Short History of Decay, Temptation to Exist, Fall in Time, Drawn & Quartered, The Trouble with being Born). However, there remain deep differences: Cioran refrains from heroic postulations like the Ubermensch and Amor Fati of Nietzsche, or the metaphysical speculations and the slightly hypocritical recommendation of resignation of Schopenhauer.

The decline of system building in philosophy in the early 19th century opened the way for new forms of discourse: ideologues and the reactionaries. Ideologues wrote anti-philosophical systems in the form of human sciences. Reactionaries on the other hand were a new kind of philosophizing that took autobiographical forms: personal, aphoristic, lyrical and anti-systematic. Cioran is the best example of this new way of writing of the 20th century.2

I think it is legitimate to include Cioran with the other existentialists because he has carried out the premises of Existentialism Proper to its logical, if outrageous, conclusion. His early nihilistic work, On the Heights of Despair, deals with despair and lucid suffering in a way that evokes the bitter ravings of the Underground Man from Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Written under the duress of suicidal insomnia, Despair embraces suffering, resignation, knowledge as sickness, and the absolute subjective experience.

In a nutshell, Cioran's early philosophy is an “absolute lyricism” where his lucidity allows him to “discover and mercilessly expose the hollowness of all philosophical systems.”3 The opening essay of Despair, titled “On Being Lyrical” Cioran argues that one is being lyrical when “one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane.”4 One of the earmarks of existentialism is its reduction of philosophy to biography, and lyricism is an effective prose.5

Cioran's relentlessly self-conscious writing deliberately opposes civilized writing where organic fears cannot be canceled by abstract constructs. Similar to Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and the Socratic person, Cioran privileges the organic, suffering thinker over the philosopher or the abstract man: “Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.”6 The organic thinker transforms his passions into obsessions. “I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction.”7

As Cioran matured, his nascent skepticism ripened and, in mercilessly demolition of his earlier idols, he criticized language itself. The main focus of Temptation to Exist was the complete severance between language and reality, and that shares much in common with Sartre's concept of nausea.8 The notion that concepts in language correspond to objects of reality is the foundation of western thought. However, Cioran instead saw language as a “sticky symbolic net,” an infinitely self-referential circular recession that distanced people from reality.

Cioran expanded this focus in Fall in Time, where language exacerbates our metaphors for experience and gets in the way of being truly alive in the moment. Split off from originality, we can no longer exploit what made us different from animals:

Quote

“Consciousness is not lucidity. Lucidity, man's monopoly, represents the severance process between the mind and the world; it is necessarily consciousness of consciousness, and if we are to distinguish ourselves from the animals, it is lucidity alone which must receive credit or the blame.”9


Thus, language has become an ouroboros, a vicious circle that signifies nothing but itself and has become the ultimate condition for man: “all speech hyperbole, all prose rhetorical, all poetry prosedemic, and all thought proleptic.”10 It is then obvious that a stylist like Cioran was too elusive to be frozen and packaged in convenient categories, as well as too complex and precise due to a decisive style that both emphasized and contradicted the ambiguity of his message. We can only highlight themes instead.

Boredom / insomnia



Throughout his work, Cioran never tires of boredom as a topic, which is paradoxically, an inexhaustible source of creativity, and a preliminary to his fatally incurable insomnia. Boredom is a baseline of "bare human existence" that demonstrates how we are all "embedded in time." Once we lose the comfortable illusions that shield us from the effects of experiencing the passage of time, boredom sets in and smears everything into undifferentiated blobs of drab grey. "Life is more and less than boredom, but it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth"11 Boredom for existentialists is a fundamental mood that emphasizes the finitude of existence, and both Heidegger and Sartre claim boredom is the naked access to being. 12

If you're not in pain, or happily distracted by some goal you've given yourself, you're left alone with life at its bare minimum. This mundane existence consists of absolutely nothing interesting, and nothing to do. "Boredom will reveal to things to us: our body and the nothingness of the world."13 In order to escape this experience of nothingness, we forget that we are merely physical husks and hurry to busy ourselves in any activity. For Cioran, boredom is one extreme swing of the pendulum; once there, we are compelled in the opposite direction, desperate to find anything to paper over the emptiness. "Life is our solution to boredom. Melancholy, sadness, despair, terror, and ecstasy all grow out of boredom's thick trunk."14

However, even if something interesting or satisfying is found, it will eventually inspire feelings of futility and meaninglessness, and boredom returns with a vengeance. “No matter what you do, the starting point is boredom, and the end is self destruction.”15

The first aphorism of The Trouble with Being Born: "3 in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up a balance sheet for every minute. And why all this? Because I was born."16 Everything that follows is framed by that experience: we are born into time, and we only realize that, once we take a step back from our mundane activity, time is the baseline of all  experience. "What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It’s all too little."17

There are experiences that amplify the dull echo boredom resonates through life, such as insomnia. It is true that boredom isn't identical to insomnia, but they both are pure access to the bare flow of time. Although Cioran focused on many other themes of existentialism with ennui, solitude, infirmity, and suicide, I think insomnia is his muse, and the key concept of his oeuvre.

Cioran is probably the exemplar of insomnia, a walking poster boy of insomnia, having suffered it throughout his life. He even claims to not have slept for 50 years! In an interview with Michael Jakob, Cioran claimed his insomnia was the “greatest experience” of his life, for it was his defining insignia and his intellectual crucifixion.18 The only solution Cioran found for his severe insomnia was exhausting himself with long bicycle rides throughout the French countryside.

While his books are merely autobiographies masquerading as analyses of decay, they explore the very personal fact of insomnia as a “form of heroism..[that] transforms each new day into a combat lost in advance.”19 The early Cioran regarded insomnia as a noble affliction, a disease of hyper-consciousness. The later Cioran glorified it: “To save the world 'grandeur' from officialdom, we should use it only apropos of insomnia or heresy.”20

Cioran found sleeplessness instructive, in which it helped undo all certainties. But insomnia is hardly ever pleasant. Anyone who's stricken with it tries their damnedest to find a cure. Had pure conscious existence been a good in itself, then we would hardly be in a hurry to cure insomnia. If consciousness was truly pleasant we would regard insomniacs as fortunate, or even sacred.

Quote

“You will suffer from everything, and to excess: the winds will seem gales; every touch a dagger; smiles, slaps; trifles, cataclysms. Waking may come to an end, but its light survives within you; one does not see in the dark with impunity, one does not gather its lessons without danger; there are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover.”21


In opposition to Aristotle, Cioran claims that we are the animal who cannot sleep: “Why call [man] a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep but yet cannot.”22 At other times, Cioran regarded insomnia as a demon:

Quote

“To discern in the depths of oneself a bad principle that is not powerful enough to show itself in daylight or weak enough to keep still, a kind of insomniac demon, obsessed by all the evil it has dreamed of, by all the horrors it has not perpetrated.”23


Other philosophers argued that boredom proved that existence is inherently miserable,24 and Cioran appropriated this argument for insomnia. Given this, insomnia can also be seen as the secret of tapping into the pure feeling of time.

Quote

"Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!"25


At the end of A Short History of Decay, Cioran suggests that insomnia is an induction to a secret society of thinkers:

Quote

"Each night was like the others, each night was eternal. And I felt one with all those who cannot sleep, with all those unknown brothers. Like the corrupt and the fanatical, I had a secret; like them I belonged to a clan to which everything could be excused, given, sacrificed: the clan of the sleepless."'26


Not only did Cioran survive insomnia, he took advantage of his conquest by making something of it. “When you waken with a start and long to get back to sleep, you must dismiss every impulse of thought, any shadow of an idea. For it is the formulated idea, the distinct idea, that is sleep's worst enemy.”27 Instead of going back to sleep, he got up and poured his thoughts on paper, in essays and aphorisms.

Against existentialists



Despite the preceding claims, Cioran is not a conventional existentialist. He often questions the validity of existence, even though he employs existential themes, and unleashes a bottomless pessimistic streak that would blanch even Schopenhauer. Cioran said most of us, throughout our lives, attempt to "keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing."28 Institutions like education or religion, systems of thought like philosophy or science, works of expression like art or music are all ways of masking this inescapable truth, for they all seek to divert our attention from its shattering impact. So, how then can we live with it?

Contra Schopenhauer, Cioran says we cannot escape agonizing ourselves with the awareness of the malady or mortification or curse of our existence. Our inquiring and scrutinizing mind give us no peace; only those living in frivolity and fabrication can avoid the constant agony. Observe your happy and content friends, and you'll draw no other conclusion. Once skepticism or nihilism takes prominence, this is the inevitable disease that follows: the symptoms, the existential feeling of this crisis of life. On the other hand, once Nietzsche freed the passions and imagination from subservience to reason and by restoring art to its rightful place, the universe became tolerable, even romantic.

Contra Albert Camus, Cioran says we all should indeed kill ourselves. That is the only consistent way to accept the absurdity of our lives. Yet we foolishly aggravate the absurdity by cowardly refusing to commit mass suicide. Whoever attempts suicide has that flush of certainty that release is imminent, but it won't because absurdity lasts until the very final moment, and if the absurdity isn't followed through to its conclusion, the ensuing shame of being a failed suicide is even worse.

Contra Sartre, Cioran says "the intoxication of freedom is only a shudder within a fatality, the form of [our] fate being no less regulated than that of a sonnet or a star."29 Freedom of will is another self-deception, an artifice of modernity that seeks to invert the void within ourselves. For people born only to experience the crushing inevitabilities of disappointment, suffering and death, a freedom defiantly thrown against the void is no answer at all. We are stuck between two irreconcilables – life and idea – and this ambiguity becomes our second nature. Thus, we suppose ourselves free, above and beyond the laws of nature or the mind.

From “spermatozoon to sepulcher” we are pawns of a taunting fate that selects for some good fortune and others for bad by chance.30 Each life is a useless hyphen between birth and death. As evolutionary biology and scientific cosmology show, Homo sapiens is one more organic species doomed like the rest to extinction, and a mere fleeting flutter in the universe's surge to heat death. Much like Sartre's nausea, Cioran acknowledges a revolting disgust surging up from such realizations: "that negative superfluity which spares nothing... [and] shows us the inanity of life."31

Cioran keeps lacerating the reader until she confesses her beliefs are tired myths, and in his remorseless destructions of such expired myths, he enriches and edifies the reader. When philosophy itself was young, Plato needed youth and beauty to advance the cause of philosophy, or he would have dismissed Socrates as just another sophist. He needed a martyr myth, because creation always involves destruction – whatever is introduced as new needs a martyr, especially when it promises change. Nowadays, philosophy has decayed and expired, and is in dire need for new myths and new martyrs to resurrect a new beauty, like a phoenix out of the ashes. Cioran, in his paradoxical way, has ignited the flames with his own intellectual crucifixion.

Works Cited


Cioran, Emil. Pe culmile disperarii. Bucharest: Fundatia Pentru Literatura si Arta “Regele Carol II,” 1934. Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston as On the Height of Despair. (1996) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. Lacrimi si sfinti. Bucharest: Humanitas (1937). Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston as Tears & Saints. (1998) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. Précis de décomposition. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.Translated by Richard Howard, Richard as A Short History of Decay. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. La Tentation d’exister. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.translated by Richard Howard as The Temptation to Exist. (1998) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. La Chute dans le temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.Translated by Richard Howard as The Fall in Time. (1970) Quadrangle Books.
__________. Ecartèlement. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Translated by Richard Howard as Drawn & Quartered. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. De l’inconvénient d’être né. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Translated by Richard Howard as The Trouble with being Born. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. Aveux et anathèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.Translated by Richard Howard as Anathemas and Admirations. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.

1. On the Heights of Despair, Preface to the French translation
2. Sontag, Susan. Introduction to Temptation to Exist, p. 11
3. Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. Introduction to On the Heights of Despair, p. xviii
4. On the Heights of Despair, p. 4
5. Nietzsche claims that all philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.
6. On the Heights of Despair, p. 22
7. On the Heights of Despair, p. 22
8. Sartre's concept of the experience of absolute contingency, presented rather vividly in his seminal work, Nausea. For Sartre, nausea stresses the absurdity of contingency, where objects lose their labels or labels fail to attach themselves to objects. Words and objects are divided, and the object becomes strange, dense, and absurd. The experience of nausea leads to the realization that labels, words, are all human inventions that have very little to do with existence, other than practical purposes.
9. Fall in Time, p. 133
10. Newman, Charles. Introduction to Fall in Time, p. 13
11. Drawn & Quartered, p. 139
12. Heidegger says boredom “reveals what-is-in totality.” In other words, boredom removes the normal focus and cares about particular beings and diffuses one's awareness into a sense of Being-as-a-whole being revealed. For Sartre, profound boredom is a special type of nausea where it provides an access to the very being of things, and leads to the awareness of oneself as the source of meaning.
13. Tears & Saints, p. 88
14. Ibid, p. 89
15. Ibid, p. 86
16. The Trouble with Being Born, p. 3
17. On the Heights of Despair, p. 43
18. “What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?” Trouble with being Born, p. 14
19. Cioran to Gabriel Liiceanu, Continents, p. 92
20. The Trouble with Being Born, p. 81
21. A Short History of Decay, p. 170
22. On the Heights of Despair, p. 85
23. Drawn and Quartered, p. 123
24. Arthur Schopenhauer.
25. On the Heights of Despair, p. 83
26. A Short History of Decay, p. 169 - 170
27. Anathemas and Admirations, p. 199
28. A Short History of Decay, p. 105
29. A Short History of Decay, p. 69
30. Ibid, p. 46
31. A Short History of Decay, p. 12]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:18:22 +0000 91bc333f6967019ac47b49ca0f2fa757 Proliferation http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophyofscience/proliferation-r98 Paul Newall (2005)

Arguments for proliferation as a methodological principle are often associated with the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1999) but they date back at least to J.S. Mill (1869 [1991]) and take the same form.

In the latter’s On Liberty of 1869, four reasons were given to advocate proliferation of theories and "forms of life".

Quote

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

The history of science is (often unfortunately) littered with examples of theories that were true without doubt and yet crumbled all the same in spite of this certainty. Although case studies such as the so-called Galileo Affair have shown that the relationship between early science and religious strictures was considerably more nuanced than had previously been believed, such that the claim that science was "held back" by religion is problematic, nevertheless the assumption of infallibility has consequences for the speed with which we can discover an error. After all, why question a surety? It has tended to take people with extreme tenacity like Galileo to adduce doubt when there is little reason to do so before the erroneous nature of the certainty can eventually become clear, of which more below.

Quote

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

It is now straightforwardly accepted that science is a fallible venture, such that our theories are never certain and are always assumed to contain some errors (although obtaining this admission where it pays in rhetorical terms not to mention it is sometimes a painful process). Given that this is so, we can take two points from Mill's remarks: firstly, that although other theories may be flawed they may still be partly true (or possess some degree of verisimilitude, or truthlikeness); and, secondly, that by bringing theories together that conflict in some or all areas we can use one to identify the flaws in the other, and vice versa.

Indeed, this "collision of adverse opinions" is for Mill an important means by which to come by knowledge. Even where an opinion strikes us as deluded or wholly ignorant, the very process of setting out why can be beneficial because it forces us to rehearse the reasons and hence to understand how a theory comes to be considered false rather than relying on an insistence that only a fool would think otherwise. This leads us to the next reason:

Quote

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

Here Mill insists that this business of contesting ideas – no matter how sure we are of them – is valuable insofar as it prevents us holding them without appreciating why they were thought worthwhile originally. There is more, though:

Quote

And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

Not only can an idea unrehearsed become held as a dogma, then, but this state of affairs can also prove a hindrance to further development, whether of the idea in question or others simultaneously or subsequently. It is here that we arrive at the full meaning of Mill's advocacy of pluralism and proliferation: even the best ideas can be improved by their clashing with others, even poor ones, because they are either enriched by their own flaws being highlighted or revealed, or else because the challenge leaves them untouched but better understood, forcing us to articulate them more clearly and to not insist upon them due to the power, prestige or authority of their supporters. Conversely, there is no value in even a true idea that is not continually subjected to challenge by even apparently false ones. Moreover, it has often been the case that the more sure of a theory people have been, the less inclined they are to question its anomalies or continue to work on its development.

One consequence of the principle of proliferation that may not be immediately apparent from Mill's discussion was elaborated upon by Feyerabend and is that these so-called "poor ideas" cannot be dismissed for the very same reasons that the "good ideas" cannot be accepted uncritically. Not only is the question of demarcating between good and bad ideas a thorny one itself, but the good ones typically started life as bad and those they replaced provide them with much of their content through the process of improvement. Any student of the history of science is also familiar with numerous examples of ostensibly hopeless theories that were regarded with scorn by all right-thinking people only to make a comeback (on several occasions in some instances, like atomism), such that it would eventually be thought preposterous that anyone would have imagined otherwise. At the time of Copernicus, say, the arguments marshalled by the Aristotelians against heliocentrism and geokineticism were so strong that Galileo had to appeal to reason over and above the clear evidence of the senses in order to explain why anyone should doubt geocentrism and geostaticism. This is not to say that a theory will make a triumphant return, of course, but only that it might and that, in the meantime, by keeping it in mind we remain aware why we (tentatively) hold to an improvement on it.

Another reason to be interested in proliferation is that theory choice is no longer accepted to be a simple matter of agreement with the evidence. The importance of rhetoric, as well as social, political, economic and thematic factors, amongst others, means that the current superior status of one theory is insufficient grounds for supposing that this circumstance is due solely to the merits of the victor (and here Lysenkoism in the former Soviet Union is perhaps the most chilling example of a theory that succeeded thanks to ideology and at the cost of many lives). Notice also that this situating of theories within a wider context is unavoidable: all the models and ideas we develop have some beneficial aspects or we would not come up with them at all, but the questions are to whom and to what end? Where only one option exists we have no opportunity for comparison and hence no way of knowing whether we have the best of the matter.

Indeed, it can happen that a theory is incorrect in an important way but there is no experimental way of knowing this. An example discussed elsewhere concerns the phenomenological theory of gases, which was replaced by the kinetic theory thanks to Einstein's Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Movement. In this case the consideration of an alternative theory in spite of there being no experimental falsification allowed Einstein to explain the same situation with a new theory that led to novel predictions, which turned the tide against the phenomenological theory and replace it with the kinetic.

Arguments against proliferation have taken several forms. One important and wider issue is that pluralism runs contrary to one of the prevalent thematic ideals: the search for unity that runs through much of physics. From this perspective, it makes little sense to proliferate theories when the aim of science is (or should be) a small number of laws that can account for all phenomena. At base this approach relies on the same notion that both Galileo and the Church insisted upon; namely, that the truth is singular and hence even if our theories may be fallible they are still getting closer and closer to one reality. Methodologically speaking, then, the suggestion is that we should not be hearking back to old, defeated theories but concentrating on the best we have and striving to improve them. In particular, our best theories (such as evolution or quantum mechanics) may be incomplete but it is unthinkable that they could be discarded at some point in the future, so we should work on the few remaining details and not concern ourselves with alternatives just to satisfy otherwise sound advice on understanding ideas.

Notwithstanding that many theories in the past were in precisely this situation (consider the certainty with which Copernicus' writing was rejected, for instance), it is here that Feyerabend's argument applies. This singular approach presupposes that our theories can be straightforwardly developed by further application but the example of Brownian motion shows that sometimes this is not possible. More generally, if a theory T1 predicts circumstances C1 but what actually occurs is C2, even though C2 is (currently) experimentally indistinguishable from C1, then we have no reason to look at alternatives to T1 in spite of it being incorrect. If we instead proliferate theories and find that some T2 predicts C2 then we have a justification for trying to experimentally differentiate the two or, where this remains impossible, for studying the merits of the two otherwise. Another possibility, of course, is that the investigation of T2 allows us to tweak T1 slightly such that it does predict C2 while maintaining its other advantages. In this way proliferation leads to strengthening or deepening the content of theories.

For Mill's part, he was very clear on why it can never suffice to rest content with one theory:

Quote

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

On this view, it is never enough to know a theory inside out; we also need to understand why alternatives exist, why they are believed to be true and why they fail in order to appreciate the value of the theory as an improvement or more deserving of our attention. The clash between advocates and deniers of the phenomenon of global warming, for example, has pushed both sides to reconsider their arguments and strengthen them, allowing flaws to be amplified (although political and other pressures are such that a good argument is rarely enough to change a policy), while the challenge of creationism and the elaboration of intelligent design have forced biologists to enter the public arena and explain why evolutionary theory is so highly confirmed and the foundation of biology.

Quote

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

Here Mill goes further, insisting that not only do "the arguments of adversaries" deserve to be heard just as part of learning about the superiority of the current theory but rather in their very strongest form. This is no recommendation of a superficial treatment, then, but a conviction that by supporting and developing alternatives we contribute to the improvement of our knowledge, even where these alternatives achieve nothing when considered in isolation. This is to say that a theory may be preposterous on its own but becomes of benefit to us when taken as providing an ever-present challenge to others. It goes without saying that the stronger it is, the greater our confidence can be that our current ideas have survived critique.

Quote

So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.

It was this last principle that Feyerabend embodied, even though there are always enough people who will paint those who apparently depart from orthodoxy as heretics by implication or opponents of clear thinking. On the contrary, it is the effort to expound, support and defend arguments we do not agree with that allows us to truly understand them enough to dissent and prefer an alternative. Proliferation enjoins upon us both a methodological pluralism and a belief that a theory is of no value unless subject to a continuous process of challenge, of which even the most dismissed of ideas is an indispensable part.

Another objection to proliferation – often the most common – is that it may be a good idea in the abstract but not in practice. Unfortunately for scientists and vacuum cleaner salesmen alike, there is only so much money to go around and hence we cannot afford to allocate resources to any and all ideas that come along. A theory can be challenged by a well-developed and plausible alternative, in keeping with the argument so far, but little or nothing is to be gained (indeed, it would even be detrimental) by taking funding from our best theories to support hopeless substitutes.

The first point to note about this rejoinder is that it effectively begs the question against the alternatives: if we deny support to an idea we can hardly criticise it later for being undeveloped and not worthy of consideration. Theories start their lives riddled with internal contradictions and partial (or even complete) disagreement with the evidence but over time may – or may not – prove their worth and begin to be taken seriously. Perhaps it is because this process of acceptance is usually slow (even where so-called "revolutions" in science are taken to have occurred, a claim that is increasingly untenable in historiographic terms) that we fail to notice it and forget that there were times when our best theories were themselves rejected as absurd or unlikely? Rejecting an idea because it is prima facie false would thus have been catastrophic methodological advice for science in the past and there is no reason to think otherwise today unless we presuppose that the current state of science and knowledge is approximately the final one, a conceit that seems to affect all ages.

What is also ignored in this response is that an idea is not only credible in proportion to how much work has been done on it and how much money is behind it. The early quantum theory was rejected with a considerable measure of displeasure by some physicists (Heisenberg told Pauli in a letter of 1926 that "[t]he more I ponder the physical part of Schroedinger's theory, the more disgusting it appears to me" (p.15 in Holton, 1988)) because it disagreed strongly with their thematic preferences, while the notion that there is or is not a higher intelligence involved in the creation or sustaining of the universe is no less unpalatable to some. Moreover, there are power structures involved in science just as anywhere else and those who have an investment in the prestige and financial rewards associated with a successful theory may not be as open to new ideas and the redistribution of funding when appropriate as their claims to the contrary might suggest. Money is thrown at projects with little or no chance of success (for example, missile defence systems) or no proven achievements (such as string theory) not because of some inherent value but because the rhetoric or personalities behind them do a better job of convincing others, while a skilful synthesis can create unity where there was none (Dobzhansky's in evolutionary biology, say) or a consensus can be constructed (like the usage of the DSM in psychiatry). Insisting that time and funding are limited, then, ignores their already unequal distribution and that the relative status of a theory is determined by far more than its empirical support. That the decision between theories is complex and based on many factors, some of them extra-scientific, is no reason to restrict our efforts to few or ignore the arguments for proliferation.

Tempering this realisation is the frequent (and necessary, for Feyerabend) association of proliferation with tenacity, the tendency of scientists (and people in all walks of life) to persist with their ideas even in the face of the most adverse of difficulties. Once again, the history of science is replete with examples of theories or conjectures that by all methodological standards in use should have been discarded but were maintained in spite of experimental results to the contrary or the most grievous of conceptual problems (see the discussion of falsificationism for more instances). Perhaps the finest illustration of tenacity – and its link with thematic commitment – is provided by Einstein's response to the question of how he would have felt if Eddington's expedition of 1919 had failed to confirm his theory of general relativity: "... then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord - the theory is correct."

The coupling of proliferation and tenacity thus goes some way to assuaging the concerns of those who would prefer not to waste time on what they consider to be bad ideas. As Mill noted, proliferation requires that we work with the strongest possible version of defeated theories in order to better our own, and vice versa, and the way to achieve this is to ensure we persist with both even when all seems lost or when it would be absurd to withhold assent that a theory is correct. This is not to say that no division of labour can be employed and that we each have to consider every idea in the marketplace, but only that it is in our interest to see that those who wish to study them are able to. This means that scientists working on a theory do not have to reassign part of their time to develop alternatives in the name of proliferation but that we should not condemn these alternatives out of hand. They may compete for funding, of course, just as we would expect given the parallel principle of tenacity, but we should view their rhetoric and behaviour in these terms rather than as indicative of a neutral claim to superiority and financial support over and above the requirements of proliferation.

When Mill set out his arguments for allowing many "forms of life" he did not have in mind only the laboratory, although proliferation outside science tends to be resisted robustly – especially when it comes to alternative medicines and the spectre of frauds and charlatans putting the health of their victims at risk. However, if we allow the benefits of supporting different ideas covered above then the same applies to methodologies, with the current dominance or pre-eminence of one approach (science) no guarantee of its continuing success – or the demerits of alternatives – any more than this could be said of theories. Extending democracy to all traditions is some way off, though, even where it is agreed that self-determination should have wider application.

Proliferation is thus a principle that makes our attitude to life and learning inclusive, as well as reflexive and genuinely fallible. It is not a rule any more than parsimony is but functions to keep knowledge an open and unfinished process by never letting us stop and be satisfied with what we have.


---

Selected References:

  • Feyerabend, P.K., Knowledge, Science and Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  • Holton, G., Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  • Mill, J.S., On Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:31:49 +0000 6aca97005c68f1206823815f66102863 Sisyphus Shrugged http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophy/sisyphus-shrugged-r97 Awet Moges (2010)

At the end of the 1949 film, Sands of Iwo Jima, after the US soldiers survive a battle, Marine Sergeant John Stryker (John Wayne) tells his fellow comrades in the trench that he's never felt so good in his life. He asks them if they want a cigarette, and then he gets killed immediately by a sniper. Later, the others find a letter on his body that contains many things John Stryker planned to say, but never did. Absurd, I thought, when I first saw this movie. I was expecting a happy ending to the movie because the protagonists always survived the climax. I couldn't help but be reminded of that scene when I read Albert Camus’ essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus. In this essay I will break down the concepts of the absurd, suicide and eluding, and make a few observations of my own.

Absurd


In 1940, Albert Camus published one of the masterpieces of the 20th century thought in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he developed the concept of the absurd in order to grapple with the meaning of life. The absurd entails three things. First, the world is characterized as irrational1 , and secondly, human beings yearn for clarity through reason or meaning. Third, the conflict between these two irreconcilable observations is known as the absurd. Fundamentally, the world is a product of random combination of events and circumstances, and we desire it to be otherwise. To be precise: the world is not absurd itself; instead, it is absurd that we seek rationality in an irrational world. Man tries to project sanity, order, or any form of rationality, on the world but always fails – and the absurd is the incontrovertible outcome.

The feeling of the absurd can strike any time.2 We live our lives with goals and purpose, and the conviction that we're doing the right things. For the most part, we are content with this presumption of rationality. But every now and then, we become overly self-aware and horribly reminded of how much creatures of habit we all are. Our predictable actions become ridiculous, and we start to doubt whether we are free agents. The most familiar person we know suddenly becomes a stranger, and the world has become dense and strange.3

Man is inclined to impose order, yet nothing about his projects has any justification, because the world does not provide support for what he does. The world is wholly indifferent to man's schemes, irrational, although man continues to try to make sense of it. Absurdity is the juxtaposition of two incompatible things, for it is “born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”4

It seems that Camus has exaggerated the duality to the point of a paradox and called it the absurd. More importantly, the dichotomy between the world and man rests on three assumptions: the universe needs to have a “human face” or it must be divinely ordered or that science is the final word of the world. More importantly, because science is a descriptive activity, then the world must be value-free. If one can contest any of these assumptions, then the Absurd is probably not a fundamental feature of human existence.
Camus says the absurd forbids all attempts to find the meaning of life. There is no possibility for a meaning of life to be discovered, but that is not necessarily a depressing view. Life as absurdity makes sense when it is seen as a claim about the lack of compatibility between people and the world they live in. What are the consequences of living with the absurd? What logically follows from the idea of the absurd? There are two obvious options: self-destruction or self-preservation.

Suicide


The Myth of Sisyphus opens with a clear mission: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem5 and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”6 The absurd is Camus’ philosophical attempt at a solution for suicide. If life is truly meaningless, then how can anyone continue to live? What are the options for the person whose life has no meaning? He/she either commits the suicide of thought by inventing a world of meaning, of hope, of God, or commits physical suicide. Camus adds a third option: the absurd hero who accepts a world without meaning, without hope, and lives.7

There are two aspects of suicide: one is the realization that life is absurd and the other is the destruction of the attachment to life. Camus notes that the body shrinks from annihilation. In order to destroy the attachment to life, there has to be a powerful rationale strong enough to blot out self-preservation, and they can number from humiliation, debilitating disease or despondency.

Although Camus was interested in these obvious types of suicide,8 I found the metaphysical or virgin suicide far more fascinating, because “rarely is suicide committed ... through reflection.”9 The virgin suicide that lacks the aforementioned rationales is a “logically disposed” suicide because it is not motivated by some kind of emotional depression or even the fear of death. Camus devoted a chapter to Kirilov, from The Possessed, since the author Dostoevsky was also preoccupied with absurd reasoning, and how it affected the lives of his characters.
Kirilov became disenchanted with the immortality of the soul and was researching on why people did not kill themselves. Kirilov said he wanted to take his life because that was his idea. Having an idea implies a motivation. Kirilov arrived at his idea with absurd reasoning by maintaining two contradictory beliefs: “I know God is necessary and must exist... I also know that he does not and cannot exist.”10

Apparently, the paradoxical existence of God entails a logical suicide. For Kirilov, this realization was enough to kill himself, because he inferred that he was God: “If God does not exist, I am God.”11 However, Kirilov was not content to believe that he was God, for that was insufficient. To be God required Kirilov to kill himself. Absurd, indeed, but this is the crux: Kirilov realized divine freedom by bringing it down to earth. For several years he had sought the attribute of his divinity and he found it at last. The attribute is freedom. Drawing the final consequences of his divine freedom ended his slavery to immortality. He refused to maintain the universal delusion that everyone up to him in history, all men and women, had invented God in order not to kill themselves.12 Kirilov thought that was the summary of the entire history up to the moment of his metaphysical suicide.

In short, Kirilov wanted to demonstrate his suicide to show others the yellow brick road. Not only was the suicide a metaphysical suicide, it was also pedagogical. Since Dostoevsky was a Christian whose Christian beliefs forbid suicide, because it is sinful, then Kirilov’s act was intended as a lesson. In the end Dostoevsky backed away from the absurd consequences, due to his faith in God. Camus forbids suicide for different reasons and gave us a solution: maintain absurdity by not denying it or adopting metaphysical delusions.
Suicide is legitimate if the first premise of the Absurd is rejected. If the world is inescapably absurd, then to kill yourself is to act as if your suicide has meaning in a meaningless existence. Suicide confirms the absurd by agreeing to it.13 To live instead is to experience the absurd at all times, but never be reconciled with it. Camus insists that if we never reconcile with the absurd, we will never be free of it, but that will rule out suicide as the genuine experience of living an absurd life. If the absurd is not conceded, it is meaningful. Life has no meaning; it is inescapably absurd. The only thing is whether we can live with it or die with it.14

Eluding15


The instinct of self-preservation usually prevails, and although we live, we deny the absurd. Camus calls this avoidance the “act of eluding.”16 This eschewal manifests as hope: the hope for life after death or the hope that there is a meaning of life – but they both only delay the absurd. We elude the Absurd in order to avoid from being overwhelmed by it.

When we experience the absurd, we continue to live – as long we convince ourselves that there is a divine mysterious plan, or agree that this world is absurd but there is a rational world after this one, or the world is absurd but only until science finds all the answers. Religions, science, philosophies all try to provide reasons and purposes for the universe, and explain away its irrational character.

Scientists and rational philosophers favor the rational schemes of man in their nostalgia for certainties as they stand before the abyss. Religious thinkers instead point at the indifference of the world and they take a leap of faith. Camus credits existentialists like Leo Chestov, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karl Jaspers for recognizing the absurd, but in the end, they are too eager to flee towards transcendence in relief. For instance, when Chestov realized the “fundamental absurdity” of existence, he declared it to be God.17 Reason has failed, thus, we must trust God. Kierkegaard makes the same escape with his “leap of faith” from the starting blocks of the absurd. The intellect is sacrificed to an irrational God. Jaspers points at the numerous failures of reason, but only to conclude in a paradox, that this failure is transcendence itself. There is no meaning; therefore, there is ultimate meaning. These existential philosophers have raised the specter of the absurd, but they attempt to resolve this absurdity by taking a suicidal leap into transcendence.

The aforementioned comfortable solutions reinstate the absurd because they prevent us from true authenticity by misrepresenting what we truly are. These denials are all philosophical suicide. Such denials are philosophical which means they are fictitious and illusory that hides the fact that life is absurd. They are suicidal, similar to physical suicide, for they deny or renounce life as absurdity. "Doctrines that explains everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relive me of the weight of my own life yet I must carry it alone." 18 Since the absurd is inherently a contradiction, every attempt to ignore or explain it away only tries to elude it. “[The] important thing... is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments."19

Camus' criticisms of the existential philosophers do not seem to be true refutations, for they seem to be complaints that their solution to the absurd only fail to meet his criteria of authenticity. This hardly persuades anyone of the cogency of his philosophy of the absurd. It seems to me that Camus does not seem as interested in their arguments, whether or not they are true, but whether one can live by them. He is more concerned with how one lives with his/her fundamental relationship with the world, the absurd. Thus, Camus avoids the more challenging task of proving the cogency of his case over rival philosophers. But that is irrelevant, as long the concept of the absurd is persuasive in itself, and whether it helps us to decide how to live.

Absurd hero


The philosophical and physical suicide both flee from the absurd. Instead, Camus insists upon a third option: embrace absurdity by refusing to commit suicide and live without a future or hope or illusion, or resignation as an absurd person. In other words, we ought to vigilantly maintain the absurd in order not to be crushed by it, and become “absurd” ourselves. He illustrated several examples as the absurd man20 and concludes the book with a chapter on Sisyphus from Greek mythology as the absurd hero. When Sisyphus was alive, he often defied and tricked the gods, and cheated even death. So they punished him by having him roll a boulder up a mountain over and over for all eternity.21

Each time Sisyphus finally reaches the top of mountain, the boulder falls back down. Camus imagines him standing there. He is thoroughly conscious of the utter hopelessness of his situation. He has a choice: give in to despair? Let gods win? Mope over his fate? Or thumb his nose at the meaningless task and refuse to see it as punishment? Camus says he is saved by his scorn. He overcomes his situation by standing in revolt of it. Given that he does not accept anything more to life than the absurd situation, Camus says he has found happiness.22

Conclusion


On one hand, I am sympathetic to the dichotomy between the hopes of man and the indifferent universe, but at the same time, I could easily envision a far more horrifying existence. We as the human species may not have arrived at a perfect understanding of our world, but what would be the consequences if that ideal did become a reality? If we knew everything, won't life be utterly boring, and consequently, intolerable? There won't be any more challenges or excitement from life. Everything is already ordered down to the last minutiae, all future events already known in advance. A bottomless, infinite, and obscure world may cost us confusion and frustration, and the impossibility of ideal knowledge. But the cost of a perfectly known world might be infinitely greater. Since Camus is not interested in possible hypotheses that are even more absurd, but whether we in our current condition can live with the absurd, then this scenario is probably irrelevant.

I am somewhat conflicted at this point. Despite the persuasiveness of Camus' arguments, I find the about-face from the Absurd as a paradox to a solution a dissatisfactory move. It seems far too similar to how the existential philosophers themselves escaped the absurd. Thus the assertion that we need to live with the absurd is an equally arbitrary move, no less another "leap of faith". The very rejection of suicide may be a compromise with the absurd, but at the same time, it seems a matter of choice, not a logical conclusion to a philosophical system. In the end, Camus stands tall as an existential thinker, despite his protests to the contrary.







Footnotes


1. Donald Crosby (1988) has characterized this as cosmic nihilism, where the universe lacks any sort of intelligibility or meaning. Camus is on the verge of making an existential nihilistic judgment that human existence is absurd, but his precise formulation of the concept of the absurd doesn't fall neatly into that category.
2. Camus lists four types of feelings of which I mention one (mechanical and routine behavior). The other three are: the burden of time and the inevitable grave, the contingency of existence and the alien nature of things, and the fundamental isolation from other people.
3. Camus, Albert (1983) p. 14
4. Ibid, p. 28
5. It's true that none of the arguments in philosophy come anywhere close in importance as finding a reason to live, or more precisely, the condition a person find him/herself in when he/she fails to find satisfactory reasons for living. This opening move has moved Camus beyond Philosophy Proper, towards theology and morality, in a religious direction.
6. Camus (1983), p. 3
7. Ibid, p. 10
8. Ibid, p. 50. Camus is less interested in philosophical suicide than he is in physical suicide.
9. Ibid, p. 5
10. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Devils, p. 690
11. Camus (1983) p. 106
12. Ibid, p. 108
13. Ibid, p. 54 “Suicide, like the leap [is not the overcoming absurdity] is acceptance at its extreme…”
14. Ibid, p. 50
15. The French term, “l’esquive” is more forceful than the English translation, “eluding,” (for it also means ‘dodging,’ ‘ducking,’ as well as ‘evading,’ or ‘escaping’) but unfortunately, there is not a better word available.
16. Camus, (1983) p. 8
17. Ibid, p. 34
18. Ibid, p. 55
19. Ibid, p. 38
20. Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror and the creator.
21. Long before I ever read The Myth of Sisyphus, I encountered an absurd hero in a video game called Chakan, the Forever Man. The main character was Chakan, a great warrior who challenged Death when it was his time to die. Death bet that if Chakan beat him, he would gain immortality. They fought, and sure enough, Chakan prevailed. However, his victory came with a curse: he would not be able to sleep, because every night, he would witness the pain he inflicted on his victims. Chakan would finally gain eternal sleep only after he had eradicated all evil. That was the game's premise, and after I defeated the game, gotten rid of all evil in the world, I awaited the final prize. Chakan tried to kill himself, only to hear the mocking laughter of Death. Death pointed at the countless stars and each of their planets was overrun with the same evil. Chakan was stuck on his world forever, alone. However, despite the absurd fate, I can imagine Chakan happy in the same fashion.
22. Camus, (1983) p. 123


Bibliography

Camus, Albert. (1983). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International
Crosby, Donald. (1988) The Specter of the Absurd. New York: State University of New York Press
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Tr. Katz, Michael (2008) The Devils. New York: Oxford University Press]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:17:16 +0000 08c5433a60135c32e34f46a71175850c Thomas Kuhn: Assassin of Logical Positivism or... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/philosophyofscience/thomas-kuhn-assassin-of-logical-positivism-or-r96 Awet Moges (2010)

In the beginning, there was nothing but
fuzzy logic, imaginary mathematics, and monolithic science.
Then the philosophy gods said, “Let Kuhn be!” And all was light.

Introduction
There are only a handful of 20th century books that impacted the world, and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions1 (SSR hereafter) is one of them. The SSR has had a major impact on history, sociology and the philosophy of science and changed them more than any other book in the 20th century.2 This essay will break down the book’s initial reception and analyze its subsequent evolution. At first, readers declared the SSR to have pronounced the last rites of logical positivism,3 after Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism supposedly dealt a crippling blow in 1951. However, reports of the demise of logical positivism may have been premature. Recently, careful readers like Michael Friedman and Reisch found enough affinities between Kuhn’s SSR and logical positivism to declare him a post-positivist who had far more in common with major logical positivists like Rudolf Carnap. First, this essay will list the theses of logical positivism, then the counter-theses introduced in SSR, and explain why recent scholars argued that Kuhn’s ideas were less radical than they appeared, and point at parallels in Carnap’s philosophy.

About SSR
The SSR was the “application of a study of history to problems within the philosophy of science”4 where Kuhn analyzed whether theory change in science had a rational account, i.e., how and why theories replace others. Prior to SSR, philosophers explained theory change in science in a progressive manner in which better theories replace existing ones (due to parsimonious or truthlike or instrumentally successful reasons). After SSR, philosophers divided themselves in two camps: the antagonists who charged Kuhn with relativism,5 and the proponents who interpreted Kuhn as a prophet of the new philosophy of science. Both parties relied on the myth that paints Kuhn as an assassin, the giant-killer of logical positivism.

The so-called giant killer reputation has glorified Thomas Kuhn for debunking several of the main theses of logical positivism:

  • Reductionism – an idea or proposition can be replaced by another idea or proposition that’s simpler. For positivism, all knowledge is reducible to scientific truths.
  • Verificationism – the claim that the meaning of a proposition is the set of experiences that determines its truth. Thus an empirical proposition has meaning as long it has been verified or could be verified in principle. If a statement is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, it is meaningless.
  • Atomism – the metaphysical claim that all reality is composed of basic and indivisible particles that’s too small to be observed by the naked eye. Russell and Wittgenstein first developed this philosophy, which in turn influenced the logical positivists.
  • ahistoricism – the idea that something is free or disconnected from history, or historical development. Logical positivism held scientific theories to be universal laws and law-like generalizations that are independent of history. Thus, scientific knowledge progresses linearly, and cumulatively.

In the SSR, Kuhn proposed holism, theory-ladenness of observation, incommensurability, and emphasized the historical or social view of science. Upon a first glance, it would appear they are not compatible with the theses of logical positivism.

Holism is the thesis that the whole has a philosophical and/or epistemic explanatory priority over the elements, members, or individuals that compose them. Therefore, a whole cannot be reduced to its bare essentials. Knowledge, contra positivism, cannot be reduced to scientific knowledge. For Kuhn, both theory and observation are interdependent in a holistic way, which introduces the problem of incommensurability, for choosing between competing paradigms cannot be solved by appealing to a theory-neutral factual language.

For logical positivists, scientific observation is taken to be epistemically primary, for observation provides the raw material that serves as an “epistemologically secure foundation”6 for scientific knowledge. Moreover, observation grants a shared base for theory choice. Observation as perceptual experience is neither judgmental, nor is it dependent on judgments of any kind. Because observation is independent of judgment, it is a neutral judge that can decide between rival theories.7

Kuhn argues against observation as a secure base for scientific knowledge, for it cannot decide between competing theories. The reason observation is useless is it is already affected by the very paradigm the observer works with. This leads to the notion of theory-ladenness8, which was first instituted by Norwood R. Hanson in 1951.9 Theory-ladenness is the idea that a concept or a term or a statement makes sense only in light of that particular theory. Observers do not make identical observations because what they see depends on what they know or believe.10 In other words, theory, tradition and expectations shape even experience. Every observational term already comes with theoretical baggage. If theory-ladenness is correct, then logical positivists cannot claim that a statement is a theoretically agnostic report of experience. Neither can they reduce a theory-laden term to the level of pure observation and produce a fact. If there's no theory-agnostic observational language, then how can any theory be evaluated without presupposing a paradigm? If all theories come from different paradigms then paradigms are incommensurable.

Incommensurability is the concept that theories of different paradigms are not translatable because paradigms consist of different vocabularies where neither could be fully stated in the other, or could not be translated without distortion. For logical positivists, the comparison of theories only needs the translation of their effects in a neutral observation language. According to the incommensurable thesis, there is no neutral observation language at all to mediate between paradigms.

In the SSR, Kuhn included many examples from the history of science where proponents from different paradigms failed to understand each other, and he defined this as incommensurability. For example, in physics, the Newton paradigm is not commensurable with its predecessor, the Aristotle paradigm. They lacked a common measure because their concepts and methods were different, and they focused on different problems. “..the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverted lenses.”11

“We have already seen several reasons why proponents of competing paradigms must fail to make complete contact with each other’s viewpoints. Collectively these reasons have been described as the incommensurability of the pre and post-revolutionary normal science tradition.”12

Kuhn argued that incommensurability was one reason why science does not progress cumulatively, in order to refute the notion of science as a constant moving towards an approximation to the truth. Science does not progress to a perfect ideal, but only away from the anomalies that plagues the current theory. Therefore, scientific progress is eliminative, rather than linear and instructive. 13

There is no transcendental method for rational scientific progress. Kuhn instead developed a cyclical picture of scientific progress, where a mature science operates under a paradigm, and goes through periods of normal science. Then a crisis occurs when the paradigm declines in its usefulness, falls into serious doubt, and revolutionary science results when a new paradigm replaces the old one. Finally, the revolution “inaugurates a new period of normal science.”14 Given this picture, scientific knowledge cannot be accumulative.

Normal science extends the “knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.”15 Normal science articulates the “phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.”16 Kuhn characterized normal science as puzzle-solving, where results may not be spectacular but they can prove the success of a scientist. Normal science entails the existence of consensus among the community of scientists. They work on research that is based on a certain achievement they acknowledge as the foundation of its practice. 17

When this consensus breaks down during crisis, it is rebuilt during the period of a revolutionary science. A crisis takes place when anomalies multiply and scientists begin to doubt the existing core theory.18 Normal research no longer works, and some scientists realize their paradigm has ceased to function adequately and needs to be replaced. Revolutionary science is defined as a “non-cumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced ...by an incompatible new one.”19 Conservative defenders of the old paradigm take comfort in the past achievements of the normal science, and are reluctant to give it up. They hold out hope that it will eventually survive the crisis and solve the anomalies. Radical supporters of the new theory, despite its lack of track record, recognize its future promise. Scientists from two competing paradigms are unable to understand one another since their theories are incommensurable. “..the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of corresponding science. Some old problems may be relegated to another science or declared entirely 'unscientific.' Others that were previously non-existent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” 20A new paradigm is accepted only if it is recognized as being superior in problem solving than the competition, and the shift to the new paradigm starts a scientific revolution.

Paradigm is Kuhn's most notorious concept, for it is least precisely defined of them all. Roughly, paradigms provide the basis for normal science, and at the same time it limits the field of investigation by restricting questions and answers, and that conditions expectations. Therefore, a paradigm can affect observation, and cause the scientist to overlook anomalies, or wilfully ignore them. Kuhn defined paradigm in at least two senses: one, a global all-embracing “shared commitments of a scientific group” and the other, a “particularly important sort of commitment… a subset of the first.”21 The first definition seems to be the conscious obedience to methodology and rules, whereas the second seems to be an intuitive pattern recognition. Logical positivists would agree with the first definition, for they thought that science could be explained by the conscious obedience to methods and rules, but Kuhn's second definition denies this and proposes that exemplars serves as models for new scientists to develop their powers of pattern recognition.

Kuhn called exemplars as the “most novel and least understood aspect” of SSR in the postscript to the second edition.22 He defines exemplars as a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational and instrumental applications. These are the community's paradigms, revealed in its textbooks, lectures and laboratory exercises.23 Kuhn pointed at great works like Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Newton's Principa as the origin of a scientific paradigm. They became paradigms because they attracted scientists and persuaded them away from other competing theories, and they were sufficiently open-ended to leave enough problems to be solved.24 Kuhn's paradigm concept helps explain the context of discovery somewhat: working with exemplars help scientists to regard new problems as puzzle-solving and allows them to potentially discover solutions to their puzzles.

One last point about positivism and Kuhn's rebellion: the foundation of the “received view” was the distinction between the discovery and justification of scientific theories.25 This distinction is essentially the distinction between psychology and epistemology, respectively. Discovery is about hunches or insights, which are psychological processes that are not beholden to conscious intention. These processes are subjective elements that come from non-rational, non-logical, and unconscious activity. Philosophers generally do not deem the context of discovery a worthwhile field of analysis, for psychologists are better suited to the task. Unsurprisingly, philosophers are far more concerned with the epistemology of scientific theories, in which they are more concerned with the reasons and arguments that support the idea. The context of justification is about rules that determine whether a hypothesis is acceptable. The problem is there are no rules that show the way to formulating the right hypothesis in the first place. Logical empiricists dismissed discoveries as irrational, for they thought discoveries were based on imaginative leaps or lucky accidents. Thus, there cannot be any logic of scientific discovery. The positivist is only concerned with “legitimizing [the discovery] scientifically, prove it objectively, and construct it logically”26

Kuhn also rejected the distinction, and at the end of the introduction to the SSR he admitted to have violated the distinction between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification.”27 Hoyningen-Huene said Kuhn rejected the distinction because he was committed to theory choice. Kuhn considered the justification of theory choice to belong to the context of discovery because theory choice depends on the commitments of the scientific community to a paradigm. The values or norms of a community is a sociological issue, so by erasing the distinction, Kuhn shifted the issue of justification from epistemology to sociology. 28 While Kuhn’s paradigm theory did erase the distinction between truth conditions of science and its historical period, this wasn’t foreign or contradictory to logical positivism.29

Analysis of giant-killer reputation
Was Kuhn truly a giant-killer? If so, did the practice of philosophy of science truly change appreciably after Kuhn? I.e., is verificationism now bunk? Not at all. We only did away with A. J. Ayer’s formulation, for it was incoherent and exceedingly simplistic.30 Verificationism lives on today but under different names such as confirmation. Another point to note is that the initial readers of SSR exaggerated the break between Kuhn and his predecessors.31 He retained some empirical commitments which is why he only broke away from certain elements of logical positivism with concepts like incommensurability, progress, and paradigms. However, some say Kuhn failed to go far enough, for he was not radical enough. The historian Michael Friedman claimed the Kuhnian revolution was not complete and he has tried to restore Kuhn as a positivist who only forced an partial transformation in logical positivism. Had Kuhn gone far enough, he would have pulled off a truly revolutionary break with the established philosophy of science of the times.

Recent scholars have tried to rehabilitate the reputation of logical positivists with a careful attention to their work that dispelled many myths, particularly the one that Kuhn hammered the final nail in the coffin of positivism. Many scholars focused on the paragon of logical positivism, Rudolf Carnap, and found sufficient material to rehabilitate his reputation. George Reisch pointed out that Carnap's philosophy of science had much in common with Kuhn's normal science and paradigm concept. Michael Friedman rescued Carnap's philosophy from the unfair reputation of naïve empiricism and foundationalism.32 John Earman saw many affinities between Carnap and Kuhn with respect to semantic incommensurability.

In the scholars' reevaluation of Carnap’s body of work, the natural transition of logical empiricism to post-positivism diminishes Kuhn’s giant-killer status. Reisch offered the letters between Carnap and Kuhn as evidence that there was no contention between them, thus he encourages us to draw the inference that there was no incompatibility between their philosophies.

Similarities between Carnap and Kuhn are found in the Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology (ESO hereafter), where Carnap proposed the notion of linguistic framework. Some scholars33 argued that the linguistic framework could be interpreted as compatible with Kuhn's notion of paradigm, and the pragmatic nature of external questions is similar to Kuhn's value of theory choice. Carnap's linguistic framework theory is also compatible with Kuhnian theses: incommensurability, holism, and the theory-ladenness of observation. Therefore, they argue, Carnap's theory is close to Kuhn's theory of scientific revolution, normal science and paradigm.

First of all, Carnap thought that all scientific theories were embedded within a linguistic framework. Carnap was chiefly concerned with existence problems in the ESO, and in order to allow scientists to discuss abstract entities without embarrassment, he divided the problems into internal questions and external ones. For Carnap, a linguistic framework is a set of linguistic conventions that determine how we decide questions about existence. A simple example for a linguistic system would be a mathematical system with axioms, and an existence question is answered with deductions from the axioms. Carnap called this existence question an internal question. On the other hand, an external question would be about the total system of entities34, for the linguistic framework presupposes them in order to ask and answer internal questions. We can judge internal questions according to the logical rules within the individual linguistic framework, but we cannot judge external questions for they do not presuppose any logical rules.35 For Carnap, the internal questions are distinct, clear-cut and philosophically uninteresting, whereas external questions, often ontological ones, are meaningless. Thus external questions should never be asked. At most we should only be concerned whether the linguistic framework is acceptable on pragmatic grounds.

Where logical rules of a linguistic framework establish validity according to that framework, for Kuhn, a particular paradigm that regulates a normal science involves agreed-on rules that designate what counts as valid solutions for puzzle-solving problems. Where external questions, with respect to the linguistic framework under question, aren’t beholden to logical rules, but more so to pragmatic and conventional reasons, for Kuhn, a paradigm is replaced when revolutionary science changes the generally accepted rules that are in play during normal science, and requires a conversion.

Once a linguistic framework is subbed for another, a revolution occurs, for the framework is defined by its rules. Changing them will change the scientific language, and brings on a revolution. These parallels between Kuhn and Carnap inspire scholars to claim that these philosophers shared similar views about science, and how scientific revolutions take place, whether it is paradigm change or lexical change.

Objections
While it is true that there are more affinities that the “received reading” has ignored or glossed over, however, those affinities are not constitutive of a clear compatibility. This “return” to a reconciliation is but a revisionist reading, because there are several reasons, raised by J. C. Pinto de Oliveira:

  • It matters little that Kuhn had Carnap's support in their personal correspondence, for that hardly amounts to a clear endorsement of Kuhn's philosophy of science in the SSR.
  • Carnap's complete silence about Kuhn in his later work, especially in his last book, Philosophical Foundations of Physics
  • Carnap continued to distinguish between discovery and justification in his attempt to push a “logic of science” in the article “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science.”
  • Carnap considered Kuhn's SSR a work in the history of science, not the philosophy of science, and he himself admitted that he was ignorant of the history of science.
Though Carnap claimed that the language change in his linguistic frameworks had much in common with scientific revolution, he did not go into detail about such revolutions because he thought epistemology or wissenschaftslogik had nothing to do with historical analysis. Carnap was concerned with formal problems, or how language applied to certain sciences. Whatever happened during periods of revolutionary science, he was only interested in the articulation of the logical structures of the two different languages. 36 However, history is not mere embellishment of an a priori structure of scientific rationality. Kuhn instead saw a philosophical quality in the analysis of history of science, and that is sufficient reason to refrain from lumping them together in a quasi-philosophical category.

Conclusion
Kuhn himself was a monumental paradigm in the philosophy of science, no doubt, but revisionist scholars went too far in the swinging of the pendulum against the death of the “received reading.” Their ace in the hole, Carnap's linguistic frameworks, only show superficial similarities between the later Carnap and Kuhn, and leaves the major tenets of logical positivism themselves untouched. The initial reading of Kuhn as the chief assassin of logical positivism was exceedingly simplistic, no question. But this does not excuse the equally dramatic swing to the antithetical position that tried to force Kuhn into a straitjacket that made him more germane to the descendants of logical positivism. I propose a middle solution that recognizes Kuhn may not have truly broken free from his ancestors in the philosophy of science, but his new vocabulary was sufficient in instituting a massive evolution that's still sending shock waves in the field that continues to be felt today. At any rate, scientists, like what Virgil advised Dante when it came to cranks, can only look at the philosophers squabble amongst themselves, and continue to do whatever they like.


Footnotes
1. The Arts and the Humanities claimed that the SSR was the most frequently cited book in the 20th century during the period of 1976 to 1983, and the Times Literary Supplement included it in “The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War.”
2. Alexander Bird claims the SSR was not a philosophical text, but a “theoretical history” because the book became a paradigm for the philosophy of science, which revolutionized the field with a “theoretical history of science.” (Bird, 2000, p. viii)
3. Suppes was the first to do so. This persists even today, with the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Thomas Kuhn
4. Newall, Paul. Kuhn. 2008
5. Critics took issue with Kuhn for charging textbooks of science as dogma, for denying any possible objective criterion that could determine between competing paradigms, and for describing the shift to a new paradigm as a “conversion experience.” (Kuhn, 1996 p. 151)
6. Bird, 2000, p. 97
7. Bird, 2000, p. 98
8. Theory-ladenness is the basis of confirmation holism, the idea that no single theory in science can be isolated in tests for it depends on other theories.
9. In Patterns of Discovery, Hanson pointed out that observation was not as simple as the logical empiricists thought.
10. Bird, 2000 p. 99
11. Kuhn, 1996, p. 122
12. Kuhn, 1996, p. 148
13. Oberheim, Eric and Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories.” 2009
14. Bird, 2000 p. 25
15. Kuhn, 1996, p. 24
16. Ibid
17. Kuhn, 1996, p. 10
18. Bird, 2000 p. 43
19. Kuhn, 1996, p. 92
20. Kuhn, 1996, p. 103
21. Kuhn, The Essential Tension, p. 294
22. Kuhn, 1996, p. 187
23. Ibid, p. 43
24. Kuhn, 1996, p. 10
25. Hans Reichenbach introduced this distinction in 1938 in Experience and Prediction where he noted the concept of rational reconstruction was essentially about how they communicate thoughts, rather than how they are subjectively formed.
26. Fleck, 1979, p. 22 Ludwik Fleck argued that the distinction between justification and discovery was exceedingly shallow, for the historical process of discovery mattered a great deal for epistemology. Fleck proposed a “thought-collective” and defined it as “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas.” In order to discuss or exchange ideas, two people must possess the same vocabulary, and share many things in common – theories, facts, significance – i.e., beliefs and dispositions. Thus, the total knowledge of a community cannot be reduced to its individual members.
27. Kuhn, 1996, p. 8
28. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. 2006 p. 127
29. Otto Neurath compared science to at boat we are rebuilding while at sea. A caricature of logical positivism would use the skyscraper edifice instead to represent their conception of science.
30. Alonzo Church and Carl Hempel also contributed to the decline of verificationism. Church heavily criticized the concept of verificationism in his review of Ayer's book Language, Truth and Logic in Journal of Symbolic Logic.
31. It’s interesting to note that Kuhn, despite his giant-killer reputation, did not make many references to Logical Positivists in the SSR. Alexander Bird points out that in the 150 footnotes, only 13 were philosophers. The rest consisted of historians. (Bird, 2000 p. x)
32. In Reconsidering Logical Positivism, Friedman argues that Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt was not a program of naïve empiricism but instead a neo-kantian project that was concerned with the conditions for possible knowledge.
33. Reisch, 1994, and Earman, 1993
34. or the system of math, entities would be about numbers in general.
35. Carnap writes that only philosophers raise external questions, especially questions about the reality of the world.
36. Carnap, 1934, §72 “Philosophy replaced by Logic of Science”


Bibliography

Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 2000

Carnap, Rudolf. Logische Syntax der Sprache. 1934 (English Translation) The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge. 1937

Carnap, Rudolf. “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science.” in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Vol. 1, no. 1. Chicago. Chicago University Press. 1938

Carnap, Rudolf. “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” in Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. University of Chicago Press. 1956

Church, Alonzo. “Review of Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic.” Journal of Symbolic Logic. Vol. 14. 1949. p. 52-53.

Earman, John. “Carnap, Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Scientific Methodology.” in World Changes. Horwich, P. (ed.) MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1993 p. 9 – 36

Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Trenn, T. J. and Merton, R. K. (eds), F. Bradley (trans.), foreword by T. S. Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981. [Translation of Fleck 1935]

Friedman, Michael. “The reevaluation of Logical Positivism.” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 88, 1991. pp. 505 – 523.

Friedman, Michael, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press. 1999.

Hanson, N. R. Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge. Cambridge University. 1958.

Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. “Context of Discovery versus Context of Justification and Thomas Kuhn.” in Revisiting discovery and justification. ed. Schickore, Jutta and Steinle, Friedrich 2006.

Irzik, Gurol and Grunberg, Teo. “Carnap and Kuhn: Arch Enemies or Close Allies?” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 46, No. 3 September 1995. pp. 285 – 307

Kuhn, Thomas. The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1977

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1996

Newall, Paul. “Kuhn.” 2008 The Galilean Library. <http://academy.galilean-library.org/glossary.php?do=item&id=20 >

Oberheim, Eric and Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories.” 2009 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 25 February 2009 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incommensurability>

Oliveira, J. C. Pinto de. “Carnap, Kuhn, and revisionism: on the publication of Structure in Encyclopedia.” (4th version) 2007 Springer Science + Business Media B. V. 6 June 2007 (online)

Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science. 58 (2). 1991 p. 264 – 277.

Reisch, George. “Planning Science: Otto Neurath and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science.” British Journal for History of Science. 27 1994. p. 153 - 75

Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science : To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:03:11 +0000 b2eeb7362ef83deff5c7813a67e14f0a Borges in his parallel universes http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/borges-in-his-parallel-universes-r91 Niven Kumar (2007)

Where does one begin with Borges? What meanings, if there is any at all, do we glean from his work? Who is Borges? And how many? One? Three? Five? Is he Everyman? Or is he No Man? Where do his labyrinths take us?

These are merely possibilities in Borges' body of work which imply yet more possibilities, forming a labyrinth of questions culminating in a vague intimation of substance. Borges' ideal and, for him, real world lies in the construction of fictional universes, in the practice of fiction making. His art has been labeled metaphysical, philosophical, sometimes even anti-philosophical. Consequently, studies focus on his style as a means of gaining access to his world of meanings. In other words, style is conceived as containing the meaning of a work of art, "with stylistic devices appearing as significant marks in a literary language that expresses certain intuitions" (Ja n, 1992, 10). The initial purpose of such an analysis is to underline the unique features of the particular work, but the ultimate goal is the prospecting of meaning in the text. Yet, Borges himself denies that there is any meaning to his work, and that his interest in religious, metaphysical and esoteric truths is purely aesthetic in nature (Borges, 1964; 37).

What is the purpose of all his writing, if we assume that all writing is political once the pen has left its mark on paper? The key to this question lies in Borges' own interpretation of what literature or fiction making is, what is written and how it is read.

For Borges, the writer is a "mobile mind in a stationary body" (Sturrock, 1977; 39). While this statement seems innocuous enough, it contains a virulent insistence that imagination is the only resource open to a writer, and that a truly realist fiction writer does not exist. The writer's first act is to isolate himself from everything, and his or her second act is to duplicate oneself in two places and be two people at one time (Sturrock, 1977; 39). Hence, in Borges' fiction, the reader encounters stories about doubles, or doppelgaengers, in pieces like Borges and I and The Shape of the Sword (although this second story is more to do with a perceptual sleight of hand than a problem of identity). Because the writer is essentially a fiction maker, imagination, that constellation of chimerical images, becomes the world he inhabits and lives within and breathes, and which for the maker of fictions is essentially the 'real' world. For the writer, the imagination, despite its interiority, is an entity in itself, an exterior interiority, so to speak, from which he or she has to step away in order to apprehend. In other words, and for our purposes, the maker of fictions creates his own universes and, therefore, is subjected to the laws and conditions imposed upon him by this existential commitment. To be divorced from 'reality' in the idealist world of words, then, is to be doubly alienated through isolation and immobility – these are the two conditions required if the imagination is to be preserved from the distractions or 'invasions' of reality (Sturrock, 1977; 41).

Isolation alone, however, is insufficient for the maker of fictions to practice his craft. Confinement leads to inspiration. It lowers the number and variety of stimuli from the outside world and gives rise to a higher level of mental activity. He writes in the Preface to his Brodie's Report,

Quote

The craft is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral and I prefer Plato's theory of the Muse, to that of Poe who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence (Borges, 2000a; 20).

Here, Borges is suggesting that intuition is not necessarily synonymous with the intellect. Isolation brings out in the maker of fictions an intuitive temperament. He argues that Poe is an intuitive masquerading as a mathematician (Sturrock, 1977; 49). He is a dissembler, Borges claims, but the Argentine himself is a dissembler, a mathematical spirit masquerading as an intuitive. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Borges believes that it is intuition that allows the mind to pass from the mundane world of the everyday, replete with specifics and the minutiae of daily routine, to the linguistic world of universals. Intuition, in other words, is the medium through which we pass from existences to essences.

In the opposition between realism and idealism, then, Borges stands firmly in the camp of the latter. For Borges, the realist doctrine that all things exist independently of the mind offers nothing. He is a maker of fictions, and can only utilise mental phenomena as a means of understanding reality, and being part of it. He says:

Quote

I thought above all of the literary possibilities of Idealist philosophy, let us say, rather than its intrinsic merits. This does not mean necessarily that I believe in Berkeley or Schopenhauer ... I believe I was thinking rather of the alchemy or unreality of the material world as subjects usable by Literature (Sturrock, 1977; 22).

Borges' chief goal, then, is a linguistic one, and one that is very instructive for critics and writers alike. His stories divulge not only the conventions and procedures of his own art but of the art of narrative in general, and to that extent they rank among the criticism of literature at the same time as extending the possibilities of creative writing. Borges wants to demonstrate the true nature of fiction: the immateriality of fictional objects, the distinction between causation and succession, the juxtaposition of the possible and impossible on an equal footing. By doing so, however, he inadvertently develops a new way of seeing and apprehending the world, and sets new standards for not only making fiction, but also reading it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, says that he reads Borges for his "extraordinary ability at verbal artifice. [H]e's a man who teaches you how to write, teaches you to sharpen your instrument for stating things" (Bell-Villada, 1999;44). Julio Cortazar, an Argentine, and an oft-considered heir to Borges' legacy, believes they both coincide in their "search ... for a style" (Bell-Villada, 1999; 44). Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, argues that Borges "blurs all genres, rescues all traditions, kills all bad habits, creates a new order, rigorous and demanding, on which irony, humour, and play can be built..." (Bell-Villada, 1999; 45).

The three writers mentioned above agree, however, that Borges' fictions are, as Marquez puts it, "escapist literature" (Bell-Villada, 1999; 44). To be sure, Borges' fantastical stories, at first glance, seem far divorced from the reality that we inhabit in our little everydays. His imaginary worlds, his non-existent novels and alien philosophies and landscapes are unimaginable and unreachable. They do not try to attempt any form of reflexivity, preferring instead to forever turning in on themselves, and referring to themselves, like a spiral staircase with no end.

However, Borges' unrealities, his forever multiplying universes, are not anti-realities. His fictions do not merely speak of non-existent landscapes and worlds. Instead, his unrealities are at the core of his aesthetic, and this he argues in his The Secret Miracle, is "one of art's prerequisites". They are not akin to the fantasies of the surrealists. Nor are they in any way similar to the soothing escapist, though elegant, fantasies of Tolkien. Borges' landscapes are disconcertingly suggestive of this world; his characters may inhabit ancient worlds such as Babylon and ancient Rome, or haunt imaginary spaces, like the Library of Babel or the circular ruins, but the fictional scenarios still refer to our own, even if obliquely.

Borges has, on many occasions, stated that his tales are essentially parables, veiled comments on real human problems. As such, they allude to reality indirectly even though they depict unrealities. Borges does not see the magical and fantastical elements as the luxuries of a bourgeois literary man. He sees magic as an essential and redeeming element in fiction making. The realist does not actually create worlds but merely expresses what already is. He suppresses artifice. He argues that the realist novel contains a contradiction. The central concern of the novel, according to E.M. Forster, an argument that Borges subscribes to, is causality. Having fashioned a plot based on character, the writer is obliged to look for reasons, be they obvious or implicit, for the events that take place. This succession of motives and occurrences claim to reflect the real world faithfully and objectively. The realist novel, by definition, represents the presumed working of natural laws. This assumption is untenable in Borges’ reckoning, since nature has an "infinite mesh of causes and effects" (Borges, 1970; 91). Nature has forces that are too numerous to pin down in a fiction. It follows, then, that nature is beyond formal control. Therein lies the contradiction. It is situated between the implicit philosophy of the novel and its intrinsic capabilities, its aims and material means (Villada, 1999; 54).

Magic, then, is a means to clarity and vigour. It has the evocative advantages of the atavistic, but it is also formally lucid, and intellectually diverse; "it is governed by all natural laws, and by imaginary ones as well" (Borges, 1970; 80). In this, Borges anticipates by thirty-five years the Franco-Bulgarian structuralist, Todorov, who, in 1967, conceived of the idea of imaginary causality, a term denoting those events that, though seemingly the products of a random conference of disparate elements, are actually informed and impelled by a greater, more mysterious, transcendental order of things (Villada, 1999; 55).

Imaginary causality, needless to say, runs through much of Borges stories. Not only is this employed by Borges as a stylistic device, it is a direct extension of his world view. Causality, be it divine or imaginary, has one basic characteristic – the loss of the Self. The individual is never in control of his or her own destiny when beneath the surface of all events and actions lies the spark of Chaos, that silent explosion of forces which orders and then re-orders our reality. Borges fiction, especially the more fantastical of his work, exemplifies this loss of the Self, and the struggle to come to terms with the revelation or discovery of our own unrealities. "Let us admit", he writes, "what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature" (Borges, 1994; 207-8).

My intention in this paper is to focus on the more fantastical of Borges' stories, three in particular, in order to discover the secret universes in which Borges is a contented inhabitant. My purpose is to show that despite their esoteric and obscurantist nature, his stories do hold some relevance to the modern condition and that he brings to literature not only a way of writing, but also a way of reading it.

We have already seen that Borges' work falls well within the rubric of Idealism rather than realism. The fictions of Realism are recognisable by their concealment of artifice, by the normality or unobtrusiveness of their viewpoint on the world. In other words, they are characterised by their fidelity with which they seem to be transcribing a world and not making one up. Borges believes, however, that by employing language in the service of artifice he is exemplifying the real power, not the false promises, of words. For him, as a writer, words and books are reality, as they are for any writer. His acknowledgement that he will never, however many and various the tigers he imagines, accede to the real animal, is an acknowledgement that cuts deep into the pretensions of Realism. Instead of hiding his workings, as most realists do, Borges chooses to make these said workings the subject of his fictions. He vehemently argues that when writers purport to write about what they claim to be first-hand experience of the world, they are in fact using only a second-hand experience of it through the literature of their day. Roland Barthes, in his S/Z, demonstrates, to this effect, that the Realist depends heavily on the cultural stock of his time rather than any immediate confrontation with real people and places.

Reality, for the Argentine, lies outside of literature and language. He is not interested in the mimesis of Reality, but instead is concerned with the mimesis of convention. How does one reconcile the word with the thing, abstraction with reality? You can't, says Borges, and so he uses abstractions as the reality proper to literature. Borges' mind, then, becomes his absolute reality. He walks through it, suffers in it, struggles with it, enjoys it, and exhausts it possibilities.

The last of these is essential for our purpose here today. Borges' reality relies on presuppositions. Presuppositions are tacit. They are potential statements we are committed to accepting if we accept the statement which presupposes them. In his essay, Narrative Art and Magic (2001, 75-82), he argues that in order for William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason to work, the writer has to establish the possibility of the centaur's factual existence. Borges goes on to show here that through artifice and other linguistic and perceptual tricks, Morris achieves the impossible; that is, he uses lyrical verse to achieve a willing suspension of disbelief in order to establish the centaur and the adventures of Jason as factual truths.

Similarly, Borges' fictions, too, are full of 'centaurs', often so cunningly introduced that they escape notice. These artifices suggest, without pretending to represent 'what is', that the reality we know is always more complex than any possible representation of it. It is up to language, therefore, to only hint at this complexity. Its task is to dream into existence the possibility of impossibilities. In this dreaming, then, the permutations for what can possibly be are endless. The dreamer is, at the same time, the dreamed.

Nowhere in his fictions is this clearer than in the story entitled The Circular Ruins. A magician dreams another man to put him into reality. After many repeated attempts, he finally succeeds, but in order to bring him to life he requires the help of the God of Fire, previously worshiped at the temple which now lies in ruins and where he meditates on his project. In return for the help received he sends the newly dreamt man, essentially his son, down the way to another ruined temple to worship the Fire God. He is concerned, however, that his son might discover the fact that he has been dreamed (a humiliating discovery), because he learns of rumours of a man who can walk on fire without being burned.

Years later, when his own temple is surrounded by a forest fire, he walks into the flames, and is relieved to find that he is unscathed. Then, he understands with terror that he, too, is an illusion, that someone else had been dreaming him. The story reminds us of Hume's belief that mankind is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity. The circular inversions of the dreamer and the dreamt, of dreaming and being dreamt, is firstly suggested by the epigraph Borges employs for the story, the incomplete thought implied when Tweedledee and Tweedledum explain to Alice that she is part of a dream the red King is dreaming at the moment: "And if he left off dreaming about you..." Here, Alice is confronted with the possible unreality of her self, since to be dreamed is to be nothing. This is a delightful infinite regress since the Red King is part of Alice's dream. The idea here is that while Reality is merely the product of one's real time dreaming, if you like, the possibility that our place in that reality has been dreamt by another makes it pointless to attempt to describe the universe through literature.

The Universe, or reality, therefore, is a chaos of impressions upon which any semblance of order is imposed or arbitrary. He concludes that,

Quote

obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is... We must go even further; we must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God's secret dictionary.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional (2001, 231).

Borges is attempting, then, to create a "through-the looking-glass" world through his art, juxtaposing it with the world of 'reality'. The world of reality is created by our presence, like the images in the mirrors: impermanent, unreal and of mysterious purpose. This, of course, is not Borges' discovery but has philosophical roots in Berkeley’s work and earlier.

Borges considers Berkeley's negation of objective reality irrefutable and even easy to conceive and accept. He suggests the simile of the mirror:

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Regarding the negation of the autonomous existence of the visible and palpable objects, it is easy to reconcile oneself to it by thinking: Reality is like the image of ourselves that appears in all mirrors, a simulacrum that exists for us, arrives with us, gestures and leaves with us, but that we only need to look for in order to find it.

Berkeley denied matter. This does not mean that he denied things like colours, smells, tastes, and tactility. He denied that there were pains no one feels, colours no one sees, forms no one touches. He argued that to add matter to perceptions is to add to the world another inconceivable and superfluous world. Borges carries Berkeley's postulates and their logical conclusions and consequences to the field of literary creation to mould a literature that moves not within the world of everyday reality but in that of metaphysical reality. Whereas Berkeley wrote under the illusion that he was describing the real world, Borges' literary use of his ideas shows us that the world he projected may be just as unreal as the one he tried to undermine. These realities cancel each other out (Ja n, 1992; 53-54). In other words, like the magician who believes he is a Creator only to find out that he too has been created, we live in the terrifying grip of an infinite regress.

At the root of this story, lies the theme of Creation, which is related to the cyclical repetition of the dream. A dream implies a dreamer, and Creation implies a Creator. The orthodox argument that god is the uncaused Caused is "a mere juggling of words, a violence done to language" (Jaen, 1992; 58). For him, a speech implies a speaker, and a dream a dreamer; this, of course, leads to an endless series of speakers and dreamers, an infinite regress. Since in the world of experience every effect has a cause, the idea of an uncaused Cause introduces a contradiction to this principle in order to avoid falling into an infinite regress. Similarly, in The Immortal, the narrator says,

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Among the corollaries of the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another, there is one that has little theoretical importance but that caused us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of the earth. It may be summarized in these words: There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away (2000, 15).

This possibility that the next river you stop at to drink may be the river that takes away one's immortality relegates reality to a game of chance, with no end to the nightmare of possibilities. That our world is "full of possibilities", as the clich goes, is an anathema, argues Borges, and that is why it is relegated to the level of a clich , sequestered in the world of language like a nun of the Cistercian order.

Further along in the story, the narrator tell us,

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Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent. Among the immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem. (2000, 15).

The never ending sequence suggested here represents the endless possibilities of language. After all, objects are irrecoverable and contingent by accident of language alone. All this contributes to Borges' essential purpose of undermining individual personality and Self, individual meaning, and individual destiny.

This world view first appears in his essay entitled The Nothingness of Personality (2001, 3):

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I want to tear down the exceptional pre-eminence now generally awarded to the self, and I pledge to be spurred on by concrete certainty, and not the caprice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual prank. I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality. I want to apply to literature the consequences that issue from these premises, and erect upon them an aesthetic hostile to the psychologism inherited from the last century, sympathetic to the classics, yet encouraging to today’s most unruly tendencies.

His reference in the last line to the classics is important for it signifies an interest in literature as form, as creation, as opposed to the romantic conception of literature as expression of self or the personality. Because Borges does not believe in the solidity of a personality, he questions the idea of character development in literature. Form is, in itself, a universe, a constellation of being, and it is through its exposition that an artistic, or creative continuity is achieved. He argues:

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I repeat: there is not, behind the face, a secret self governing our acts or receiving our impressions; we are only the series of those imaginary acts and those errant impressions. The series? If we deny matter and spirit, which are continuities, and if we also deny space, I do not know what right we have to the continuity that is time (2001, 321).

Here, Borges is alluding to both Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley denied matter; Hume denied spirit (Borges, 2001; 328). In essence, then, humanity is nothingness. Hence, in The Circular Ruins, the final revelation that the magician, too, has been dreamed suggests not only that the self is illusory, but also that the narrative that has led us to that revelation is illusory, or meaningless. It is the snake eating its own tail. This is his meaning when he stubbornly insists that there is no meaning to his stories.

However, we can go much further. While in The Circular Ruins, Borges shows us that the Self is an illusion, he also believes that the entity, the being of the singular 'I' is not one thing alone, but all the things in the universe, and of none. He argues that "Man is not matter, form, impressions, ideas, instincts, or consciousness. He is not the combination of these parts, nor does he exist outside of them" (Personality and the Buddha, 2001; 348-9). Not only is the self negated, but all things are negated, including the negation of the negation. Borges is here attempting to equate pantheism with the negation of the personality, for pantheism represents the fragmentation and the dissolution of the Godhead.

The central idea of pantheism is that the world is a projection of the divine or the transcendental realm. Therefore, the multifarious diversity of the world is imbued with unreality, and points to an underlying and essential unity. Borges employs the cabbalistic notions of the world as an intellectual or verbal emanation of the divine, Schopenhauer's vision of the world as representation of Will, and the Buddhist perception of the world as a dream of Buddha to suggest in his stories the "vacuity or banality of the differentiated world while affirming its fundamental unity and the equality of its parts" (Jaen, 1992; 79).

In The God's Script (1964, 169-173), or sometimes translated as The Writing of God, Tzinacan, magician and high priest of the pyramid of Qaholom is imprisoned in a cell divided in two by a wall of long iron bars. On one side of this wall is Tzinacan, on the other, a jaguar. The conquering Spaniards have tortured him in order to force him to divulge the secret of the hidden treasure, but he refuses because his God has not forsaken him.

In prison he begins to dream, recalling all that he knew, and in one of these mental sojourns, he recalls the tradition of God who, forseeing that at the end of time there would be devastation and ruin, "wrote on the first day of creation a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils" (1964, 170). He meditates for months on end, then, remembers that the jaguar was one of the attributes of God. He sets about to decipher the secret word from the black patterns on the animal's coat.

Finally, he cracks the code, but, he does not use the Word to wreak havoc on his enemies and save himself and his people because, he says, he no longer remembers Tzinacan.

Quote

Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, if he, now, is no one. This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here, in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me (1964, 173).

Tzinacan has seen the universe through the eyes of God. In the universe, all things are one and nothing. Like the magician in The Circular Ruins, Tzinacan finds himself unable to change the direction of his fate, even when imbued with the knowledge of Gods. The magician has the power to create a being into existence, but he cannot deny that he is both everything and nothing. Tzinacan has the power to obliterate the Spaniards and claim back his lands and his people, but he has seen the infinite processes “that formed one single felicity” and he becomes a personification of inertia.

It is clear that despite being criticised or labeled as fantastical or irrelevant, Borges employs universal themes, the predominant one being the disempowerment of the individual in the face of universal forces, and the loss of the Self. To be sure, other writers before and after him have dealt with the same issues. Kafka, among these, is the best known and is often compared with Borges. Whereas Kafka writes from the outside looking in, Borges writes from the inside looking in. By juxtaposing the idealist principle that all matter and spirit is illusory with the world of language and fiction making, he allows himself the advantage of exhausting the possibilities of and limits to creative output.

By using abstractions as the reality proper to literature, he extends the life of fiction making, and allows language to explore and describe areas of the human psyche. His literature of exhaustion is a silence that comes with the disruption of all connection between language and reality. Like Nabakov, Borges turns art into anti-art or silence, which proposes a "mood of ultimacy" (Stark, 1974; 3). Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.

The 'silence' that Sontag argues exemplifies the work of Borges is a silence that results when a Literature tries to subvert itself, to exhaust its own possibilities. In this, the literature of exhaustion differs from fantastical fiction, since the latter seeks to transcend itself. This self-subverting tendency stems, in Borges' mind, from William Morris's belief that the essential stories of man's imagination had long since been told and that by now the storyteller’s craft lay in rethinking and retelling them.

Borges' literature is about literature. Writers of this kind of literature build an artificial construct, rather than rendering in artistic form meaningful details from a meaning-laden world. They care not for character or plot. The most vivid exposition of the reason why he creates artificial literature can be found in the essayistic story, The Library of Babel:

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At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad... The Vindications exist (I have seen two of which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero (1964, 55).

The world is inexhaustible, and no man can be completely understood, suggests Borges, and this reminds us of Edmund Husserl's notion of the self's ultimate unknowability, and that it, like the rest of everyday reality, is unreal. A couple of paragraphs down, Borges continues:

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There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything (1964, 55).

The Universe, then, which Borges calls the Library of Babel, is infinite because all that can be written about it has already been written. The Library exists ab aeterno. Man is the imperfect librarian looking for the chance infamous Word, not realising that he, too, is the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi. Further, because the Library can only be the work of a god, as Borges claims in the story, those who try to dissemble or emulate the divine structure are reduced to pathetic figures "in latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup" who "feebly mimic the divine disorder" (1964, 56).

In other words, while the universe may be infinite, what we can apprehend of it through language is finite. The Library, says Borges, "is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveller went to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order)" (1964, 58).

Borges' universes, then, are limitless entities, abounding in a multitude of forms, crossing over time and space, their boundaries determined only by the extent of Borges' imagination and language. Reality lies outside of this equation, carries no weight, save for the realities we create in our own minds when we read, for example, of a high priest called Tzinacan, who unravels the secret code of God from the invisible circular designs on the jaguar's coat. The Wheel that Tzinac n discovers and which he explains in his mind is, in fact, the wheel our own minds construct from the cultural stock at our disposal. We do not need to consciously learn that Borges has borrowed the idea of the Buddhist Wheel of Life; we know this from our own vague internal, muddled realities, which collect like moths to a light source, and through which we sift to retrieve what we need. Borges' games, then, include the readers. We are unwitting conspirators in his diabolical labyrinthine puzzles.

Borges is not a magic realist, despite the magical elements. More accurately, he is a literary critic and theorist. He does not theorise the short story form. Rather, he theorises writing. Read in this manner, Borges' task becomes clear.

Borges merely articulates in literary form what we articulate in the form of vaguely apprehended snippets of social and cultural reality. He gives voice to our inner urges, the chaotic order that characterises our dream state. Such reverie weaves soft bonds around the dreamer, and poetises the dreamer. Perhaps, this is Borges' ultimate goal – to attain a purity of form, both in apprehension and expression. This purity is meant to achieve a cognitive resonance within the experience of the reader, to emulate a dream sequence and to extend the limits of a linguistically engendered reality. He forces us, as both writers and readers to confront literature as a mirror (that negates) of the Universe.

Ultimately, Borges is perhaps suggesting that literary creation is the same as the reading of it. Perhaps, he is saying that all our ideas are games of chance that point to one fundamental fact – the objects we dream have already dreamt us.


---

Works Cited:

  • Bell-Villada, Gene H., Borges and His Fiction: A guide to His Mind and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
  • Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964).
  • _______________ Dreamtigers (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970).
  • _______________ The Aleph (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).
  • _______________ Brodie's Report (London: Penguin Classics, 2000a).
  • _______________ The Total Library (London: Penguin Classics, 2001).
  • Jaen, Didier T., Borges' esoteric library: metaphysics to metafiction (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992).
  • Stark, John, The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1974).
  • Sturrock, John, Paper tigers: the ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:48:46 +0000 3493894fa4ea036cfc6433c3e2ee63b0 American Psycho Reinterpreted http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/american-psycho-reinterpreted-r90 Paul Newall (2005)

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterpiece American Psycho is typically described as a satire ("a black-hearted satire on the terrible power of money" said Jenny Turner in the Scotsman) and, in particular, a savage indictment of a (Western) society caught in the iron grip of commercialism, greed and superficiality.

Ellis' decision to quote Talking Heads ("And as things fell apart / nobody paid much attention") on the inlay before the story begins would seem, on the face of it, to set us up for just such a reading. At the same point, Ellis also excerpts Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

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Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, given the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.

We are thus led, as it were, to viewing the work from its outset as a commentary on a society gone wrong, in which the protagonist is perhaps incidental to the purpose at hand.

American Psycho is also, as is well known, a brutal read, as hard on the stomach as it is on the mind. The numbing detail of chapters cataloguing the recording exploits of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and The News, combined with incessant information as to which combination of designer labels the characters are dressed in, are upstaged only by the detached and almost itemised descriptions of the many episodes of violence, murder and sexual abuse throughout the text. Ellis spent a considerable amount of time researching these, trying to understand exactly how much punishment a human could take without expiring. This has lent weight to the assumption that his purpose was bloodshed for the sake of it, or to hammer home the lesson of what will surely come of a culture built upon corruption and apathy. In this essay I shall offer an interpretation that goes beyond these basic observations to find a deeper, more philosophical and more romantic story hidden behind the easy option of mere satire.

All that happens in American Psycho is sandwiched between two related remarks, one scrawled in graffiti and the other a neon sign in a cinema. They are, respectively, "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" and "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT", both capitalised. Having noticed the former, the novel begins in the third person as the central character, Patrick Bateman, describes a colleague, Timothy Price, before shifting into the first person where, with a few (and significant) exceptions, he will stay. Price is one of three crucial people who will shock Bateman out of the reasoning he has constructed around himself, trapping him and thus leaving him without an exit.

The thesis ostensibly explored in American Psycho is that examined at great length by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. Although stated in various (contentious) ways, for our purposes it may be given as "if life is pointless then anything is permitted". Godless or otherwise, a society that has lost its moral rudder makes the existence of psychopaths like Bateman almost an inevitability, or so it is implied. What I want to suggest is that this proposition is precisely backwards: it is not that life is pointless and therefore Bateman does evil, but instead that he does evil to prove (to himself) that life is pointless.

This counterintuitive reading is difficult to appreciate at first but becomes more readily apparent as we compare Bateman's differing reactions to the situations and characters he meets. With his friends, workmates, acquaintances, girls or those people he comes across from day to day at the gym or serving his drinks at restaurants, he is on a kind of autopilot: detached, uninvolved and noting what goes on largely as a spectator. Witness the laconic way in which he tells a girl, Daisy, that he has hurt people before and may do so again with her; or the mechanical discourse on world and US politics at Evelyn's. This is the empty life he has fashioned, comfortable because it is predictable. Nevertheless, the story we read is on one level an extended test as he attempts, with increasing risk, to show that “nobody pa[ys] much attention” to his inhumane behaviour. This, he feels, demonstrates that people just do not care. Perhaps the most memorable occasions are Killing Child at Zoo ("I feel empty, hardly here at all […] and I walked away, my hands soaked with blood, uncaught") and Chase Manhattan. The latter, in particular, involves a change in the narrative as Bateman moves from his usual first-person telling to "Patrick shoots him in the face" and then back again, when "calm is eventually restored". What hope can there be for anyone in such a world?

The problem for Bateman is that he is trapped in this thinking, with each instance of not being called to account convincing him still further that no act can have any meaning. That is the point. At dinner with Jean, he attempts to set this out in detail in a monologue:

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... where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change, or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a look or a feeling or a gesture, or receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a clich , was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire – meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failue, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in ... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

While it is an easy matter to point to passages like this as indicative of an emptiness in Bateman, he himself contradicts all of it moments later, only to fight against it:

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I get an odd feeling that this is a crucial moment in my life and I'm startled by the suddenness of what I guess passes for an epiphany. There is nothing of value I can offer her. ... and in my own stubborn, wilful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting. And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. This relationship will probably lead to nothing...(emphasis added)

In spite of the effort he makes to turn this feeling away and reject it, the chapter ends rather differently:

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Someone with a baby stroller stops at the corner and purchases a Dove Bar. The baby stares at Jean and me. We stare back. Its really weird and I’m experiencing a spontaneous kind of internal sensation, I feel I’m moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

Earlier, at the previous dinner, Bateman had imagined "running around Central Park on a cool spring afternoon with Jean, laughing, holding hands." This is followed immediately by the most important line in the entire book: "We buy balloons, we let them go." This is the "taking pleasure in a look or a feeling or a gesture" that has supposedly never occurred to him, and which is said to achieve nothing. As quickly as he experiences these isolated moments, however, Bateman talks himself out of his optimism and back into the solace of the meaningless, where his failure becomes the norm again.

His position is thus one of knowing there is a way out but being too afraid to take it. If everything is meaningless, of course, then there is no shame in not letting the balloon go simply for the sake of it. The suspicion that there is something more is what Bateman attempts, over and over, to kill – to remove the doubt that nags at him and asks why Bethany left him, a circumstance that bothers him so much that, typically, he has to murder her to make it go away. It is when things go differently that his confidence and detachment evapourate, whether trying to strangle Luis Carruthers and finding himself immobilised by not having predicted the outcome or genuinely worried that he does not know how much Tim Price makes or where he went when he disappeared down the tunnel. It is easier for Bateman to believe that nothing is of any consequence and to prove it by acting with seeming impunity than it is to face up to his emptiness on the inside and admit that Jean makes him lose control, not knowing what will happen next.

American Psycho, then, is a story about a man so afraid of the uncertainty in the world around him that he finds solace in an idea; namely, that there is no meaning and no one really cares. This at once renders him no different than anyone else and excuses his failure to take any kind of risk. Never having to worry about making his way in life, he seeks out and destroys meaning wherever he finds or suspects it to be hiding to soothe his worry that he has somehow fallen short. Faced with a friend who takes (non-violent) directions he dare not, a colleague whose sexual orientation he was unable to judge and a secretary who will love him unconditionally, he backs away, unable to cope. This fundamental inadequacy, the certainty – buried far beneath the violence – that he is scared of not knowing what will happen next, is why Bateman is trapped in the sure knowledge that there is no exit external to him to take and why he ends the book by sighing again, crushed under the realisation that he will have to find the answers within himself.

The book is a tragedy, not a satire.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:46:53 +0000 08b255a5d42b89b0585260b6f2360bdd <![CDATA[Kirilov's Dilemma]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/kirilovs-dilemma-r89 Paul Newall (2005)

In his The Possessed (also known as Demons) and other works, Dostoevsky employed an advocatus diaboli device familiar to and used by the Schoolmen and the Church whereby he offered and defended in detail those notions he wished to subsequently challenge, taking care to develop them to their strongest possible form before attempting to show why they are flawed. This is rarely moreso than in the case of the character of Kirilov (or Kirillov).

In an early chapter, during the first description of his thinking (entitled "Another man’s sins" for a good reason), Kirilov explained some of his ideas and received the retort:

Quote

If it is all the same whether to live or not to live, everyone will kill himself and that’s perhaps the only change that will come about.

The scorn of the narrator here is a marker intended to caution us against a simplistic disregard. Kirilov replied:

Quote

It makes no difference. Deception will be killed. Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself has learnt the secret of the deception.

The deception discussed here is quite subtle and is explained in response to the narrator’s remark that people love their lives because they are afraid of death. Instead, said Kirilov, life is fearful and unhappy – precisely because it seems to have no meaning - until men become afraid of death and transfer their fear to it, rendering life something to be loved. He did not find this impressive because he wanted to learn whether life can be loved on its own terms, given its apparent absurdity. This is the question that Camus wrestled with, asking if we could conclude anything from the seeming meaninglessness of life. It may be that the fear Kirilov spoke of comes of the silence that answers our attempts to find meaning.

Later on, in the chapter "A very busy night", Kirilov expanded on his thinking in syllogistic form when talking with Verkhovensky:

Quote

God is necessary, and so must exist.
But I know that He doesn’t exist and can’t exist.
But don’t you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?

(Verkhovensky’s comments have been removed.)

In order to explain why he concludes as he does, Kirilov set out come of the consequences of these premises:

Quote

Is there no man on this planet who, having finished with God and believing in his own will, will have enough courage to express his self-will in its most important point? […] All man did was to invent God so as to live without killing himself. That’s the essence of universal history till now. I am the only man in universal history who for the first time refused to invent God. […] To realize that there is no god and not to realize at the same instant that you have become god yourself – is an absurdity, for else you would certainly kill yourself. If you do realize it, you are a king and will never kill yourself, but will live in the greatest glory. But he who is first to realize it is bound to kill himself, for otherwise who will begin and prove it? […] I am still only a god against my will, and I am unhappy because I am bound to express my self-will. […] Fear is the curse of mankind. But I shall proclaim my self-will. I am bound to believe that I do not believe. I shall begin and end, and open the door.

These comments are replete with religious imagery. The general case of the problem that Kirilov was discussing is that of meaning: it does not appear that any meaning exists for our lives (or that is not defeated by the fact of death), but we apparently require that meaning to cope; as a result, mankind has invented meaning – not once, but very many times – in order to avoid the dilemma that meaning is needed but can never be found.

If we take the problem in its most general form, it goes back at least to Ecclesiastes:

Quote

Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.

For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (II, v15-17)

It seems that all significance is stripped from life by the fact of death. Camus’s attempted solution was to rebel against this thinking and say that we should live in spite of the absence of meaning, refusing to allow this argument to have any power over us. This does not answer the problem so much as advise going on regardless. Others have since insisted that we can give our own meaning to our actions, but this is not the meaning Dostoevsky was considering nor is it clear how it can survive the challenge of Ecclesiastes. Kirilov’s point, instead, was that inventing God had permitted people to dodge the issue entirely by creating a constrast between death (to be feared) and life (to therefore be loved). In order to reject the dilemma, however, someone would first have to show that it could have no dominion over man. The extent of the freedom thus granted could never be clear until someone expressed it fully by choosing to reject it.

In many ways, Stavrogin is the most fascinating character of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and one who shows by his actions in The Possessed the thinking that Kirilov tried to explain. He, too, found life without meaning and refused to invent a fiction to save it – eventually killing himself quietly and without fuss. While he lived, he frequently sought out ridiculous situations in which he acted in such a manner as to confound expectation and cause trouble for himself, because this was the only way he could feel alive after his rejection of the power of the dilemma. Kirilov, of course, had figured this out, and had Verkhovensky spell-bound when he explained:

Quote

Stavrogin, too, was eaten up by an idea. […] If Stavrogin believes in God, then he doesn’t believe that he believes. And if he doesn’t believe, then he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe.

When he eventually hung himself, Stavrogin left a note saying "no one is to blame, I did it myself."]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:46:03 +0000 30bb3825e8f631cc6075c0f87bb4978c Wag the Dog http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/wag-the-dog-r88 Chen-Roy Simpson (2005)

Abstract: Wag the Dog is a film about media manipulation. In the first section of the paper, some relatively unknown "Wag the Dog" cases are explored. In the second section, the complicity and lack of vigilance of the Media with regard to manipulation is discussed. In the final section, the paper assesses the impact of both the manipulation of the media by government and the media's own complicity in such manipulation.

Far from Fiction: Wag the Dog and the News Media in Wartime

Released in 1997, Wag the Dog was quite prescient in its central scandal (a president charged with sexual misconduct) and effectively chronicles the many ways in which the news media is manipulated. Two weeks before election, the president in Wag the Dog has allegedly had sex with a minor. In order to divert attention from this scandal, and increase support for the president, Conrad Bream, a sort of Public relations professional (played brilliantly by Robert De Niro), invents a war with the country of Albania. Bream hires the services of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and the movie is a sustained focus on their clever manipulation of the media. Among the many manipulations the two devise are the in studio creation of a war – digitally creating a poor Albanian village ransacked by the war; staged ceremonial events congratulating the president on his efforts in Albania; anonymous leaks to the press; and finally a public relations campaign used to engender sympathy for a 'lost soldier' when the fictionalized war is abruptly put to an end by the CIA. Initially, some of Wag the Dog's scenarios seem to be ludicrous but on closer reflection many of the tactics used in the film are quite real.

"Wag the Dog" Cases

While the relationship between media and military have never been amiable, after Vietnam a new adversarial relationship developed. Convinced that the media portrayal of the Vietnam War significantly contributed to its negative perception by the public, military officials sought new ways to suppress negative press coverage. The new set of rules were first implemented in the U.S. invasion of Grenada, 1983. Ironically, the Grenada invasion is the first war cited by Conrad Bream as an example of media distraction. When asked how the appearance of a war will distract attention, Bream says:

Quote

During Reagan’s administration, 240 Marines were killed in Beirut. 24 hours later we invade Grenada. That was their M.O. Change the story, change the lead. Its not a new concept.

Bream, of course, may be taken to imply that the Grenada invasion was specifically intended to distract media attention by "changing the story, changing the lead." This, in fact, was the claim of many writing at the time of the Grenada war. While it is doubtful that the Grenada invasion was undertaken specifically to distract attention from the Beirut killings (the decision to invade was made three days before the bombing), it is hard to imagine that the its political benefits did not play a part in its role. The Grenada invasion took place (as Bream says) just 24 hours after more than 200 marines were killed by a suicide bombing in Beirut. In his book On Bended Knee, Mark Hertsgaard states that the Marine's death had the potential to be a political disaster for President Reagan because of widespread fear in the public that Reagan could take the country to war. In fact, the war became a political triumph. Public opinions polls rose sharply after the war, spurred on by Reagan's own explanation of the war as an example of the restoration of American power (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

It is here that we see many parallels with Wag the Dog. In the days leading up to the invasion, information was leaked to the press about it. When asked about the possibility of invasion, officials declared that the idea was "preposterous". The decision to lie was not an isolated incident by war planners but a directive from the highest offices to mislead the press. The invasion was unknown to the White House press offices or the Pentagon until one hour after the attack had already begun. One reporter managed to make it to the island but was detained on a U.S. Navy vessel (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

The government further subverted the Press by barring reporters from going to Grenada to report on the invasion. As a result, most of the pictures and video of the war came from the government. The video footage was carefully selected: the government videos consisted of paratroopers dropping on the island and shots of students kissing the ground as they returned to America. But this distorted the reality of the invasion. Only a few students kissed the ground when they returned to America. In fact, the students as a group were divided about just how much danger they were in. Other government-supplied videos were of warehouses stockpiled with weapons, purportedly the weapons with which Cuba was going to take over Grenada. One of the reasons for invading Grenada, according to the Reagan administration was that it was being turned into a Cuban-Soviet military base whose purpose was to disrupt the Carribean and Central American region. When reporters were finally allowed access to the island, the claim that Grenadian warehouses were full of Soviet missiles and old weapons, tenaciously reported in all major news outlets and ‘supported’ by government supplied videos of said warheouses were falsified, refuting one of the rationalizations for the war. A second rational for the war was to “rescue American students” but Hertsgaard asks the interesting question “rescued from what? The clutches of Cuban trained Marxists or the combat ignited by U.S. invaders?.” Substantial evidence exists that the Americans could have safely returned without military rescue. The weekend before the invasion, for instance, Cuba and Grenada both made arrangements for Americans to depart the country if they wished (Hertsgaard, 1988 ). Thus, another war rationale was refuted. Nevertheless, the Grenada invasion was a political victory because the administration lied to the press, barred reporters from entering Grenada, and provided news outlets with their decidedly sanitized and favorable images of the war.

In the book Toxic Sludge is Good For You, authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton state that after being shut-out of the Grenada War, journalists raised enough controversy to lead to the creation of bi-partisan committee that tried to best balance the media and press in wartime. The idea of a media pool was developed and faced its first real challenge in the 1989 invasion of Panama to oust General Manuel Noriega. Ostensibly, the pool was to provide journalists with quick and easy access to the military and war but quickly turned out to be yet another way to subvert the role of reporters. Media pool members got to the island late, after being delayed two hours by the Pentagon. When the reporters arrived they were detained on a U.S. military base another five hours and therefore missed all the major combat actions which took place during this time. Moreover, the Media Pool was fed outdated information by the U.S. embassy instead of being taken into combat (military personnel refused to take journalists into the combat zone). Overcoming technical difficulties (with a fax machine in the Pentagon), the first pictures of the war surfaced four days later, most of which were taken by the government. The pictures and videos were of parachuting U.S. troops and the reports mostly consisted of U.S. casualties, reporting nothing on the battlefield.

However, media manipulation was not regulated to these short wars. In the 1980's, the Reagan administration secretly tried to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which in 1979 had ousted the American-friendly dictatorship of Anatasia Somoza. In order to win public support for U.S. actions against Nicaragua (trade and economic sanctions), the Reagan administration in January 1983 directed CIA director William Casey to set up an office of "Public diplomacy", described as "a set of domestic political operations comparable to what the CIA conducts against hostile forces abroad; only this time, they were turned against the three key institutions of American democracy: Congress, the press and an informed electorate ... the administration built an unprecedented bureaucracy in the [National Security Council] and the State department designed to keep the news media in line and to restrict conflicting information from reaching the American public." (Stauber & Rampton, 1995).

Following the advice of the then leading Public Relations professionals, the White House created a "communications function", of which the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) was primarily to discredit the Sandinista government in the eyes of the American people. Soon a mythical crisis was developed which greatly resembles Bream's first actions in Wag the Dog. Bream, after finding out that the president has been charged with sexual misconduct with a minor, hatches his first plan to subvert the story: he tells his aides to leak a story about a B-3 bomber so his press office can deny press that there is B-3 bomber. Such denial means he’s not lying.

Quote

Bream: Why is the president in China?

Aide: Trade Relations.

Bream: You're goddamn right and its got nothing to do with the B-3 bomber.

Aide: There is no B-3 bomber.

Bream: I just said that. There is no B-3 bomber and I don't know why these rumors get started.

Bream cleverly concocts a diversion. Since the president is in China for trade relations, it is imperative that he stay there for a few more days in order to avoid having to answer to the allegations made against him. However, for it not to seem like the president is extending his stay in China because he does not want to face the allegations, he must give the press something to think about – a crisis involving a B-3 bomber. Bream instructs his aides to "let it slip" to a Washington reporter "I hope this [the president being in China] won’t screw up the B-3 program." Of course, the reporter will ask "what B-3 program and why should it screw it up?" to which his aide will reply "to avert the crisis." At this point in the film Bream does not know what the "crisis" is but leaking the story buys enough time to allow him to create it.

When told by one of his aides that the "story won’t prove out", Bream responds "It doesn’t have to prove out. We just have to distract them." Predictably, the reporters in the film, instead of skeptically addressing the bomber story, spend most of the time asking if the president's stay in China has anything to do with the B-3 bomber and rumors of an "Albanian Ops center." This allows the press office to deny knowledge of any B-3 bomber which only furthers speculation. One reporter asks:

Quote

Is the situation in Albania in anyway related to the Muslim fundamentalist anti-American Uprising?

To which Bream, watching the press conference on television, happily responds:

Quote

Now they get it. There you go. There's a little help.

In other words, all that needs to be done is to leak a false story and enable the curious journalists to expand on it, in the process ignoring allegations against the president. After all, "Muslim fundamentalists" and "anti-American Uprisings" present a threat to national security and "The American Way of life", which are much graver than the sexual misconduct of the president. While the obvious comparison is the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal*, the Nicaraguan example is more apt since no actual action was taken as in the film. Following directives to find "exploitable themes and trends", the Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan administration leaked uncorroborated stories purporting to show the military threat Nicaragua posed to the U.S. One such story was the 1984 "MIGS crisis." The White House leaked information to the press that claimed Nicaragua was on the verge of receiving Soviet Fighter planes. Later research showed that the story did not "prove out" but the story served its purpose. Television news frequently played the story of the MIGS crisis, to the extent that regular news programs were interrupted to give "special bulletins" about it. Moreover, the story diverted attention from the Nicaraguan election, which was held that week and in which the Sandinista government - the one Reagan was trying to overthrow - won by a large margin. In fact, the election was the first "free" Nicaraguan election, though it was soon dismissed by Reagan as a "sham." (Hertsgaard, 1988 )

The most striking example of the similarity between the events in Wag the Dog and the news media in wartime may be the 1991 Gulf War. In the film, faked news footage of a young "Albanian girl" (an actress) fleeing a ransacked, digitally created "Albanian village" is the central means by which Hollywood producer Motss hopes to convince Americans that there is actually a war going on, and most importantly compel enough sympathy and a sense of urgency to distract attention from allegations made against the president. Motss refers to the girl as his "young girl in the rubble" meant to "mobilize" public opinion in favor of the war. While the Gulf War was real, in order to justify and encourage support the Bush administration needed its own "young girl in the rubble." That girl was 15 year-old Nayirah who testified to Iraqi atrocities at the 1991 Human Rights Caucus.

In Wag the Dog the challenge was to convince Americans that there was an actual war; however, the Gulf presented the challenge of making the case for war - a task which involved doing two things: making Hussein the unique embodiment of evil and sanitizing the image of Kuwait in the eyes of Americans. In the book, Second Front, John MacArthur explains many of the details in Pr campaign of the Gulf War. Up until a week before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States. Throughout the 1980's Hussein's ruthlessness was ignored by the United States since they both shared a mutual enemy in Iran. But the invasion changed all that. The invasion of Iraq would cause a political upheaval in the region as well as impugn on U.S. ability to control resources**. The sanitizing of Kuwait meant the portrayal of Kuwait as a young burgeoning democracy and thus worth the blood of U.S. soldiers. In the cynical words of an Army PR Hal Steward:

Quote

If and when a shooting war starts reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks.

Further complicating matters was the fact that Kuwait was not a young bourgeoning democracy. In 1991, Kuwait was ruled by a family oligarchy, the al-Sabah, who disbanded the Kuwaiti national assembly in 1986 giving all executive power to an Emir chosen by and from the family. Even before the disbanding of the national assembly, women were excluded from the political process and only 65,000 males out of a nation of two million were allowed to vote. Kuwait also crushed the small democratic movement it had growing, banned political rallies and had a bad reputation because of its near enslavement of its major workforce who were foreigners (MacArthur, 1992).

In order to turn public opinion for Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government financed one of the largest public relations ever. The first step was the creation of the "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" who were represented by the public relations group Hill & Knowlton. For all its efforts in the Gulf War, Hill and Knowlton received nearly 11 million US dollars in fees from the Kuwaiti government. The reach of Hill & Knowlton's campaign was wide: national days for Kuwait were scheduled; t-shirts were made; and all form of news media were bombarded with pamphlets, clips and videos. On October 10, 1991, three months before the war, the congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill, officially the first formal opportunity to present evidence for Iraq's human rights violations. However, the Human Rights Caucus was not a committee of congress. This is in the context in which Hill & Knowlton presented Nayirah, a 15 year-old who, in a tearful testimony, claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers loot Kuwaiti incubators, leaving the children to die on the cold floor. Nayirah, like other witnesses that day, did not reveal her last name, citing fear of Iraqi reprisals against her family. In fact, Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, and thus hardly a reliable witness. Nevertheless, the story gained national coverage. MacArthur says of the story:

Quote

Of all the accusations made against the dictator, none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.

The story was repeated by the president, all major media outlets (TV, radio, newspapers) and later congressmen cited the story as one of the primary examples of Iraqi barbarity and thus reason for war. Eventually the incubator story made its way to Amnesty International who knew nothing of it before the day of Nayirah's testimony. But the story was false. Kuwait's own investigators could not confirm the story, nor could Amnesty International who later retracted it after further investigations. Nayirah herself was never made available for testimony (MacArthur, 1992).

Perhaps the most insidious form of media manipulation stems from the use of pre-packaged news, or video news releases. It is still not known, for example, what videos Hill and Knowlton produced for air play on TV in the Gulf, nor are they willing to reveal this. In the article Under Bush: a New Age of Pre-packaged Television News, David Barstow and Robin Stein detail the expansion of pre-packaged news in the last decade. Pre-packaged news is news segments specifically produced to be indistinguishable from regular Network TV news, complete with scripts, interviews, and suggested lead-ins. While pre-packaged news existed in the time of the Grenada and Panama wars, in the form of favorable or "sanitized" video footage, the use of video news releases has grown exponentially since and has become much more sophisticated. These videos feature "reporters" who report on an issue, just as if it were regular news. Public relations professionals are careful to not overtly push a message though the segments never feature criticisms of their positions. The segments are distributed to various media outlets and subsequently played to millions of viewers. Networks regularly edit these video news releases by, for example, cutting the paid government employee out and using their own reporters to read the Government-written or Public relations-written script (Barstow & Stein, 2005).

Another carefully orchestrated plan of media manipulation in the film Wag the Dog remarkably resembles the use of Video News releases to engender certain sentiments in the public. In light of the President's return from China, Bream stages a ceremonial event: an Albanian young girl and her grandmother thank the president for his help in their country, and thus the segment broadcasted live in the movie serves to rationalize the fictional war to the American public by showing the good fortune it is bringing about. This deliberate act of manipulation is virtually identical in the first case the New York Times article cites, in which a jubilant Iraqi-American says "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A." to a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. The segment was produced by the U.S. State Department.

However, the war on terrorism began before the war in Iraq - in Afghanistan. The Administration used video news releases to justify and support the war in Afghanistan. A total of 59 segments (according to the Times article) were produced, "reporting" how successful the U.S. war on Afghanistan had been. The video news releases explained that as a result of U.S. action, Afghan women were "liberated", now being free to go to school and participate in their country's politics. One such video featured reporter Tish Clark, who later learned that the segment was government produced. Clark, following standard industry practice, had edited the tape and read the script giving the segment the reality of "real news." The segment was broadcast to millions of viewers who were not made aware that the segment was a product of the government. The effective blurring of the lines between "real news" and government or PR produced news, through censorship and media complicity, has led to marriage between the media and the government, in which the government is the greater benefactor.

The Complicity of the Media

In any marriage, one expects to find some storming and shouting. But how much storming and shouting did the press do? While each of the wars from Grenada to the Gulf elicited enough anger from various journalists that new committees were formed with the expressed purpose of better accommodating the demands of journalists in Wartime, journalists consistently complied with prima facie cases of military censorship rather than vigorously challenge them..

The Grenada Invasion is case in point. A day before the invasion, two ABC reporters captured footage of U.S. Navy jets and Marine helicopters on the neighboring island of Barbados. The airplanes landed, transferring soldiers and equipment to helicopters and men in business suits to the Jets. Sharon Sacks, one of the reporters, called the U.S Embassy wanting to find out if the event was signal of invasion but was told it was an evacuation of students (later shown to be false). When this story was filed to ABC News, editor Robert Fyre declined to run the story citing Washington stories that the prospective invasion of Grenada was "preposterous". Further comments from Washington suggested that a U.S. carrier in the region was there to ferry stranded foreigners, not prepare for invasion. All of these were lies, yet the press did not run, lead with, or feature this curious case of Government censorship and deliberate misinformation in its newscasts (Hertsgaard, 1988 ).

John MacArthur, in the book Second Front, details many of the cases in which top newspapers and TV editors simply conceded to the military, showing a nascent lack of vigilance in pursuit of news and complicity with government censorship. After the failure of the National Media Pool system in the Grenada and Panama invasions, another committee was created to address the problems of the press and military in wartime. The compromise was to be tried in the Gulf war but failed miserably. Journalists were confined to hotels and could not independently report; a military escort was necessary on each report; journalists in pools could not choose stories and were instead assigned "slots" by the Pentagon; and journalists' stories had to undergo a "security review" before they could be filed, which is essentially censorship. As a result of these rules journalists agreed to in going into the Gulf War, they were effectively prevented from reporting any other news other than what the Pentagon wanted. Popular stories of the war praised the accuracy of U.S. bombs, and exaggerated the might and quantity of the Iraqi army. IF pre-packaged news represents the most insidious ways of media manipulation, then the conventional acceptance and use of Video News releases in the Journalism industry is probably its most unsettling. In a country that receives over 80 percent of its news from television, what is one to make of the fact that much of what seems like "news" produced by the stations is in fact VNRs produced by the government PR professionals? Are we to na vely assume that the seamless blending of sponsored news and "real news" has negligible impact? The specific purpose of VNRs is the promotion of a product or ideology. The news media's ostensive purpose is to report on different products, whether they be material goods or ideologies. As such, a primary feature of actual journalism is criticism. In order to fulfil its function as an informer, the journalist must be wary of promoting different ideologies, either by short shifting an idea or lacking vigilance in their reporting. The producers of VNRs have a decidedly different objective: the promotion of a product which precludes criticism. Thus, there exists an essential tension between the VNRs and the practice of journalism.

But if VNRs are common then their must be reason for their use. The primary argument for the use of VNRs is its financial benefit to stations: News networks have radically downsized while expanding coverage. The use of VNRs is a cost-saving measure that allows news organizations to gather footage that would either be too expensive to be produced or which they cannot afford at all. Unfortunately, while the argument explains the widespread and conventional use, it says nothing about ethical questions. In Media Codes of Ethics there are no articulated standards for the use of VNRs. While some codes state that work not produced by news organizations should be clearly labelled, this can hardly be sufficient. VNRs still expound, not report on or critique products or ideologies. As a result, the public is still being fed a particular ideology by a news organization. Should the government-produced events of happy Afghan women be accompanied by anything? Is merely noting that this is a product of the government sufficient to curb the ideology produced? Is the later correction of misleading statements or images sufficient? It is impossible to determine precisely how images and videos affect audience perception but that they can should give us caution in thinking that merely labelling uncritical "reporting" is sufficient to prevent propagandizing.

The Impact of "Wag the Dog" Cases

In Wag the Dog, the result of media manipulation is decidedly bleak: the Hollywood producer mysteriously ends up dead and there remains a public permanently deceived about non-existent war. In real life, the consequences are not so different though the casualty is the ability of the public to discern the truth. In the film, some characters express worry that the public will know or find out about the deception but Bream, who refuses to assert the truth or falsity of any statement in the film, gives a devastating response to such naive sentiments:

Quote

You watched The Gulf War. What do you see day after day? The one smart bomb falling down a chimney. The truth? I was in the building when we shot that shot. We shot it in a studio in Falls Church, Virginia, 1/10 scale model of a building.

Asked if the above is true, Bream responds:

Quote

How the **** do we know. You take my point?

This is the crippling skepticism that results when the lines of "real news" and government sponsored or public relations are mixed. The "point" is that the Gulf War images fed to journalists could have been easily been faked by the government. Bream has outlined a possible scenario in which the bombing could have been fictional, asserts it as "truth" but resorts to agnosticism when asked if what he asserts as true is indeed so. That is, how can you tell the difference? We simply don't know.

Moreover, and as Bream argues in the film, it is the visceral impact of the images that matter, not their truth or falsity. While the News media prides itself on its ability to issue public statements correcting mistakes, by the time the media has corrected misleading visual images the point has already been made. Says Bream:

Quote

'54, 40, or fight.' What does that mean? ...'Remember the Maine.' 'Tippcecanoe and Tyler, too.' They’re war slogans. We remember the slogans but we can't remember the war... The Gulf War, smart bomb falling down a chimney. 2,500 missions a day, 100 days. One video of one bomb. The American People bought that War. War is show business.

Bream’s language is important. Firstly, that the Americans "bought" that war, and the comparison of War to show business suggest that the images function to sell Americans a rationale for war and therefore, the images function as arguments justifying and also celebrating military action. Since the country of Albania is little known by Americans, images need to explain the terrorist threat and danger they pose. Why the terrorists are dangerous and the reason for war is explained by the video of a young girl running through the streets of Albania screaming that she has been raped. Why, again, is it justified that the president has gone to war with Albania? The compassion and gratitude shown to the president by an Albanian girl and grandmother when the president arrives. The staged event explains the success of a vague war on an unknown country. Visual images, whether they communicate truth or not have lasting impact.

But of course this conclusion isn't too distressing? Perhaps, the lesson for the public is to develop a "healthy skepticism" toward the Media itself. This is the conclusion of Robert Charles in the informative (but slightly dated) article "Video News Releases: News or Advertising" Charles argues that the charge of "fake news" levied at VNR's is misguided since VNRs often have general news value. For example, in 1993 Pepsi published VNR'S disproving reports that there were syringes in Pepsi bottles which were broadcast on news networks. However, Charles concedes that VNR'S are problematic because they can be used (and are in fact used) to communicate uncritical 'reports' on products or ideologies products. While Charles even-handed approach is appreciated, the conclusion that this should encourage a "healthy skepticism" misses a crucial point: journalists are supposed to be the skeptics. Can the public be expected to have the same time to do as much research as is assumed of journalists? Can the public, for instance, be expected to research reports from overseas? It can easily be replied that a "healthy skepticism" simply entails a suspension of judgment and compels the public to do no more than acquiesce in the face of news. However, this is insufficient. Journalists report information that is supposed to inform the public: this information can then be used by the public to act. Journalists do not present their work in a vacuum in which there is no effect on public attention. Thus, the concept of a "healthy skepticism", while a valuable concept, ignores the demand this will put on a public now expected to critically research the reports of those who are supposed to be its researchers. Though it is unacceptable for the public to take the media simply at face value, it is equally unacceptable that journalists cannot be trusted enough to give fair accounts in the absence of individual research.

Conclusion

Wag The Dog is often referred to as a satire because of the 'absurdity' of its central plot: the creation of a fictional war in order to distract the public from sexual allegations made against the president. On closer inspection, however, the tactics used to manipulate the Media in the film are everyday practices in the world of newsreporting - exemplified by some unknown "Wag the Dog" cases in the Grenadan, Panamanian and Gulf wars. Staged ceremonial events, anonymous (false) leaks to the press, and the creation of sympathetic characters used to explain and justify war are just some of the tactics used in the film which are replicated in the world of news reporting - all of which contributes to making Wag the Dog far from fiction.


---

Notes:

* I say the obvious comparison because of speculation after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings that President Clinton's retaliation, on the very day he was to face questioning about Lewinsky, was used to distract attention from his trial.
** For more information on the political aspects of the 1991 Gulf War, a good resource is John Pilger whose website is available here.

References:

Barstow David and Robin Stein. "Under Bush: a new era of pre-packaged news." New York Times 13 Mar. 2005 (a copy of this article can be found here).
Charles, Robert. <A href="http://www.worldandi.com/public/1994/september/ci11.cfm">"Video News Releases: News or Advertising", http://www.worldandi.com/. Sep. 1994.
Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.
MacArthur, John. Second Front: censorship and propaganda during the Gulf War. New York: Hill & Wang, 1992.
Stauber, John and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic sludge is good for you : lies, damn lies, and the public relations industry. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1995. (An excerpt from the book which goes into a little more detail about the Gulf War is available here.).]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:41:48 +0000 daca41214b39c5dc66674d09081940f0 <![CDATA[Shyamalan's The Village]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/shyamalans-the-village-r87 Paul Newall (2005)

M. Night Shyamalan's The Village has aroused vociferous responses from viewers and commentators alike but there have been few detailed studies of the themes and ideas explored in considerable depth in the movie. In this essay we look at the celebration and criticism of utopian communities alongside the love story that forms the core of the film.

It is worth noting in passing, however, that Shyamalan is not thought the modern Hitchcock for nothing. In particular, the use of editing in The Village to maintain the deception until the last possible moment (especially when Ivy Walker is set to leave) is masterful. The role of colour, too, and the manner in which it adds to the tension and sense of separation, is quite brilliant. Some viewers reacted badly to the plot twists, perhaps because of his other works in which a similar experience of having the rug pulled out from under them had made them expect such a device, but here protests miss the point of the film and ignore what has been achieved over the course of the story. By examining it more closely we can learn how actually nothing has changed in the community between the opening and closing scenes, save our feeling for what was important about the village after all.

Before shooting began, Shyamalan put all his actors through a form of "boot camp" in which they were introduced to the skills required to live off the land self-sufficiently. From their own comments, it seems this period helped them appreciate how they would need to rely on one another as well as understand how much pleasure could be derived from such a life. Joaquin Phoenix even carved Bryce Dallas Howard a guide stick for her blind character Ivy Walker that made it easy work to pretend to be in love with him, she has said. It is against this backdrop, however, that Shyamalan examines the utopian ideal and the many questions associated with it.

Covington Woods is a community isolated from the outside world by the presence of "those we don't speak of", hostile creatures who live in the woods in something of a truce with the inhabitants of the village: they stay away so long as the people maintain their border unbreached. A line of markers and a watchtower mark the detente. These circumstances are apparently coincidental, however: the elders moved to Covington originally to get away from the nearby towns – "wicked places where wicked people live". Having lost loved ones to crime, the founders of the community have journeyed away from the decadence they saw in the world to try again and provide a better life for their children.

Shyamalan uses his village to plumb the depths of this life for philosophical insights into the nature of the utopian venture. The first and perhaps most general issue is whether we can secede from the world to avoid societal problems or whether these are inevitably part of life? Can we create a community without them? Many people, it seems, believe we cannot, holding wars and criminality to be unavoidable and a part – if an unfortunate one – of the human condition. This is August Nicholl's opinion, who wakes with a start mumbling "… like a dog can smell you." When Lucius Hunt asks him what was said, he expands:

Quote

You may run from sorrow, as we have; sorrow will find you. It can smell you.

Later, near the close of the movie, he repeats the lesson he has learned from recent events, including the death of his son, saying "we cannot run from heartache… heartache is a part of life. We know that now." Somehow this can strike us as an easy answer, though: certainly the community of Covington Woods does not appear to have any of the concerns faced by the distant towns, although we might say that Shyamalan has created a fiction only. There is a distinction to be made between unavoidable sorrows due to death and accidents, on the one hand, and malaises like rape and murder. Can people come to terms with the former while learning to avoid the latter? Is it unduly pessimistic or instead realistic to answer in the negative? The Village shows us that this demarcation is a sound one, but its accuracy depends on the extent to which we take the film to reflect genuine possibilities in our world. We can also look to actual utopian communities to help us decide this issue.

Even if they are not perfect, of course, we can still wonder whether Covington Woods and other utopians societies are better than the outside world, and what "better" can mean in this context. The villagers seem genuinely happy, for example, but again we can object that this is based on Shyamalan's imagination and may not be representative. Nevertheless, those of us with experience of life in smaller communities can attest to the value of closer integration with the people around us while, conversely, the alienation due to modern life in large cities has been the subject of much study by sociologists and psychologist, among others. When we listen to Jake (actually a cameo by Shyamalan himself) holding forth on how to best work for the Wildlife Preserve, all the stories in his newspaper concern murders or combat deaths.

What factors limit the success of separatism? The most important one for the story is the medical constraint. Stabbed by Noah Percy, Lucius lies dying from an infection that can be cured by medicines available in the dreaded towns and this knowledge weighs heavily on the mind of Edward Walker. The additional irony is that Lucius had himself requested permission to travel to the towns to return with potential new medicines, his intention being to improve the quality of life in the village and perhaps help Noah. This, of course, is a common objection to utopian ideals (and also to primitivism): we may rue the evils of modern life, but are we prepared to do without the many advances in medicine if we give up on it and try to start anew? The implication is that either we have to make just such a bargain or we cannot consistently reject the outside world.

When it comes to the threat faced by Lucius, indeed, Walker does not insist on the separation of Covington Woods that he has fought so hard to protect. His wife, on the other hand, is the voice of the critic of utopia:

Quote

You have made an oath, Edward, as we all have, never to go back. It is a painful bargain but no good can come without sacrifice. These are your words I am saying. You cannot break the oath. It is sacred.

This idea that "no good can come without sacrifice" is one some people accept, such as those who refuse blood transfusions or invasive surgery that could potentially save them in order to maintain a principle that holds these are morally (or otherwise) wrong. For Walker, however, matters are not so straightforward. "It is a crime what has happened to Lucius", he insists, and although this event occurred within the community, there is a sense in which the intentions behind it have been violated by the attempted murder, a justification Walker uses to appeal to outside help. Is this acceptable? More importantly, is it not somehow an absurd question to be asking?

This narrow view of utopias relies on a strict separation of them from the outside world, but on the face of it there is no reason why we should judge them according to a criterion of self-sufficiency. The Amish, for instance, prefer to live apart but occasionally trade with others. Can the utopian community, by its example, show that a different life is possible without necessarily giving up on everything? Shyamalan hints at this interpretation with the apparently incidental character of Kevin, the patrolman who guards the border of the Walker Wildlife Preserve. Confronted with the desperate figure of Ivy Walker, he is won over by her appeal and obtains the medicines she needs. More than this, however, we notice the mixture of quiet awe and fascination with which he sits in his van when she has gone, deep in contemplation. This is a particular case of the appeal of utopian ideas, of course, in which we wonder if the lives we lead are not really taking place in the best of all possible worlds in spite of the technological advances we claim to have made. Perhaps it is for this reason that Walker has arranged not to keep people in his community, a function carried out by "those we don't speak of", but to keep them out – achieved, as we learn, by paying government officials to prevent plane routes from passing over the woods as well as by the setting up of the preserve.

In addition to the matter of how the village should interact with the towns, there is the converse: how should wider society treat utopian communities? Do people have the right to secede if they wish? Here again we come to the medical critique: if a group proposes to settle apart from others, should they then be denied access to public institutions and services? The issue here is that in most states we are expected to contribute to the maintenance of order and other provisions, such that withdrawing into a separate community would deprive others of funding. Why, then, should such people remain entitled to healthcare? This tension is what Shyamalan exploits with the dilemma faced by the elders when Lucius' life hangs in the balance.

It remains the case that Walker breaks his own oath, if not himself then through his daughter, by allowing contact with the towns. With this exception, he and the other elders maintain the pretence of the creatures inhabiting the woods to sustain the separation of their community. Are "those we don't speak of" an example of a noble lie, a shared falsehood used ostensibly to bring about positive consequences? We see, eventually, that the creatures are only "farce", but they sustain the integrity of the village and its ideals. Here we find another interesting question explored by Shyamalan: are such noble lies required by utopias, in one form or another? Plainly other societies cope without the threat of beasts clad in red, but is there a necessity for an inward-looking mentality of one form or another, or at least a feeling that there is no need for the trappings of the outside world? For one thing, the suggestion seems to be that it is difficult to leave behind everything, as Lucius observes when he tells his mother that "there are secrets in every corner of this village. Do you not feel it? Do you not see it?" Her justification is that she does not want to be ruled by her memories but at the same time does not want to forget them and the reasons why she decided to become part of Covington Woods in the first place.

The noble lie, in any case, does not scare Lucius and he is conscious of this medical problem. Warned of the possible danger, he insists that the creatures will sense his motives: "they will see that I am pure of intention and not afraid." Where the death of Daniel Nicholson plays on his father’s mind, convincing him (as we have seen) that sorrow is unavoidable, for Lucius it outweighs the threat of potential harm – in short, it does not suffice to keep him content to stay in the village. This restlessness, caused in Lucius by a desire to help others, ifs effectively countered in his fellows by the reminders of "those we don't speak of" (particularly the warnings in the form of the skinned animals). That some, like Lucius, are not satisfied suggests that to preserve an order based on a lie those who seem likely to disregard it must be brought into the deception. This is the subtext when Walker asks "who do you think will continue this place, this life? Do you plan to live forever? It is in them that our future lies. It is in Ivy and Lucius that this way of life will continue."

This, though, is one of the most difficult aspects to the story and Shyamalan is careful with it, not providing a clear – if any – answer. The optimistic interpretation is perhaps that Ivy and Lucius will appreciate the value of the community they are a part of and agree that its survival is more important than the truth, such that a relatively harmless lie is a price worth paying. Walker tells his daughter that "there is no one in this village who has not lost someone irreplaceable, who has not felt loss so deeply that they question the very merit of living at all", but he is speaking only for the elders. When he insists that "it is a darkness I wished you would never know", there is no reason to doubt his sincerity and yet it is the morality of the means that disappoints Ivy. "I am sad for you, Papa", she replies, and this is the indictment of the endeavour as a whole and the point on which the story turns (with one exception, discussed below). Is the life in Covington Woods justification enough for the lie, or does it show us that utopias are predicated on a discontinuity with the rest of the world that in reality does not exist and hence can only be sustained by lies? "What was the purpose of our leaving?", Walker asks. "Let us not forget – it was out of hope of something good and right." Challenged that he has put the community at threat, he ultimately retreats to a moral argument:

Quote

Yes I have risked – I hope I am always able to risk – everything for the just and right cause. If we did not make this decision we could never again call ourselves innocent – and that, in the end, is what we have protected here: innocence. That I'm not ready to give up.

Here, it seems, is our answer: it is better always to do what is right, and the perspective of his beloved daughter has won the day.

Although this is an impassioned speech and it convinces the objectors, Shyamalan gives us a different kind of innocence to that Walker appears to have had in mind. All the exploration of utopian communities and ideals serves as a backdrop to what The Village ultimately is – a love story. For all the critical commentary on the twists in his plots, in this movie his direction takes second place to his writing, with some beautiful dialogue underscoring the depth of the relationship between Ivy and Lucius. The latter part, according to Shyamalan himself, was written specifically for Phoenix, and his soft, breathless delivery perfectly compliments his nervous yet quietly confident role as Ivy's guardian angel. "How is it that you are unafraid while the rest of us quake in our boots?", she asks him, and he responds in a way that helps us understand Shyamalan's verdict on Covington Woods and experiments like it:

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I do not worry about what will happen – only what needs to be done.

For Lucius the threat of the depravity to be found in the towns or the dangers lurking in the trees has no effect because of the attitude he takes towards life. His utterly unconditional love for Ivy is but one facet of a character that seeks only to achieve what is necessary and no more. In many respects he may strike us as something of a simpleton, but this speaks to our own prejudices that Shyamalan is challenging. Lucius senses that the separation of the community from the world outside is one side of a false dilemma and wishes to travel to the towns not for his own benefit but for that of others. He is simultaneously trapped by his indecisiveness in personal matters, which Ivy summarises by telling him that "sometimes we don't do things we want to do so that others won't know that we want to do them." The tension arising in him as a result of these two aspects, in which his quietude and willingness to selflessly help others restricts his ability to tell Ivy how he really feels, is something of a microcosm for the strange way in which utopian communities exist outside the modern world even as their very closure limits what they can achieve.

For her part, Ivy is the heroine of the tale as a whole and ultimately saves Lucius. She is the leader-in-waiting of the community and is able to quiet Noah as no one else can. The interesting thing about her is that she is blind. For Shyamalan, likely intentionally, this has two consequences: firstly, she cannot see the outside world when she ventures into it – nor that the creature that attacks her in the woods is really Noah. When her father tells the Percys that "your son has made our lies real", his daughter’s lack of sight is an equal factor and gives them a chance to maintain the pretence if they wish to. The moment at which the elders all stand in agreement is significant, as we will come to appreciate below.

Secondly, she is truly self-reliant in a way that the other villagers (excepting Lucius) lack the courage to be – and even Walker, when faced with the conflict between his principles and his concern for Lucius, choses the former. We could say, of course, that this actually is the brave decision to make, but there is a strange disconnect between his words and his actions. He tells Ivy that the burden of travelling to the towns to find medicines is "yours and yours alone", but he sends two escorts to accompany her and tries to convince the other elders that this is the right thing to do. Moreover, that Lucius might have died was due to his living Covington Woods, where not only were barriers erected in the form of "those we don't speak of" to prevent villagers going to the towns to improve medical conditions but also the preserve is strictly controlled to ensure that no influences from the towns reaches it. When Noah stabs Lucius, then, it is difficult to accept that responsibility for remedying its consequences falls solely to Ivy when the elders have brought about the circumstances that would lead to death without the towns. Indeed, we could argue that the movie demonstrates that the effects of our choices are far wider ranging than we might suppose, in this case for all intents and purposes condemning a man to death for the sake of a principle. Walker is consistent initially but changes his mind when his daughter tells him that she will die with Lucius.

To understand how the problem is answered by Shyamalan, we have to look to the relationship between Lucius and Ivy and how it is used to conclude The Village. There is no better way to stress the importance of these characters than the beautiful porch scene in which Lucius quiets Ivy. "What can you not say what is in your head?", she asks him, after taunting him with talk of their wedding and making plain that she knows how he feels about her. "Why can you not stop saying what is in yours?", he replies, and then it begins, leaving the viewer spellbound:

Quote

Why must you lead, when I want to lead? If I want to dance, I will ask you to dance. If I want to speak, I will open my mouth and speak. Everyone is forever plaguing me to speak for them. Why? What good is it to tell you you are in my every thought from the time I wake? What good can come from my saying that I sometimes cannot think clearly or do my work properly? What gain can rise from my telling you that the only time I feel fear as others do is when I think of you in harm? That is why I am on this porch, Ivy Walker. I fear for your safety before all others.

Lucius loves Ivy completely, in a fashion that takes no account of where they are and for what reasons. Ivy, likewise, is utterly certain of their love and tests her faith in him when the creature first visits the village. As touching as this may be, though, what relevance does it have to any of the foregoing or to interpreting The Village? The answer lies in the closing moments, when the elders have made their pact to perpetuate their stories and the community the way it is. As they stand in unison, Ivy returns and ignores them all, rushing to the bedside. As she grips Lucius’ hand, the questions of where she is or what principles should guide our lives fade into nothing and the words of her father ring in our ears. "She is led by love. The world moves for love. It kneels before it in all." Covington Woods is many things – an experiment or a critique of society and the utopian communities that try to improve on it – but it is the place where yet again the world moves and buckles under the weight of love. What, in the final analysis, is most important? Ivy Walker answers in two words and all else comes to nought: "I'm back."]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:37:23 +0000 766ebcd59621e305170616ba3d3dac32 <![CDATA[Soderbergh's Solaris]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/soderberghs-solaris-r86 Paul Newall (2005)

When Steven Soderbergh's version of Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris opens with the sight of Kris Kelvin sat on his bed, listening to the disembodied sound of his dead wife's voice, it is immediately clear that the script has departed from the text in significant ways.

Kelvin has been in this position for an unspecified amount of time; his surroundings, including his apartment, are functional; and as we spend more time following his life it is apparent that he pays little attention to those around him – quite an irony, given that he works as a psychologist. He appears to be a man lost, making just enough effort to get by.

Lem's 1961 book is his most famous, the subject of a previous film by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky and part of the old tradition of science fiction that dealt with the ideas involved in – and consequences of – space exploration, rather than the new technologies actually or potentially associated with it. Lem's Solaris is an enigma, a planet that occupies a twin-sun system and has somehow achieved a stable orbit, ostensibly by its own efforts. The subject of a century of studies and exploration, its ocean is reckoned by some to be alive and conscious, as well as aware that it is being examined and reacting accordingly. Kris Kelvin, our narrator, is part of this tradition and explains it at length in the text. In Soderbergh's reworking, however, Solaris is only under assessment as a possible source of energy; there are no lengthy scientific digressions to set the scene and this is the first of many departures. When Kelvin docks at the Prometheus station at the request of his friend Gibarian, two people are dead and one missing – the former including Gibarian himself who has committed suicide. In Lem's book there were only three crew onboard when Kelvin arrived – the late Gibarian, Snow and Sartorius (a male, replaced by the female Gordon) – while Gibarian's son (whom Kelvin chases) is not mentioned at all. There are other discrepancies that will be noted as their relevance becomes apparent.

There are several themes at work in Solaris, the first of which is a critique of the ideology of exploration that Lem had Snow expound upon at length, words that Soderbergh gives to Gibarian in his soliloquy intended to help Kelvin understand what is happening on the Prometheus. It is worth quoting in full:

Quote

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid and the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us – that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence – then we don't like it anymore.

[…]

I'm talking about what we all wanted: contact with another civilization. Now we've got it! And we can observe, through a microscope, as it were, our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame!

Writing at a time when the conquest of near-space was considered a "race", Lem's Snow saw it instead as a testimony to our arrogance at wanting to spread our human conceits unto the very edge of the universe rather than make contact with other forms of life in order to improve our own. This is central to Lem's work as he has Kelvin go over the various attempts by scientists to understand Solaris and attribute a status (alive and/or conscious?) to its ocean. For Soderbergh it is of lesser import, and yet he introduces the problem in a different way through Rheya's struggle in Kelvin's cabin to piece together her memories. She recalls a conversation with Gibarian and others, in which she was "talking about a higher form of intelligence". Gibarian had responded dismissively with "you’re talking about something else. You're talking about a man with a white beard again. You are ascribing human characteristics to something that isn't human." As viewers, we can contrast his certainty here with his temporally later realisation that this very character of his attempts to study Solaris had ensured he could never understand it, warning Kelvin that "there are no answers, only choices." At this early stage, though, Kelvin is himself quite sure that "given all the elements of the known universe, and enough time, our existence is inevitable. It's no more mysterious than trees, or sharks. We're a mathematical probability, and that's all." It seems we are again invited to note this confidence as we come to watch it erode over the course of the movie.

In the novel, the dead Gibarian visits Kelvin – just as he does in the film version, but for longer. During their conversation he explains why there is and must remain a barrier to any understanding of the polytheres (his term for the apparitions):

Quote

We are the cause of our own sufferings. The polytheres behave strictly as a kind of amplifier of our own thoughts. Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.

Here we see an extension of Lem's critique: just as we invariably talk about God from a human perspective, we extend the conceit that we can fathom the non-human to Solaris and indeed anything we might find as we advance the frontier through space. We assume that our reason is sufficient to comprehend what motivates God or an entity like Solaris but this presumption remains, for Lem, a barrier to any genuine understanding. Some have argued that we simply have no alternative but to judge the actions of gods or "higher forms of intelligence" by our own standards, but it seems Lem is making the further suggestion that it is our viewing life as a mystery to be solved that is the deeper problem (an idea found in Wittgenstein, most famously). This is the lesson of several so-called Eastern schools of thought, too, insofar as the immediate experience of life is broken into pieces in the attempt to make sense of it, creating a puzzle that was not inherent in the experience itself. The behaviour of Solaris defies the efforts of all the "Solarists" to comprehend it, as Kelvin discovers for himself when he tries to achieve the same via a polythere drawn from his own memories. All he can learn, it seems, is about himself (whence the suggestion some have made that if and when we finally complete the jigsaw puzzle we will be confronted with an image of ourselves looking out at us). When we reach the close of the movie, perhaps the only motivation we can guess at on the part of Solaris was to give Kelvin the chance to do so.

The second aspect of both film and book is given by the lines spoken by Gibarian that follow those quoted above:

Quote

Before we can proceed with our research, either our own thoughts or their materialized forms must be destroyed. It is not within our power to destroy our thoughts. As for destroying their material forms, that would be like committing murder.

The counter-argument to this position is stated forcefully by Gordon, who tells Kelvin that "we are in a situation that is beyond morality." The question is whether or not the polytheres are fully human, and even if they are not whether they should be accorded the same rights. (These issues are especially relevant given contemporary concerns about the consequences of cloning.) In particular, Rheya is identical with her "real" counterpart except that she is formed from Kelvin's memories of her, some of which may be inaccurate (a point we return to below). This is complicated by doubts over whether she can survive away from Solaris, but is an incomplete memory or the effect of the polytheres on the crew of the Prometheus sufficient to justify their destruction? By extension, Lem was asking the same of any forms of life we might encounter in our exploration of the cosmos. That Snow is eventually revealed to be a polythere himself (this does not occur in the novel) – having killed his progenitor by accident – renders the issue still more difficult in Soderbergh's reproduction because it strikes us that action is only mooted for those known to be copies. That is, there is an epistemic dimension: no one advocates the demise of Snow because they do not know that he is a polythere, nor have any reason to suspect it, but Gordon (and later Rheya herself) poses the question regarding Rheya and her own visitor because she is certain of their status.

By making the change to Snow's character in such a significant way, Soderbergh seems to be undermining any possible case for destroying Rheya. Likewise, the scene involving Snow and Gordon in which the latter lets slip that Kelvin sent the previous version of Rheya away does not appear in Lem's work (indeed, in the book it is Snow who eventually uses the device on Rheya at her insistence), and we may ask why it was given such prominence? What it achieves is to force us to reflect on Kelvin’s earlier choice and how his failure to understand his situation was dispelled by banishing the problem, just as Gordon's desire to rid herself of her visitor seems driven more by her own discomfort than any desire to learn about how Solaris sustains them. That Rheya is upset upon discovering that she is a copy only serves to underline this failure to distinguish meaningfully between polythere and reality, which Kelvin comes to appreciate when she asks him "but am I really Rheya?" He replies, making the irrelevance of this demarcation plain, by saying "I don’t know anymore. All I see is you."

The third strand to the story is the fascinating question of how well we can ever know someone (sometimes part of the so-called "problem of other minds"). Although we the viewers are already aware that this Rheya is not really Kelvin's dead wife but an imitation, she is not and has to piece the realisation together herself. "I do remember things, but I don’t remember being there. I don’t remember experiencing those things." Obtaining her memories from Kelvin's, she has content but not context. From our privileged vantage point we watch as this inevitably leads to tragedy:

Quote

Don't you see? I came from your memory of her. That's the problem. I'm not a whole person. In your memory you get to control everything, so even if you remember something wrong I am predetermined to carry it out. I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me. My voice sounds the way it does because that's how you remember it.

Although we can observe that Kelvin would be expected to have largely negative memories of his wife given her suicide and the part he feels he played in it, there is something more important at stake in the inadequacy of his recollections; namely, that all memories are inherently incomplete – even those we have of ourselves. Given that Rheya is dead and therefore must be reconstructed from his memory, the question is not why this should happen but how it could be otherwise? The implication of the polytheres, it seems, is that there can be no total knowledge or understanding of another. Drawn as they are from the thoughts of the crew, they are nevertheless recognised as incomplete renderings by their "real" double; but rather than this being a comment on a supposed failure by Solaris to achieve a perfect copy, instead they speak of the failure of our own conceptions of others to match them. That is, it is we who fall short, not the polytheres or their originator.

Kelvin appreciates this failure, at least in part, by rejecting the idea that his memories should dictate how life with the new Rheya must play out:

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I don't believe we're predetermined to relive our past. I think that we can choose to do it differently. The day I left and you said you wouldn't make it – I didn’t hear you because I was angry. This is my chance to undo that mistake, and I need you to help me.

He thus increasingly conceives of Rheya not as a copy of his wife but an opportunity to atone for his previous errors, with his admission ("all I see is you") pointing us in the direction of acknowledging that complete knowledge of others is both impossible and what we yearn for nonetheless. When Rheya says "I wish we could just live inside that feeling forever", it is difficult indeed to recall that she is supposed to be composed of Kelvin's memories and sustained by Solaris, rather than a new person in her own right. He is, as it were, on almost a level playing field with this Rheya because while she came into existence with an incomplete recollection of her past, Kelvin comes to realise that he is handicapped in exactly the same way as we all are. The desire of lovers to slow time or live in a perfect moment then becomes not a hopeless dream but exactly the response we should expect given that this feeling can neither be recorded as it is in our memories nor expressed in a way that has the same meaning to anyone else.

This, of course, is the last and greatest theme of Solaris: love. Soderbergh has straightforwardly admitted that he intended to tell a love story and it is here that his version departs most significantly of all from Lem’s novel. Back from Solaris, Kelvin tries to describe what "home" means to him:

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What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women – and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again.

This, however, is where the two tales diverge. Lem’s Kelvin declares that he will "find new interests and occupations" but "not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody", a profoundly negative lesson drawn from his experience with Solaris that he continues as follows:

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On the surface, I was calm; in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amore, is a lie, useless and not even funny.

He closes by saying that he lives in expectation, persisting "in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past". Soderbergh's Kelvin, on the other hand, takes another route by ending his discussion of home with a desperate admission:

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… but I was haunted by the idea that I had remembered her wrong. Somehow I was wrong about everything.

Notwithstanding the incompleteness of his memories, Kelvin cannot shake the feeling that those things he did recall were inaccurate, born of his grief rather than a genuine reflection of what occurred between him and Rheya. Rinsing his finger under the tap, he realises that he did not cut it; turning to the fridge, he sees a picture that he did not remember was there (leading the new Rheya to form the wrong impression of their home); and so Kelvin learns that his grief is conditioned by his inability to let go of his guilt and focus on the beautiful aspects of their relationship. When, with a start, he realises that Rheya is with him and asks her if he is alive or dead, she replies:

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We don’t have to think like that anymore. We’re together now. Everything we’ve done is forgiven. Everything.

In Soderbergh's Solaris, it is not clear whether Kelvin and Rheya are really back on Earth or whether Kelvin is dreaming this scene as he dies on the Prometheus. What is apparent, though, is that Kelvin has been given another chance precisely because life ends but love does not.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:34:29 +0000 605ff764c617d3cd28dbbdd72be8f9a2 <![CDATA[Tykwer's Heaven]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/tykwers-heaven-r85 Paul Newall (2005)

Although he had claimed upon its completion that the Three Colours Trilogy would be his final work, Krzysztof Kieślowski was writing (with his long-time collaborator Kryzsztof Piesiewicz) a second trilogy at the time of his death, to include films entitled Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.

When the Polish master died, the script for the first was passed to the German director Tom Tykwer who had himself already plumbed the subjects of fate and coincidence, as well as "the relationship between the two", and was therefore a perfect choice to interpret a work sitting squarely in Kieślowskian territory.

The plot of Heaven is quite straightforward. Philippa Paccard, an English teacher working in Italy, is distraught at the extent of the local drug trade and the impact it is having on her students, one of whom has just hung herself leaving a note saying simply "throw me out with the trash". She is recently widowed, her husband having himself overdosed and been involved with a man named Vendice whom she believes to be controlling much of the trafficking. She has been writing to the Carabinieri over an extended period but they have done nothing, due (as we later learn) to at least one of their officers being involved himself. Having discovered a bomb in her apartment constructed (apparently) by her dead husband, she decides to take matters into her own hands and manages to plant it in a wastepaper bin in Vendice's office. At the last moment a cleaner arrives and empties the contents, making her way to a lift to continue with her duties on another floor. A man and his two young daughters already in the lift are killed along with the cleaner when the bomb detonates. Paccard is arrested (having confessed by telephone) and interrogated, believed by the investigators to be part of a larger terrorist network.

At this point we meet Filippo, an officer in the Carabinieri and son of the former head for Turin. Acting as a scribe for the case, he offers to interpret when Philippa insists on testifying in English. She tells the Carabinieri that she has records of all her correspondence with them, explaining the drug problem and her suspicions, but none are found (due, it is implied, to a Maggiore Pini destroying them to cover his own tracks). Philippa believes she has accomplished what she set out to do until she is told that she killed innocents instead, at which point she breaks down (a spellbinding performance by Cate Blanchett, it should be said). She faints and Filippo rushes to her aid, whereupon she wakes up gripping his hand – a shot that Tykwer lingers over just as surely as Kieślowski would have. Filippo resolves to help her escape, later giving as his reasoning that his younger brother Ariel was in her class and she was his favourite teacher. He passes her recorded instructions, which Pini is able to eavesdrop on. The latter confers with Vendice and plans to let her go, in order to bring about her death on recapture and hence keep their involvement secret, but Filippo changes his plan at the last moment and they lure Vendice to Pini’s office while the Carabinieri are searching for them. Philippa shots and kills Vendice with a gun Filippo provides, whereupon the pair go on the run and ultimately escape. Where they escape to, however, is the important detail.

Tykwer has said of Heaven that "the basic theme is redemption". It is how this comes about that provides the depth of the movie, in which the action and the dialogue – even between the main characters, which may not be obvious on first viewing – is minimal. In his message to Philippa, Filippo explains that once they have been able to break her out of custody,

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... then we will think what to do next, because I believe there will be something and it will be beautiful.

Even before this, after watching Philippa cry on learning of the deaths she did not intend, Filippo has admitted to his father that he is in love. At first, however, she is not convinced that anything special is occurring and tells him that she agreed to escape not to avoid punishment, which she fully deserves, but only to kill Vendice.

It is important to realise the situation in which the viewer finds him- or herself at this early stage in proceedings: Philippa has slain four innocent people, even if unintentionally, including two children. Tykwer is careful to spend time with them beforehand as they chat tenderly with their father; in the lift itself, they count the floors as they travel upwards. There can be no suggestion that Tykwer is minimalising the extent of what Philippa has wrought, or presenting an apologetic for it. She then goes on to kill Vendice, a man who could easily have been portrayed as the embodiment of evil but instead is given a scene in which he calls his partner to lament his being called away and hence arriving home to her late. Moreover, when Philippa shoots Vendice it is with Filippo's help, the latter holding the door closed to prevent Vendice avoiding his death. For the more observant, too, we can notice Philippa touching wood for luck on her way to plant the bomb and valuing her own life when she is almost knocked down at a road crossing even as she is about to take that of another. She also calls Vendice's receptionist to ensure no one other than her target is hurt, which demonstrates how calculating and considered her actions are.

What we find, then, is that both Philippa and Filippo are perhaps as far from our sympathies as they could be, and yet there is something wonderful about his unquestioning and immediate love for her in spite of everything that makes us curious about what will happen to them, or how matters can possibly be saved or put right. Tykwer hints at this in a typically Kieślowskian shot (recalling Delpy in the hotel room in White) when the two wake up together in their hiding place, staring into one another’s eyes in silence. It is easy to regard Filippo's behaviour as simplistic, or as a moral failure on his part to realise the magnitude of what she has done and that, straightforwardly, she should be brought to justice for it. Nothing was straightforward for Kieślowski, though, particularly moral issues. Where others had and have the confidence to pronounce on what should or should not be, Kieślowski explored the grey areas where easy answers were seldom (if ever) to be found. The question prompted for us – as viewers – to answer is: given these circumstances, complicated by Carabinieri corruption but where guilt is nevertheless clear-cut, can Philippa be saved?

Another aspect of life that Kieślowski was fascinated by is synchronicity, and often in his work lives that ostensibly were disconnected would meet and prove to be intimately related, the most detailed example being the mirroring of Joseph Kern's mistakes in August Brunner in Red, giving the latter the chance to choose differently and hence save the former. This theme of salvation not through grace or faith but rather the simplest of gestures runs through Kieślowski's oeuvre and we pick it up again in Heaven. The synchronicity involved in achieving this becomes apparent when Philippa and Filippo are on a train bound eventually for Montepulciano and she asks him his age. It turns out that their birthdays match, Filippo having come into the world at the moment when Philippa was receiving her first holy communion. We notice (if we have not already) that their clothing is identical, and begin to realise why Kieślowski had Philippa say to Filippo "I don't even know your name", as if there could be any doubt. When they visit the barber and together have their heads shaved, the implied is made concrete.

With the benefit of hindsight, Giovanni Ribisi was perhaps cast perfectly for the role of Filippo, his constant look of untroubled innocence founded on the certainty of love helping the viewer to suspend disbelief and realise that the congruence of these two lives in so many details is crucial to the exploration taking place before our eyes. Arriving at Montepulciano, Philippa remarks that "it's as if nothing ever happened" and we understand in a flash, as it were, that this line summarises events so far because of Filippo's intervention. When she meets her friend in the middle of the wedding celebrations going on around them, Philippa is slapped in the face and then hugged, forgiven in spite of what she has done. Likewise, Filippo's father meets with them covertly and embraces his son silently, forgiving him, too, as he comments – apparently proudly – "I do know you a little". Both have sinned, whether in the religious or moral sense, but are forgiven in an instant by people who love them.

Religious aspects were central to Kieślowski's work, particularly after his Decalogue series on the ten commandments. In the Montepulciano church, Philippa engages in what we recognise to be a confession (an impression Tykwer emphasises by opening the shot on the boxes themselves, curtains drawn as she speaks). Sat beside Filippo, she lays out her sins in detail and tells him that she has "ceased to believe in sense, justice and life". Head bowed, he hears her out before looking into her eyes and saying simply "I love you". Later, when Filippo’s father asks her if she loves his son, too, she begins to shake her head and tries to say no, wanting him to take Filippo with him and not allow her to drag him down with her needlessly, but she is unable to. Is it a coincidence, then, that Filippo – her saviour – was born on the day she entered the Church, only to hear her confession years later?

Given somewhere to stay for the night by her friend, the two venture out into the Tuscan sunset and there follows surely one of the most beautiful pieces of cinematography ever conceived. Shot from helicopter, Tykwer captures the two as they shed their clothes and embrace, silhouetted against the burning sky and symbolic of the angelic Filippo purifying his double. There is no music and no sound save the gentle rustling of the trees. The landscape becomes the canvas on which this individual act of redemption is painted. This, for Tykwer, is what we have witnessed: "somebody who is completely lost is taken out of the darkness and brought into the light".

Heaven opens with Filippo flying a simulated helicopter, apparently undertaking lessons. In a moment of difficulty he evades danger by taking the craft upwards, to the limit of the program. "In a real helicopter you can’t just keep flying higher", his teacher complains, to which he replies “how high can I fly?” This scene makes no sense at all throughout the movie until the very end: the Carabinieri descend on the farmhouse where the two had been sheltered, but they avoid them initially because they had spent the night on the hills under the stars. As a helicopter swoops and lands, they make their way back and stop at the fence, hands clasped together tightly. The attention of the Carabinieri is directed elsewhere and the pilot steps out, seemingly curious at the events unfolding in front of him. Filippo looks slowly at Philippa and asks her something: "now?" She nods, and they run to the helicopter, which Filippo pilots upwards. We watch from beneath as it rises higher and higher, the Carabinieri shooting in vain. The music stops and the shot lingers, the image becoming smaller and smaller until we can only see the sky into which it has faded.

At Montepulchiano, Filippo's father had posed a rhetorical question, frustrated at himself: "why can we never do anything at the important moments?" He did not realise that he had done everything possible, absolving his son in a moment just as Filippo would save Philippa and himself in the process. We see that the question has been posed and answered: can a person find salvation through love? Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov was saved by Sonya, and the Russian master's work was a huge influence on Kieślowski, covering similar ground. Philippa and Filippo have found one another and found forgiveness, ending their journey by ascending to heaven.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:33:11 +0000 a9a1d5317a33ae8cef33961c34144f84 <![CDATA[Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy]]> http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/literatureandfilm/kieslowskis-three-colours-trilogy-r84 Paul Newall (2005)

Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy is a monumental work that blends cinema, philosophy and music in a seamless whole. Its sheer depth poses a host of interpretational difficulties but this paper seeks to unravel a minority of the interwoven themes that form it.

Perhaps the most philosophical of directors (and writers, with his long-time collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz), meanings in Kieślowski's work are elusive and not easy to pin down. He claimed that "knowing is not my business - not knowing is", and this is a sense we find throughout his creations: a lack of answers to questions that are explored rather than resolved. Although he had plans to work on a further trilogy (Heaven, since completed by Tom Tykwer, Hell and Purgatory), his death in 1995 meant that the Three Colours was his final gesture.

Blue

When Juliette Binoche first met Kieślowski, they discussed philosophy. This was a recurring trend for him, with Ir ne Jacob"s "audition" for Red consisting solely in a philosophical conversation over coffee. Binoche would turn down Jurassic Park to be Kieślowski"s Julie, remarking that she "would rather play a dinosaur than one of those characters". Reckoned by many to be the finest actress of her generation, she understood that Kieślowski was interested in details and prepared for her role accordingly. Asking to wear her own clothes on the principle that being familiar with costumes is necessary in order to forget them, she studied and was influenced by Annie Duperey's novel L'Ange Noir, which tells of the death of her parents at a very young age. Displaying no visible signs of bereavement, Duperey wrote that she had "suffered enough without having to show it as well."

In Blue Binoche is Julie de Courcy, a woman who loses her composer husband and their daughter Anna in a car crash at the opening of the movie. Fleeing her old life and her lover Olivier, she tries to start over, taking an apartment in a working class area of Paris.

There are several instances of close-ups in Blue, particularly the focus on Julie holding a sugar cube to let her coffee soak into it. Kieślowski was explicit on the importance of these passages:

Quote

We are trying to show how the heroine perceives the world. We are trying to show that she focuses on small things, on things which are close to her. She doesn't care about things which are further away from her. She is trying to limit her world, to limit it to herself and her immediate environment.

Kieślowski's intention here was to show Julie concentrating on tiny details "in order to be able to discard other things". He spoke of sending an assistant on a long search for the right sugar cube (one which would dissolve in five seconds – no more, no less), based on his conviction that the viewer would be patient enough to wait for just this long and understand the implication: that she "watches the sugar cube dissolve into the coffee in order to reject an offer she has just received from a man who loves her".

The opening act in Kieślowski's trilogy is ostensibly concerned with liberte, the first of the ideals of the French Revolution. The subtlety in Blue that can easily be missed, however, is that the process Julie goes through is exactly the reverse of what is superficially occurring. Speaking of the part, Binoche said that "when you’ve lost everything, life is nothing"; but what we see made plain throughout the movie is that she has not lost everything. Olivier still loves her unconditionally and although she tries to remove all trace of her past, selling the family's belongings and eating the blue lollies that remind her of Anna, she keeps the mobile from the blue room and puts it up in her new apartment. Even after Lucille touches it and Julie recoils so slightly as to almost be imperceptible, a quite beautiful gesture on the part of an actress having achieved total mastery of her craft, it stays as a perpetual reminder of what she has lost. This is straightforwardly inexplicable of a woman who supposedly views memories as traps and seeks freedom from them, but it immediately makes sense if we understand her behaviour in a similar way to that of Patrick Bateman's in American Psycho.

Thus when we watch Julie trying to block out the music that reminds her of the past by curling up in a natal position in the swimming pool, fingers in her ears (Binoche's idea), and yet returning to an apartment with the blue mobile, just as she destroys her husband's final composition even as she keeps on a scrap of paper in her handbag the motif that would tie it all together, we realise something: she is not free of all ties because life has lost its meaning, but instead wants to be free in order that life – and the past – will have no meaning. She is hiding from her pain inside a false liberty.

During the meeting with Olivier, Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that "different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons". With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed. Indeed, music played a vital role in all of Kieślowski's work, his relationship with Zbigniew Preisner being a unique one wherein the latter (a self-taught composer and graduate of philosophy) wrote the score before the movie, fitting the story to the music rather than the other way around (Kieślowski described it as "the film [being] an illustration of the music").

Julie's mother has Alzheimer's and represents the ultimate end of any attempt to be free of memories, being unable to recall most details of her life. We notice, however, that when Julie discovers her rat infestation she goes to her mother to ask if she was afraid of rodents as a child. This scene again draws our attention to the inconsistency – or tension – between Julie's apparent desire to forget her past while at the same time needing it to make sense of her present. That she would turn to the one person who really is losing the power of retention is not so much ironic as tragic, demonstrating the absurdity of her predicament.

There are four instances of the fade to blue accompanied by de Courcey's motif for the Concert for European Unity: at the hospital on the visit of the journalist; on the stairs when Julie locks herself out of her apartment; in the swimming pool; and when she learns of Patrice's affair and is asked by Olivier "what do you want to do?" When we realise that these notes are those left by her husband to complete the concert, his last work, they become symbolic of the ties that remain even though she has tried to make a clean break. Only when she finally accepts that she cannot run away from the love that endures does she cry, letting go and beginning again with hope – truly free at last.

White

The second feature in the trilogy, White is concerned with equality. Many commentators have viewed it as the weakest of the films, passing over it in their haste to get to Red and describing it only as a black comedy. There is no doubt that it is funny, but unfortunately this misses the key points that Kieślowski was stressing and also its importance in making sense of the whole. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that White adds another dimension without which the overall effect would be considerably lessened.

White is the story of Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser (named by Kieślowski as a tribute to Charlie Chaplin) living in Paris and married to Dominique Vidal, a French coiffure. She leaves him because of his failure to consummate their union. The movie begins with a number of humiliations, as Karol loses his marriage, his finances and his dignity through the divorce hearing and his (now ex-) wife immediately taking a lover. On the steps of the courtroom Karol is the target of a pigeon with a good aim, so that moments after taking a small pleasure in the bird's flight he is "humiliated through his naivety in the face of nature", as Kieślowski put it. This sets the scene for what is to follow, a point on which Kieślowski insisted:

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Humiliation is the subject of the film. People aren't and don't want to be equal.

In a continuation of the motif from Blue, Karol grins at an old man struggling to use a bottle bank, taking a perverse pleasure in someone apparently being worse off than him. However, he salvages something from his humiliation, demanding the return of his two franc piece (which he subsequently keeps with him) and finding beauty in the bust he notices in a shop window and carefully restores in Poland.

There are two instances of foreshadowing in White. In the opening credits we watch as a bulky suitcase makes it way around an airport carousel, without knowing what this means as yet. Only later do we understand that it contained Karol, on his way home by being smuggled as part of Mikolaj's luggage. Later Karol spins his two franc piece as we watch Dominique enter a hotel room, looking exhausted. This, we discover, is where she will meet the "reborn" Karol after his funeral.

The subplot involving Mikolaj, a Pole who Karol meets in the Paris Metro and helps get him back to Poland, is itself one of rebirth or resurrection. Wanting to kill himself but being unable to do so, Mikolaj offers Karol money to help him. At the fateful moment, Karol shoots him in the chest with a blank before telling him that the next one is real and asking "are you sure?" Mikolaj is not and the two men trade the idea for running onto a frozen lake like children. For Mikolaj now, "everything is possible".

The remainder of the movie follows Karol's rise to prosperity in a Poland opened up to capitalism. Reaching a point of financial security, he is able to fake his own death having first changed his will to make it seem that his ex-wife was involved in the handsome settlement she receives, resulting in her being jailed. Karol is thus able to erase his humiliation and attain equality with Dominique, but it comes at a cost of its own that neither can afford.

Indeed, Kieślowski's real point in White is that the maxim "these days, you can buy anything" is false: love cannot be bought and cannot be described in terms of equality. Moreover, it is much more than consummation, which is hinted at by Dominique early in the film when she tells Karol "you don't understand that I want you. You don't understand that I need you." Only at his funeral does Karol realises that something is wrong with his attempts to achieve parity when he observes that Dominique is genuinely upset. Delpy herself noted that the result of his machinations was that "both characters are locked up in their own prisons – his because people think he is dead. They still love each other, though, and hence there is hope."

There is thus in White a critique of viewing equality in economic terms - or as a matter of power - as both Karol and Dominique come to appreciate that neither have dominion over love, just as Julie learned that she could not free herself from it in Blue.

Red

The final movie he completed before his death, Red is acknowledged as Kieślowski's masterpiece. Its meaning is so elusive that overinterpretation is a constant danger. A good example is the name of the heroine, Valentine, which has been the subject of much speculation. Kieślowski recounted, however, that he had simply asked Ir ne Jacob what she would like to be called, which she responded to by selecting her favourite name as a child. Jacob herself noted that Kieślowski was "distrustful of any message, of a moral", but this is not to imply that interpretation is unlimited.

The most obvious aspect of the film is its daring use of colour. In contrast to the muted greys of Gen ve, anything of any significance it saturated with or marked in red – from the ribbon on Valentine's telephone to Auguste's jeep. When Valentine stops at a traffic light in front of an empty billboard framed in red, then, moments before Auguste crosses the same road and drops his books (the elastic having broken), we are aware that some kind of foreshadowing is taking place.

The subject of Red is fraternity, at least on the surface, but Kieślowski himself stated that "the essential question the film asked is: is it possible to repair a mistake which was committed somewhere high above?" The meaning of this apparently cryptic allusion becomes clearer as the movie progresses, particularly if we pay attention to the many pointers scattered throughout. When we notice the camera lingering over a picture of a ballet dancer in Auguste's apartment, for instance, and then watch Valentine struggling to hold the very same pose at her class shortly thereafter, the room dripping in reds, we expect to find a connection between them. Nevertheless, they seem to keep missing each other, such as when Auguste moves to the window when Valentine's car alarm is sounding, only for his girlfriend to appear and distract his attention.

When she knocks down his dog Rita, Valentine finds herself at the home of Joseph Kern, a retired judge who appears only under this description in the credits. Ostensibly indifferent to Rita's accident, he dismisses Valentine and yet comes to the window to look at her again. He then sends her money to pay the veterinarian's bill – far too much, as it happens, and apparently quite deliberately. Although this scene passes quickly and our attention is focused on Valentine's winning on the fruit machine – red cherries – and her understanding it as relating to her brother’s appearance in the newspaper, the question neither asked nor answered is how the judge was able to post any form of payment without knowing who Valentine is or where she lives…

In any case, the plain implication is that Kern paid too much in order to draw Valentine to him again, and revisit she does. He lacks the correct change for her when she gives back the overpayment, so he disappears inside and fails to come back. Valentine, of course, follows her curiosity and seeks him out, discovering the eavesdropping on his neighbours. Before we come to this strand, however, we notice that the judge points to the thirty francs rather than passing them to Valentine. When she picks them up, we see that they were resting on what seems to be a picture. This is actually a record sleeve, the artist being van den Budenmayer. (The composer was a fictional creation of Kieślowski's and Preisner's, used in La Double Vie de Veronique, although it was taken seriously by some music critics.) Again the camera lingers and we have another example of foreshadowing: later we see Valentine listening to a CD which we recognise by the cover as van den Budenmayer, her interest having been piqued by seeing it at Kern's house. Next to her are Auguste and his girlfriend Karin who buy the last copy, as though the judge had arranged for their paths to cross again.

For Kieślowski, the dialogue involving Valentine and the judge was between "experience which can know disappointment and youth which has yet to face it". Faced with her disgust at his behaviour, Kern challenges Valentine to fix the problems he listens in on and asks her if she acts to help others or instead just to make herself feel better. Rising to the bait, she visits the home of one neighbour only to find the daughter already listening in on her father's conversation with his lover while his wife is cheerfully oblivious. Much as we learned from many of the shorter pieces in the Decalogue, situations like these are too complex for easy answers. No such attempt to help is involved when Valentine learns that another resident controls much of the Genevan heroin trade and wishes death upon him, her brother firmly in her thoughts.

Some commentators have suggested that the judge is – or represents – God. He asks Valentine to stay, telling her "the light is beautiful" just as he is bathed in it. They listen to Auguste's conversation in which he tosses a coin to decide between bowling or studying penal code and Kern does likewise beforehand, resulting in tails and still another lingering close-up. Somehow we know that Auguste will obtain the same result, and – more foreshadowing – that is where Valentine will end up, too. Again and again we find Auguste and Valentine passing one another without meeting, as though the judge is contriving to make it happen. Indeed, he tells her that Auguste has not yet met the right woman; and when she asks how he knows this, he replies "I watch them from my window". This in itself engenders the realisation that much of the movie involves glass, usually as a barrier between a spectator such as Kern and the world outside.

The second discussion between Valentine and Kern takes place after he has turned himself in. He did this, he says, to see what Valentine would do. He mentions that he had to write to his neighbours using a pencil since the pen he had used all his life would not work, while the previous scene had involved Auguste being given a very similar one as a gift. Even so, he remarks that Valentine may have been very close to Auguste when she went bowling, which piques her interest. She notices that he seems happy about the couple breaking up and demands to know if he provoked it; and indirectly, of course, he did.

It is at this point that we witness the development in both characters. Valentine wants to help her brother but has come to realise that there are no easy answers. When she asks the judge if there is anything she can do, he replies "be". Asking for clarification, he repeats himself: "just that: be". Kern then admits that he had made judgements in the past that he now believes to have been wrong, acquitting a guilty man – a sailor – who had since led a good life. Valentine tells him that he had therefore been saved, but Kern wonders about how many others he might have judged differently, even others who were guilty. "Deciding what is true and what isn’t", he says, "now seems to me a lack of modesty." This passage is key to understanding the trilogy and Kieślowski’s oeuvre as a whole: all judgements are too soon and everyone can be saved by the smallest of gestures. This lesson applies particularly to Kern, whose liberation from the confines of his objectivity is symbolised by the breaking of the glass we see him trapped behind on many occasions. After the fashion show he places his hand on the window of his car, a gesture she reciprocates which indicates that their connection has transcended the boundary between them.

Standing at his window, however, Kern states that the difference between him and those he judged is only contingent. In reply, Valentine asks him if there is someone he loves. Jacob herself was clear on the meaning of her character's question:

Quote

You can do anything you want, but if you don't have love, it's pointless. And you can try to help everyone, but if you're not there, it's pointless.

Here, of course, we come full circle to the Concert for the Unification of Europe from Blue and its chorus drawn from 1 Corinthians 13.

The final dialogue occurs after the fashion show, to which Valentine invites the judge. She asks him to tell her again about the dream he described, involving her waking up happy beside someone. When she asks if this is what will happen, he is unequivocal. As though the realisation is unfolding slowly at that moment, she inquires of him, "what else do you know? Who are you?" and states that she feels something important is happening around her. We appreciate what this something is when the judge recounts his experience of visiting the fashion show years earlier and dropping one of his books from his balcony seat when the elastic binding them broke (captured in a beautiful sweeping shot by Piotr Sobocinski), falling to the ground open on a particular page. Just as we had seen for Auguste in the present day, the passage indicated by this "accident" was the one that came up in the subsequent test. As if this were not enough, he then remarks that he had to recharge his car battery.

What we learn, then, is that Auguste is somehow living the judge's life over again, with more than a hint of implication that Kern is directing it. There have been numerous chances for Valentine and Auguste to meet without doing so, but this time the judge will ensure it happens. The details are identical, down to Kern's description of his lover, her betrayal and following the couple across the English Channel. He calls Valentine the woman he never met and explains that his last judgement was on a case involving Hugo Holbling, the man who had taken his only love from him. This was his last act, taking early retirement. There follows the joining of hands and Valentine's noticing an old lady struggling at a bottle bank, the same motif we have found in each element of the trilogy. She helps her, completing the cycle and saving the world in a moment.

It remains only to note the breathtaking close of Red, in which the threads of all the movies are drawn together by the tragedy of the ferry sinking in a storm that also claims a yacht – one we understand to contain Hugo Holbling from the pictures he had shown Karin and the closing of her weather service in order to travel across the Channel. The only survivors are Julie and Olivier from Blue, Karol and Dominique from White (these pairings indicating that both couples remain together and also, by the use of his name, that Karol has given up his pretence of being dead), Valentine and Auguste from Red, along with a barman. (There is no mention of this character, Steven Killian, at any point in the trilogy, which may imply a final lesson from Kieślowski against overinterpretation, leaving a detail that cannot be explained.) This is the moment at which Valentine is captured in exactly the pose of her billboard advertisement, a stroke of genius by Sobocinski that can only be experienced since words fail to convey the sheer power of the shot. The camera then cuts to the judge gazing through a broken window, smiling quietly. Kieślowski has answered his own question, the mistake rewritten and absolved by the love that never fails.

Finis vitae sed non amore


---

1 Corinthians 13

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;
Does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;

Does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:32:07 +0000 f5deaeeae1538fb6c45901d524ee2f98 9. Political Philosophy http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/introducingphilosophy/9-political-philosophy-r81 Paul Newall (2005)

In this article we'll discuss Political Philosophy, from what we mean by the term and what it's good for, through some historical ideas and perspectives, to the common divisions employed today. We'll also consider some of the philosophical issues behind politics, including the approaches used or assumed before we even get to arguing which party is dragging us to hell in a hand cart quickest.

What is Political Philosophy?

There are many questions studied by political philosophy that come up so often that we hardly notice that philosophy is involved at all when considering them. What should be the relationship between individuals and society? What are the limits of freedom? Is freedom of speech a good idea, or freedom of action between consenting adults? When may government act against the will of a citizen, and when should a citizen act against his or her government? What is the purpose of government? What characterises a good government? And so on. Not everyone is interested in these things, of course, but they'll be answered in one way or another—affecting us all. Everyone has a political philosophy, we could say, whether it is thought out in detail or not.

Political Philosophy is the study of these and other matters, more generally the first—the relationship between individuals and society. Sometimes the subject is nicely encapsulated in the question "how are we to live?" That is: given that few people live entirely alone, we may ask how best to govern our interactions. What responsibilities do we have to each other? Can we do as we please? Is society more important than the individuals that make it up? Political philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum, though; the answers we might give will depend in turn on our ethical ideas, as well as what kind of world we think we live in and what we may consider the purpose of our time here, if any.

Historical considerations

There have been so many political theorists and theories over the years that we cannot hope to cover them all here. Instead we'll look at a few representative and important notions that vexed wiseacres of the past.

When kings enjoyed absolute (or near-absolute) rule and used their positions of authority to dress like girls and sleep with their sisters, a major concern was how to check or limit the power of sovereigns. It could be a good thing to have someone above or beyond the law to ensure that everyone else was held accountable for their actions, but quis custiodet ipsos custiodes? That is, who guards the guardians themselves? It was realised that power could corrupt those who wield it and hence that there should be a means of ensuring it did not, or at least minimising the possibility of abuse.

A way to address this (and other abuses) was to advocate the rule of law, not of men. In that case, it would not merely be left to the whim of a king or magistrate to do as they pleased; instead, they would be accountable to laws—a well-known contribution being the Magna Carta. One benefit of codifying expected conduct was that it would show clearly when violations had occurred and hence the contempt of the ruler for the ruled. Some thinkers suggested that any form of government could only exist with the consent of the governed, so even kings realised that they would have to regulate their behaviour according to law or potentially lose their heads.

It is interesting to inquire how societies developed in the first place. One model proposed that men exist in a state of nature until they decide to join together based on the greater productivity of the division of labour; that is, more can be accomplished together than by individuals acting alone. In order to secure such an arrangement, it would be necessary to develop some form of agreement whereby people respect each other's person and (perhaps) property to improve their lot through co-operation—a kind of social contract. Another possibility mooted is that the political apparatus—rather than the society itself—is the result of the conquest of one group by another.

A contrast could also be made between the desire to formulate a civil law or constitution—defining and demarcating the nature and scope of government and the rights to be enjoyed by people living under it—and the practice of amending laws and societal arrangements on a case-by-case basis, as some countries did according to common law. More generally, an important question was (and still is): can we achieve the benefits of setting down rules to describe what will and will not be acceptable in relations between people while at the same time taking into account the ever-changing content of and influences on those relations?

A final issue to look at here is the understanding of what makes a society or political circumstance good or bad. Is strong state control important to safeguard the people, or is that government best which governs least? What middle ground may be found?

Types of Freedom

What do we mean by freedom? In a famous lecture of 1958, Isaiah Berlin proposed that freedom could be understood in two senses: positive and negative. By negative freedom, he meant freedom from intervention; while positive freedom is the freedom to do something. In the first case we are unfree insofar as other people can prevent us from doing what we otherwise might want to, while in the latter we are unfree insofar as the opportunity exists to do something but we lack the capacity to achieve it.

The best way to understand and criticise these conceptions is by examples. Negative freedom, then, would be leaving consenting adults to do as they please in the privacy of their own homes; that is, they would be free from any intervention from government (or anyone else, for that matter) since their activities are no-one else's business. They would be unfree in this sense if, say, a law had been passed making homosexuality illegal even in these circumstances. Notice that we would be unfree in this context even if we are not homosexual, or prefer to watch the rugby on a particular day; the machinations of government have restricted our freedom, whether we choose to exercise it or not.

Another example would be an unscrupulous landowner blocking access to a public right-of-way. This would be another restriction of our negative freedom because we could otherwise take a stroll and muse on whether philosophy makes the sunset any prettier, whether or not (again) we actually decide to go or prefer to stay in and watch the rugby repeat.

Berlin explained negative freedom as follows:

Quote

The extent of a man's negative liberty is, as it were, a function of what doors, and how many are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how open they are.

Thus we see that if certain of these doors are closed to us—perhaps because of our sex, religious opinions, colour, and so on—then our negative freedom is the less. A door is not closed to us if there is no way we could actually go through it: for instance, if door 1 is marked "fly to the North Pole with the sole aid of a red cape", our freedom is not restricted by its barring because we do not appear to be able to fly. Note that this negative sense of freedom is what people often mean when they use the word.

Moving on to positive freedom, Berlin described it in these terms:

Quote

The 'positive' sense of the word '[freedom]' derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. [...] I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes.

It could be, then, that we want to master philosophy but there is just too much rugby to watch; that would mean that our inability to discipline ourselves and stick to the task at hand that we want to complete means we are not our own master. Any similar circumstances where we feel let down by being unable to attend to a goal because other desires that we cannot control get in the way (sometimes people refer to a distinction between their "higher" and "lower" selves in this regard) would represent a restriction of our positive freedom.

A lack of freedom in the positive sense is thus associated with a disparity between what we truly want and what we actually end up with, thanks to a failure to become our own master. Berlin went on to discuss the history of these two concepts of freedom and noted that in the past the positive sense has led to forms of oppression and tyranny more often than the negative, calling this the misuse of positive freedom. The argument runs as follows:

First it is noticed that there is a difference between the higher and lower selves that may make sense to those afflicted. Presently, though, groups with some form of political power may decide that they know what represents higher and lower better than particular individuals and take it upon themselves to insist upon definitions and impose them on those who disagree. It does no good to complain that in fact we want something other than what we are told we want because this is the result of our lower selves opposing what is actually good for us, and so on—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if we fight with every fibre of our being against the imposition of the better or more reasonable idea, this still only represents our lower selves struggling; the truth is that forcing us to think otherwise is going to help us in the long run and hence intervention is not only justified, but in our best interest; in the long run, we will learn to appreciate what has been done for our benefit.

Berlin's survey of the history of ideas suggested to him that positive freedom had been abused more than negative, but there are criticisms that can still be made of the latter. For example, it could be that medical care is available to everyone irrespective of any distinctions and hence people are free to use it; however, if such care is prohibitively expensive, this freedom is beneficial to only a few. The others are not their own masters because even though the door to healthcare is open, they cannot go through it; the door is wide open and no one is blocking their path, but their financial situation prevents them. It may even be that these circumstances are no-one's fault, but the beggar still cannot go through even though he may have chosen to be a beggar and hence his negative freedom in this context is worthless.

Is there any way of reconciling the two or preventing the abuse of either? Berlin did not think so and considered the bringing together of the myriad goals people have to be an impossible task.

Methodologies

There are several ways we can approach political philosophy and they have an effect both on how we perceive problems and how we propose to solve them. A metaphysical decision is taken as to what to study, as well as an epistemological choice as to how to go about it. There are also ethical ideas that contribute, whether explicitly or as implicit assumptions.

Holism and Individualism

In the first case, then, we can distinguish between individualists and holists: a methodological individualist is concerned with the individuals that make up a society or group, while a methodological holist (also called collectivist) considers the whole greater than the sum of its various parts. Suppose, for example, we take a statement like "it would be good for society to do x"; to a methodological individualist, this would make no sense at all unless it was understood as "it would benefit the members of society if x was done".

What is the best way to approach political problems? The answer is not clear and it appears difficult to reduce either of these methodologies to the other. On the one hand, any ideas we have or decisions we take are going to effect individuals—not a collective noun like Danes (although some of the individuals may have the particular merit of being Danish); on the other, we might want to use such terms to describe trends or actions—especially since a general theory of how individuals behave would no longer be general, as well as being a tall order in any case.

The point at issue is whether a society (or any other grouping) is made up of its parts (the individuals) or greater than their sum. We can try to find explanations that refer to what individuals did, or groups did; perhaps more helpfully, though, we could use both approaches to see what they suggest.

Rationalism in political philosophy

Another (epistemological) question to consider is the extent to which reason is (or should be) involved in political philosophy. Should we search, for example, for an account of how we should behave that everyone would have to submit to, or do the sometimes irrational desires that people have get in the way? To what extent do people employ reason in their political (and other) thinking in any case? Are they instead more inclined to listen to their passions, their social groupings, cultural or religious ideas, and so on?

The difficulty for a reasoned political philosophy is thus to take note of all those apparently unreasonable things we do. Some thinkers have worried that too much theorising about how to construct a rational utopia could lead to forcing people into a framework that doesn't allow for the subtle or overt differences between them and hence to a form of tyranny. Others have pointed to the diverse ways of living that have developed throughout history all over the world and wondered if it is fair or meaningful to judge them from the point of view of only one of them—for example, the so-called Western way.

From Berlin's analysis, we could be concerned that if we suppose there to be only one correct manner of living—whatever it is—we might also be more inclined to support the idea of enforcing it on others, ostensibly for their own good. John Stuart Mill recognised this possibility and suggested that what he called "experiments in living" should be supported. In his work On Liberty, which we have already touched upon elsewhere in this series, Mill said:

Quote

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them.

He justifies his position in the following way:

Quote

That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men's modes of action not less than to their opinions.

Here he is noting that one form of life (a rationalist utopia, perhaps) is only superior to others insofar as anyone was and is free to try another way and show by example whether it betters the former or not. This is quite a subtle point: consider, for example, the statement "it is better to live in England today than in Australia"—however we choose to define "better" (it could be by reference to drop goals). If we remove the second part—leaving "it is better to live in England"—then it no longer makes any sense: better than what? When we add the reference to Australia, it only supports the statement if we have some kind of information to go on; perhaps we lived there for a time, or know someone who has. Without performing the experiment of living there, though, we have no idea if it is better or not—a kind of certainty through ignorance. Even appealing to measures of some kind is based on the same thing.

According to Mill, then, it is only by testing a way of life against others that we can appreciate whether one is preferable to another for whatever purposes we might have. If, on the other hand, we believe that it is possible to find criteria by which to judge which experiment in living is superior that no-one can reasonably argue with, then we may after all be able to discuss utopia and bringing it to our world. These criteria, of course, are what have been argued over for many centuries.

Environmentalism

In much political discourse the question is the same one that we began with: what is (or should be) the relationship between individuals and society? However, recent work in ethics (along with older perspectives) has suggested that we should not leave our environment out of our considerations: what about the relationship between individuals and their world, or societies and the world that supports them? Perhaps we have obligations to our fellow humans, but do we have similar responsibilities to our environment?

Generally speaking, then, environmentalism invites us to take account of more than just human concerns when deciding on a political philosophy. We need to search for that arrangement of our affairs that is most beneficial to humans and those others areas that some thinkers consider to have rights or intrinsic value. The problem lies, of course, in just how to achieve that: is there a political system that can be adapted, and an economic one? Can the world remain largely as it is? Some environmentalists, for instance, have suggested that we need to return to a more basic form of existence—sometimes called "primitive", although it need not mean running around naked and clubbing each other. Critics say nothing of the kind is possible; adjusting to such a lifestyle would result in the deaths of very many people that can only be supported by our modern methods that are supposed to cause environmental issues in the first place.

Behind much of environmentalism lies the ethical work that treats of what rights animals and other non-human life have; this will be discussed in a later article.

The Harm Principle

Again in On Liberty, Mill suggested his famous Harm Principle in the following terms:

Quote

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Using Berlin's terminology, this is a negative conception of how free we should be. The principle states that we may do as we please as long as we do not harm anyone else. By way of example, then, we may get a tattoo if we choose to because it harms no-one else. If the strain of reading still more Holblingian prose gets too much, we could also take flight from a tall building. Although in both cases we do ourselves a (differing somewhat) measure of physical harm, no-one has the right to stop us; by the same token, the immorality or otherwise of our actions is no reason to step in either.

Although at first glance the principle may seem plausible and is similar to what many people have in mind when they think of how we should interact with each other, it is not difficult to draw out some criticisms. The main problem is what we mean by harm: where do we end and others start when we are considering the harm done by an action? Depending on what tattoo we get, for instance, we could cause a great deal of offence to some people and it is not at all obvious that this shouldn't count as harm. Alternatively, we would probably cause a lot of harm to our family and much strain on the members of the emergency services who have to pick what's left of us off the pavement after our swan dive, assuming that gravity applied on this occasion.

The general point is that it is not so easy to split the world up into discrete individuals who exist separate from one another; instead, every action, however small or apparently insignificant, has an effect of one kind or another. How are we to determine whether something harms someone else in any case, excepting by his or her own testimony? If someone says "all this philosophy is making my head hurt", who are we to say otherwise? Similarly, how do we decide which claims of harm are genuine and thus require action to prevent?

In spite of these difficulties, can we salvage anything from the harm principle? We can if we are not so concerned with concepts like harm standing up to close scrutiny and prefer instead to employ them on the basis of intersubjective agreement (that is, an agreement between those using the term as to what it means on different occasions, rather than a fixed definition), then we can say that an action causes harm by considering cases on their individual merits. When we propose to do something and someone else reports that it will (or later does) result in harming them, we can talk it over, investigate a little and decide if in this instance any harm has been caused, even if in the final analysis there may be some people who vehemently insist that it has and others that it hasn't. Thus a more charitable interpretation of the principle leads to something that can be used in everyday life, which is probably what Mill intended.

Political Philosophies

There are a wide variety of political philosophies, of which we can only consider a few here. Although many of them may be familiar, we can apply the concepts discussed above to them and perhaps see them in a new or different light. Below, then, we'll look at some of the philosophical aspects only. The standard division runs as follows:

Socialism

A great many political ideas may come under the broad banner of socialism, but generally speaking there is an economic decision that the ownership and planning the use of the means of production should be held centrally and publicly in some way, rather than privately. Often this is based on a critique of capitalism, but the idea is that the former method is more ethical or beneficial to people living under such arrangements. It is important to remember that not all socialists have a red hue and live under the beds of decent, right-thinking people.

There are degrees to which socialism is preferred to some form of market economy. Given the failure of some attempts to control economies centrally, some have instead opted to allow a market to operate while maintaining control of certain areas that may be seen as fundamental, such as health services, travel networks and so on.

The principle philosophical difficulty for socialism is how to distribute resources fairly. If we hope to give to people according to their needs, what do we mean by a need? How do we distinguish between true and false claims of need from people? Moreover, if we don't continue to impose controls on the distribution of these resources, wouldn't they eventually become unequally distributed?

In the face of such problems, it is often useful to ask what we're aiming at with a political philosophy: if the answer for socialism is a more just or fair world then even if these concepts prove impossible to attain, we may still choose to at least try.

Liberalism

A distinction is often made between modern and classical liberals, owing to the change in meaning that occurred during the nineteenth century. Before that time, liberalism was concerned with—as the word suggests—liberty; that is, providing for toleration of ideas and ways of life, as well as granting as much freedom as possible. This was a negative understanding of freedom, but more recently some liberals began to pay more attention to the notion of positive freedom and sought to provide for fairness and justice. By way of analogy, we could say that early liberals wanted to ensure a level playing field while their heirs wanted to see that everyone had the chance to get a game. Some classical liberals suggest that these latter are not liberals at all, since their plans call for intervention on the part of government.

Despite their differences, the liberal hope in general is to provide that form of government that best allows people to work towards their goals and adopt the form of life that they choose. What do we mean by "best" here, though? How do we provide the most level playing field when it seems that a purely negative conception of freedom is problematic, as we saw earlier? If we want everyone to get a game, it seems that some people will need more help than others. How much help should they be given before we are being unfair to others who could perhaps use the time and resources to excel or to address some other issue?

Conservatism

If it ain't broke, don't give it to Hugo—or so runs the ancient wisdom and any handbook to a modern appliance. Conservatives note that many of our political (and other) ideas have developed over time; those that didn't work or were no longer of any help tended to fall out of use on their own accord. As a result, they are generally reluctant to accept change for the sake of it and want to know why a new notion is going to be of benefit to us.

There are now—like all of these overview positions—very many variants of conservatism that disagree amongst themselves but similar criticisms made be found. It is not obvious that political institutions survive because they work or have proved their mettle over time; on the contrary, they may have been imposed on people in the first place or too few alternatives considered. How long should we give a new idea to establish itself before the conservative finds it worth defending? Conversely, how long should we wait if the idea is too important to delay?

Anarchism

Although often used in a pejorative sense, anarchism means a political system without a hierarchy—not a lawless free-for-all of Durdenesque proportions. That does not imply a complete lack of social structures, though; instead, people may voluntarily choose to live according to certain rules or ideas and may similarly choose to do otherwise at a later date.

Anarchists have the difficulty of determining which structures are natural and which are imposed, a fact which need not be readily apparent. There is also the question of security: how does the anarchist society protect itself against those states that do not share its ideas and would conquer or otherwise oppose it?

There are lots of forms of anarchism, of course—some more radical than others. The easiest way to learn the content and differences is to try the experiment of telling several of them that their ideas are ridiculous and then discovering rapidly that they are not.

Economic issues

Many of the issues in political philosophy now turn or are dependent in many ways upon economic analyses—the best way to provide and allocate resources being an example. Nevertheless, these may themselves have been influenced by political and philosophical ideas, so there is interdependence at play between them. To ignore either is problematic: we need to know the best way to achieve our aims, but we also have to decided what to aim for in the first place and what forms of solution we are inclined to accept.

In summary, political philosophy is central to everyone and effects our lives whether we like it or not, and whether we play a part or take an interest in political ideas or not. Asking questions of how we should interact with each other and our environment occurs in all cultures and at all times, and is probably far too important to leave to the politicians.

Dialogue the Sixth

The Scene: Our philosophical friends are back at table, where Steven is hoping to discuss more philosophy with Jennifer—touching on aesthetics a little, perhaps.

Jennifer: (To Trystyn...) Jeremy is up at the bar. (She motions with her head...)

Trystyn: (Looking...) Oh dear. (Someone waves at him from across the room and he is forced to smile weakly and wave back.)

Steven: Who's Jeremy?

Jennifer: I went to school with him. He's training to be a politician, apparently.

Steven: Training? How do you do that?

Trystyn: Just start talking and don't stop to catch a breath or a thought.

Anna: Here he comes now.

Steven: (Looking longingly at Jennifer...) What's his problem? Why can't this character leave us alone? We want to talk about philosophy, not politics. (He sighs dramatically.)

Anna: I'm not so sure there's a separation.

Trystyn: Let's find out... (Glancing up...) Hello, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Greetings to all. I spy potential voters.

Jennifer: What are you standing for?

Jeremy: Well, you haven't offered me a chair.

Steven: Look... we were kind of having a discussion...

Jeremy: (Extending a hand...) Well met, friend—and who might you be? Have you voted? (He pulls up a chair and sits down.)

Jennifer: This is Steven... and Anna; friends of ours. They're both studying at the physical sciences campus.

Steven: Voted for what?

Jeremy: A good question, Mr. Steven, and well asked: President of the Student's Union, of course. You'll have read my position paper, no doubt. The other candidates have all but conceded. I don't envy them—it was an impossible task. The gracious thing would be to bow out now.

Trystyn: Still honing the rhetoric, I see.

Jeremy: At least I know I can count on you to do the right thing, dear Trystyn. There are no sidelines when it comes to the issues facing students today.

Anna: What issues are they?

Jeremy: Tuition fees, funding, interest on loans...

Anna: These are all financial matters...

Trystyn: Students are hard done by.

Jeremy: As a matter of fact, they are; in any case, students are the future of this country. We don't have time to worry about where the next meal is coming from—students need to be free to exercise their intellect as it takes them.

Trystyn: You can see that there are a lot of poor students out drinking tonight.

Steven: (Quietly) Please leave.

Anna: I don't understand. Why should we be free to do that? Don't we have responsibilities to the people paying for our education, or providing the opportunity for us to have one with their taxes?

Jeremy: Nonsense. Students are the future.

Jennifer: You already said that. How about addressing Anna's point? Students aren't a class of superior beings, to be supported by the underlings. If they want financial assistance with their studies then they have responsibilities to those paying.

Anna: What do you mean by freedom in this context anyway? Why should we be free to waste taxpayers money on useless courses?

Jeremy: Yikes! More philosophy... (He looks at Trystyn.)

Jennifer: These are philosophical questions because you bandy around concepts like freedom without any understanding of them, and political because they concern the interactions between people and society. If you want votes then you'll have to address them.

Steven: Or you could just leave... (He is looking at Jennifer.)

Jeremy: Of course I've thought about them, but we need action—not mere words. Students want a fair deal.

Anna: What's a fair deal? What makes a deal unfair?

Jennifer: You haven't answered Anna's question about freedom.

Jeremy: (To Trystyn...) Help me out.

Trystyn: You should know better.

Steven: I heard the couple at the next table talking about voting...

Jeremy: Look—students need to be free from interference—whether it be financial intrusion or some moralistic nonsense. We all know what I'm talking about.

Anna: Financial intrusion?

Jeremy: Some people are suggesting that we should pay for our education—all of it.

Trystyn: It's preposterous...

Jeremy: Exactly! (He rubs his hands together and appears to be ready to launch into a monologue.)

Jennifer: What moralistic nonsense?

Jeremy: Eh? The point is that students must be free of any interference. Would you want anyone telling you what you can or can't study?

Anna: Suppose that we have this freedom you're talking about—what then? It doesn't mean we'll achieve anything; in fact, if we can do as we please then probably many of us will do as little as possible and come out with a qualification all the same.

Jennifer: How can you ensure that removing any restrictions will lead to a positive result?

Trystyn: Instead of leading to the bar...

Jeremy: This is just talk. I don't see how this philosophical mumbo-jumbo has any point at all.

Steven: I guess you could leave, then.

Anna: What about some positive incentives for us to get the most out of our time? Staying in bed all day is just a waste of time and money.

Jennifer: Perhaps paying for our education might prompt us to take an interest in getting more from our time? The removal of restrictions alone doesn't imply that studies will go any better for us.

Anna: It seems just as plausible as your "students save the world and make it home in time for tea" notion that allowing students as much money as they like won't have any positive effect at all.

Jennifer: You haven't answered the other point yet, either. What is the relationship between students and the rest of society, or what should it be? You seem to be taking us in splendid isolation, but we have obligations like everyone else. What's your position on this?

Trystyn: Perhaps this is just more talk?

Jeremy: It is indeed. While you all sit around musing, someone has to act to help people.

Anna: You don't get it, do you? Acting without giving your ideas a basic critique is going to leave you acting on bad advice or achieving the opposite of what you want. There's no separation between thought and action anyway: we act because of what we think and we amend what we think as a result of our actions.

Jennifer: Meaning there's more to politics than just rhetoric. Relying on people not having enough time to vote against you is all you have, though.

Jeremy: So are you going to vote or not?

Steven: No.

Jeremy: It's as I thought. Consider this, though: for every principled objection or person critical of whatever ideas I or anyone else may have, there are others who vote and decide for you. Any of you can think what you like about me, but come the weekend you'll have a new president all the same. Are you going to have a say in it or not?

(Silence.)

Maybe I should leave now...

Steven: Well, I already said...

Jeremy: (To a girl walking past the table...) Excuse me, friend—have you voted? (He moves away.)

Curtain. Fin.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:20:49 +0000 c6e19e830859f2cb9f7c8f8cacb8d2a6 Hermeticism http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/history/hermeticism-r80 Paul Newall (2004)

The Hermetica—or the collection of mystical teachings that form the basis of Hermeticism—was traditionally attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: "thrice-greatest Hermes", the Egyptian god Thoth, who was known as Mercury by the Romans and as Hermes from the time of Herodotus onwards. A distinction was made between the Greek Hermes and this earlier and quite different god by adding Trismegistus to the latter. In fact, many appellations were used by writers: "great-great" on the Rosetta Stone and other Egyptian texts and "five times great" in Ptolemaic times. At some stage the Greeks settled on "thrice greatest", possibly as a translation of "very great-great".

Also called the "scribe of the gods", Hermes was taken to be the inventor of writing. Texts that covered religion and philosophy were said to be due to him, as well as those on magic, alchemy and astrology. It is the former that make up Hermeticism, however; the latter have nothing more in common with them than their being credited to Hermes. Nevertheless, it was common practice to ascribe a text to Trismegistus in order to give it more credibility.

It was thought by Renaissance translators that Hermeticism could be traced back to the Egyptian mystery schools, through the Neoplatonists and Kabbalists, but some of the texts have been shown to be contemporaneous with early Christianity. There are four classes of extant Hermetica:

  • The Corpus Hermeticum;
  • The Asclepius;
  • Excerpts in Stobaeus' Anthologium;
  • Fragments found in Cyril, Lactantius and others, collectively called the Testimonia.
We shall consider each of these in turn.

The Corpus Hermeticum

The first is a collection of approximately seventeen MSS (Scott counts nineteen; others twenty (Scott, 1993)) in Greek, reckoned to be by different writers. It is often (incorrectly) called the Poimandre (or Divine Poimandre), this being but the first part. It was brought to prominence by Ficino's translation of 1471, in which he claimed of Hermes "eo tempore quo Moyses natus est". As a Neoplatonist, Ficino had concluded that the similarities between the philosophy of the Hermetica and the dialogues of Plato implied that Hermes had lived at the time of Moses; but this reverses the direction of any historical connection.

The study of the Corpus was recommended by Patrizzi to Pope Gregory XIV as containing "more philosophy than all the works of Aristotle taken together". Casaubon realised that it was of a later date, putting it around the first to second century CE. He thought that the treatment of subjects also found in early Christian literature meant an influence there from, but instead there was a similarity of thought in Christian and Pagan Platonists of that time. The unfortunate result of Casaubon's scholarship was that, shorn of the esteem due to ancient texts, the early C.E. Corpus largely fell from consideration.

In the early part of the twentieth century the Corpus again came to prominence with Reitzenstein's Poimandres and G.R.S. Mead's translation and sympathetic study. Even Flinders Petrie contributed a theory on the dating of the collection, although his suggestion that the period between 500 and 200 B.C.E. is likely was not taken seriously. Scott made the important point that the texts do not represent a joint body of doctrine but only "a certain general similarity". They treat of many religious and philosophical topics, with even a cursory reading confirming Scott's observation.

The Asclepius

The Greek original of the Asclepius was lost, but not before its translation into Latin. It takes the form of a dialogue attributed to Apuleius and is the combination of several MSS, most dating to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Textual analysis reveals corrections by many different hands, and also that the dialogue is composed of three separate sources that do not overlap.

The first concerns the relationships between God, Earth and Man, aimed at the practical goal of exhorting men to live according to divine order. In particular, the corruption of philosophy is held to be due to the coveting of worldly goods and the wise man is called upon to renounce them. It echoes much of Plato in its cosmology but shows no Christian influence, which, along with other textual clues, places its (Greek) authorship between 100 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.. The place of man is analysed:

Quote

[Man] is linked to the gods, inasmuch as there is in him a divinity akin to theirs; he scorns that part of his own being which makes him a thing of earth; and all else with which he finds himself connected by heaven's ordering, he binds to himself by the tie of his affection. He raises reverent eyes to heaven above; he tends the earth below. Blest in his intermediate station, he is so placed that he loves all below him and is loved by all above him. (Scott, 1991)

We will return to this idea of man's place later.

The second part concerns evil, trying to account for its existence and origin. It is very brief, but an interesting excerpt addresses the problem of evil:

Quote

You must not then, my pupils, speak as many do, who say that God ought by all means to have freed the world from evil. To those who speak thus, not a word should be said in answer; but for your sake I will pursue my argument, and therewith explain this. It was beyond God's power to put a stop to evil, and expel it from the universe; for evil is present in the world in such sort that it is manifestly an inseparable part thereof. But the supreme God provided and guarded against evil as far as he reasonably could, by deigning to endow the minds of men with intellect, knowledge and intuition. It is in virtue of these gifts that we stand higher than the beasts; and by these, and these alone, are we enabled to shun the traps and deceptions and corruptions of evil. (Scott, op cit.)

The third text of the Asclepius is a muddled concatenation of fragments heavily reliant on Plato, particularly the Timaeus. There are also clear Stoic and Hellenistic Egyptian influences. The hostility to Christianity, along with the powerful prophecy of the fate awaiting Egyptians and their religion with its rise, strongly indicate a dating in the region of 300 C.E.. Scott convincingly narrowed this estimate to 268—273 by comparing the details in the text with the Palmyrene occupation of Egypt (Scott, ibid). On this evidence, the attribution to Apuleius is taken to be in error. Part of this famous prophecy runs thus:

Quote

... this land, which once was holy, a land which loved the gods, and wherein alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth, a land which was the teacher of mankind in holiness and piety—this land will go beyond all in cruel deeds. The dead will far outnumber the living; and the survivors will be known for Egyptians by their tongue alone, but in their actions they will seem to be men of another race. O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings—for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon—will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around them, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made, ungrudgingly favouring man's welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain immortality, as I have taught you—all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed. (Scott, op cit.)

The Anthologium and Testimonia

Stobaeus' made his collection of pagan writings in four books at approximately 500 C.E., taken from works he had seen and arranged by subject. All take the form of dialogues, either lessons from Hermes to another or between Isis and Horus. From 300 C.E. onwards the Hermetic writings were familiar to many scholars and are mentioned in their writings—from Lactantius through to the Muslims and beyond. The collection of these excerpts is known as the Testimonia. Interestingly, perhaps, the early Pagan Neoplatonists paid little attention to them.

Hermeticism from the Renaissance

Hermetic texts and philosophy came to prominence during the Renaissance when Ficino began translating manuscripts that his patron Cosimo de Medici had obtained from the East. Opinion of that time, supported by Ficino's analysis of the texts, held that they were prophetic of the eventual triumph of Christianity. Such was the resulting importance attached to this assumption of antiquity that, near to death, Cosimo ordered Ficino to set aside his translation of Plato to work on the Hermetica.

Already a blend of Egyptian and Greek philosophies and theology, Renaissance scholars added elements of natural magic and Kabbalah, particular with the work of Pico della Mirandolla, one of Ficino's students at his Florentine Academy. From the seventeenth century and the advent of Rosicrucianism, together with Freemasonry in the eighteenth and alchemy from its beginnings, Hermeticism became suffused with the Western esoteric tradition as a whole.

Texts that were collected and studied intensely over this period include the famous Emerald Tablet of Hermes, the Hermetic Museum drawn up by A.E. Waite, the anonymous Hermetic Arcanum and many works in alchemy that built upon the Hermetic ideas found in the Emerald Tablet. This was analysed by a continuous stream of Hermeticists, alchemists, philosophers, Kabbalists and magicians, including Newton as part of his voluminous studies of alchemy and related subjects, all of them attempting to divine its meaning. Although there are many extant translations, one reads thus:

Quote

1) This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:-
2) As below, so above; and as above so below. With this knowledge alone you may work miracles.
3) And since all things exist in and eminate from the ONE Who is the ultimate Cause, so all things are born after their kind from this ONE.
4) The Sun is the father, the Moon the mother;
5) the wind carried it in his belly. Earth is its nurse and its guardian.
6) It is the Father of all things,
6a) the eternal Will is contained in it.
7) Here, on earth, its strength, its power remain one and undivided.
7a) Earth must be separated from fire, the subtle from the dense, gently with unremitting care.
8) It arises from the earth and descends from heaven; it gathers to itself the strength of things above and things below.
9) By means of this one thing all the glory of the world shall be yours and all obscurity flee from you.
10) It is power, strong with the strength of all power, for it will penetrate all mysteries and dispel all ignorance.
11) By it the world was created.
12) From it are born manifold wonders, the means to achieving which are here given.
13) It is for this reason that I am called Hermes Trismegistus; for I possess the three essentials of the philosophy of the universe.
14) This is is the sum total of the work of the Sun.

Some consider the Emerald Tablet to be the earliest known alchemical work, with Needham placing its origin in China. Whatever the case, it gives an example of the dictum that would come to characterize Hermeticism: "as above, so below".

Hermeticism as a system

In spite of the existence and study of the texts discussed above, Hermeticism has no sacred books and no doctrine. Hermeticists have historically disagreed with one another and were never encouraged to defer to the opinion of specific authorities. Much like some philosophers of religion today when trying to come to terms with the plurality of religions and their competing truth claims, Hermeticists believe that Hermeticism represents the common centre of all forms of religion. The general idea is that the esoteric core of religions are the same; the exoteric shells, however, differ due to the regional, environmental, historical and other factors at work at the time of their creation or development.

Hermetic groups exist today, both openly and in relative secrecy, within religions and without. As a rule they do not make themselves known, although academic treatments (such as Frances Yates' studies or Copenhaver's criticisms) are becoming more frequent. The significance of Hermeticism in the histories of science, natural philosophy and magic is becoming familiar, although its syncretism and incorporation of so many disparate philosophies, religions and traditions means that it remains difficult to determine the direction of influence. In particular, the famous Rosicrucian Manifestos (the Fama Fraternitatis of 1614, Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615 and the Chemical Wedding of 1616) represented a continuation of Hermetic ideas and were seized upon by scholars across Europe in a general wave of excitement at the workings of hidden or occult ideas made public (McLean, 1991). The effect of the Hermetica on Ramon Lull and Giordano Bruno, with the manifestos adding to the intellectual climate of a world ready to open up and reveal its secrets. Kepler studied the Poimander at length, suggesting that either Pythagoras was a Hermeticist or Hermes was a Pythagorean but disagreeing with the latter on most points (Field, 1988). The Picatrix or Ghayat al-Hakim linked Hermeticism with Arabic occult ideas, echoes being found in Agrippa, Rabelais and even the Venetian Inquisition in explaining the arrest of Casanova (Kiesel, 2000) The writings of Newton on alchemy and related subjects are well known (cf. Westfall's biography and similar), and he summed up the spirit of the age when he wrote in his notes to the Principia that:

Quote

... the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded vulgar matters from the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth...(Newton, c. 1690)

Thus it is that Hermeticism has traditionally been thought to represents the so-called perennial philosophy (a term first used by Liebniz and adopted by Huxley), passed down through the ages by word of mouth or in writings that require a lifetime of effort to understand fully. In his discussion of it, Huxley identified four "fundamental doctrines":

  • "First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness—the world of things and animals and men and even gods—is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
  • "Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
  • "Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
  • "Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground." (Huxley, 1990)
As explained in the caveat previously, these may have been believed by Hermeticists but they did not take the character of doctrine. The first tells us that plurality is only apparent: reality is ultimately a unity, which manifests itself through a hierarchy symbolised by the Sephiroth of Kaballah and similar systems in other religions. The second says that this ultimate reality may be known, not by thought and reason but instead through a direct intuition. This assumption is thought to be common to all religions and it was often claimed that by forcing reality into conceptual categories we cut off the possibility of understanding it as a whole. The third is also well known, while the fourth speaks of the spiritual evolution of Man. In particular, this last was the goal of all alchemists: although many maintained working laboratories, talked of practical benefits and there exist documented claims of the transmutation of base metals to gold (for example, the 1942 demonstration by Sarma in Delhi, witnessed by national leaders and attested to by an inscribed plaque in the Laksmi Narayana temple. A previous incident in 1941 is similarly recorded, including a description of the processes involved. (Mukherji, 1998 ), the accepted interpretation of alchemical texts, from the ancient through to Fulcanelli and the contemporary, is of alchemy as a spiritual quest.

Huxley called these the "highest common factor" of religions. An additional aspect is the injunction already introduced: "as above, so below". The importance of this dictum, which has a distinguished pedigree, has been emphasised by those scholars who see Hermeticism as a significant current in the rise of science. For the Hermeticist, it implied that the microcosm and macrocosm are linked such that order in one reflects order in the other. Harmony in the heavens, then, would suggest that the Hermeticist look for a similar harmony on Earth; likewise, it is proposed that the belief in a unity of (God-given) purpose for men on Earth could have inspired Copernicus and others to seek simplicity in place of complexity in the heavens. With the role of natural laws as a necessary condition in the development of science well established, it is easy to see why Hermeticism should be deemed worthy of further study. Another way in which it was understood was to see man as embodying the universe on a smaller scale—man as symbolic of all mysteries or the "measure of all things". Rudolf Steiner wrote at length on this issue.

Examples of the application of Hermeticism are quite easy to find: in the Tarot, Masonic engraving, and interpretations of tales such as the Golden Fleece. It is also straightforward to find criticism: Hermeticism is ad hoc, or unfalsifiable, since its very syncretism and fundamental tenets mean that it can survive difficulties by ascribing them to exoteric differences while maintaining the esoteric core unchallenged. Similarly, these same tenets are exclusively metaphysical and hence not subject to any kind of verification. By claiming parts of existing religious traditions, Hermeticists leave themselves open to the charge that they add nothing significant to them and are hence rendered irrelevant. More importantly, they also make it almost impossible to point to the impact of Hermeticism over history. In general, Hermeticists do not concern themselves with responses to these objections and go—quietly—about their business. It is hoped that further textual, comparative and philosophical analysis of religious documents will give scholars more to go on, but is seems that the nature of Hermeticism is such that the ultimate truth remains so whether agreed upon or not.


---

Selected References:

  • Casaubon, Exercitationes XVI (London, 1614)
  • Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
  • Ficino, Mercurii Trismegisti Liber de Potestate et Sapientia Dei (Treviso, 1471)
  • Godwin (trans.) and McLean (intr.), The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1991)
  • Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Perennial, 1990)
  • Kiesel (ed.), Picatrix (Seattle: Ouroboros Press, 2000)
  • Mukherji, The Wealth of Indian Alchemy (Delhi: Indian Books Centre, 1998 )
  • Newton, Gregory MS 247, Royal Society
  • Patritius, Nova de universis philosophia... (Venice, 1593)
  • Reitzenstein, Poimandres. Studien zur griechisch-aegyptischen und fruh-christlichen literature (Lepizig, 1904)
  • Scott, Hermetica (Boston: Shambhala, 1993)
  • The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1973-74)
  • Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)
]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:12:45 +0000 069d3bb002acd8d7dd095917f9efe4cb Minimalism and the rhetoric of misrepresentation http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/history/minimalism-and-the-rhetoric-of-misrepresentation-r79 Paul Newall (2004)

Keith Whitelam's paper Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism is found in a festschrift for Robert Carroll, Sense and Sensitivity. In the early parts of his essay, Whitelam attempts to show that the rhetoric of those like William Dever and Gary Rendsburg does not match the reality of what minimalists (or revisionists, variously) are either engaged in or suggesting. It is perhaps worth giving some examples for the benefit of those not aware of what can sometimes pass for scholarship in Biblical Studies and use them to illustrate a more general point, which will be the goal of this piece.

Whitelam's point of departure is an article by Rendsburg, in which the latter explains to us "the consensus" before moving on to "the crisis". Notwithstanding this basic attempt to "control the rhetorical space" (as Whitelam characterised similar tactics here), Rendsburg states that

Quote

The positive historicism of Albright and the others gave way, not only in biblical studies, but in the humanities in general, to the relativism, skepticism, and indeed nihilism which now dominates.

This is not the first time that an allusion will be made to wider problems in the humanities, which are laid at the door of "postmodernism" (Dever) or relativists and - inexplicably - nihilists by Rendsburg. Nevertheless, Rendsburg provides a useful description of minimalism and maximalism:

Quote

In short, the paradigm has shifted from a maximalist stance to a minimalist one. A few definitions of these terms. The maximalist holds that since so much of the biblical record has been confirmed by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the aforementioned Mesha Stele, that even when there is no corroborating evidence, we can assume that the Bible reflects true history, unless it can be proved otherwise. The minimalist approach is exactly the opposite. Because so much of the biblical record is contradicted by archaeological work and by other sources from the ancient Near East, for example, the lack of any conquest at Jericho and Ai, we must assume that the Bible is literary fiction, unless it can be proved otherwise.

It should be immediately apparent that this is a false dichotomy, which Whitelam shows by quoting examples of those who fit into neither camp - including, quite brutally, Dever himself, who regards "the historicity of the Exodus as a dead issue". In spite of the failure of his simplistic attempt at definition, Rendsburg asks "who are these people, these minimalists?" and goes on to tell us:

Quote

To give you the names of the four best known among them, they are Thomas Thompson, Philip Davies, Niels Lemche, and Keith Whitelam. Some of them are driven, as I indicated above, by Marxism and leftist politics. Some of them are former evangelical Christians who now see the evils of their former ways. Some of them are counterculture people, left over from the 60s and 70s, whose personality includes the questioning of authority in all aspects of their lives.

None of the information in this rather poor ad hominem is relevant to the credibility or otherwise of minimalism, of course, but Rendsburg goes on to identify two important factors in the portrait of a minimalist:

Quote

First, almost without exception, these individuals have no expertise in the larger world of ancient Near Eastern studies. [...] In short, the academy has created an intellectual environment which permits the untrained to operate on an equal par with the trained.


Whitelam points out that since he was himself "trained" by F.F. Bruce and A.A. Anderson, these scholars have (by implication) failed to adequately prepare their students. Rendsburg provides no argument as to why an "untrained" person should be ignored a priori, leaving his complaint another ad hominem. However, the second charge is perhaps more serious:

Quote

Second, as you may have gathered, almost without exception, the scholars of this group are not Jewish. [...] Now, at first glance, one might think that one's religious or ideological identification would have no effect on one's scholarship, and I too once naively thought this to be true. [...] But with the current group of revisionists, as I intimated earlier, ideology, not objective scholarship, governs. If it is not actual Marxism, it is leftist politics in general. If it is not revolution against the sins of one's youth, the sin being once having identified as an evangelical Christian, then the issue is anti-authority culture in general. Furthermore, and I do not hesitate to use the terms, these scholars are driven by anti-Zionism approaching anti-Semitism.

Again, this is a straightforward ad hominem, but the accusation is a serious one. Moving to the supporting footnote, we find that Rendsburg relies on Dever, who opines that "several of Whitelam's statements border dangerously on anti-Semitism; they are certainly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel." Following the citation, Whitelam found no page reference: this is just Dever's assertion, which Whitelam calls "the most extreme form of a rhetoric of misrepresentation which has been designed to marginalize and discredit." Whitelam links it to a reported comment by Jerome Berman, linking minimalists to Holocaust deniers - a tactic with echoes of that also employed by historians opposed to contemporary historiography (the idea being to imply that disbelief in the past wie es eigentlich gewesen is tantamount to an insistence that the Holocaust never happened, which is an emotive argument of no substance and never supported by reference to �postmodern� historiographers writing any such thing). It seems the best we can say in response to this behaviour is that it is disappointing.

Rendsburg moves on to pose and answer the question "why not simply ignore this bunch?" Admitting that he considered this the preferable course of action previously, he tells us that it failed because the "minimalists dominate both in the noise that they make and in the quantity of their books. Volume after volume appears from their pens, all of it recycling the same views, all of it suspended on nothingness, to quote Job 26:7." Repeating implicitly the empty charge of anti-Semitism, Rendsburg suggests that Jewish scholars avoided the issue because of the alleged politics of the minimalists.

We can move on to Dever to test whether indeed the minimalist programme is "suspended on nothingness". Whitelam blockquotes him as saying that the revisionists (i.e. Rendsburg's nihilists) "caricature the history of traditional scholarship [and] demonize any remaining opponents", which is an interesting irony, given the "anti-Semitism" above. In spite of providing no justification for his own charge, Dever himself lectures us on "not pretending to an expertise one does not possess [and] resisting the temptation to indulge in personal polemics that stem from a sense of inadequacy, either in oneself or in the evidence at hand [and] refusing on principle to distort the evidence or another scholar's view". Having digested this advice, Whitelam offers a selection of commentary from Dever on minimalist arguments, variously described as "'credulous', 'facile', 'fashionable', 'a passing fad' [...] part of 'trendy academic fashions' [...] 'politically correct' [...] or 'circle of dillentantes'".

This last reminds us of an identical complaint made against so-called "postmodernists", often by Dever but also by a vocal group of philosophers who would have us treat "nihilists", "relativists" and "postmodernists" as Rendsburg advises for minimalists; that is, never seriously and with an appropriate measure of disdain and contempt. The approach of historians like Evans in historiography is much the same, up to and including identical rhetorical strategies. This, I submit, is where the importance of Whitelam's paper lies: these tactics of demonising the opposition or questioning the integrity of those who refuse to dismiss them outright without further consideration are part of a wider phenomenon not limited to Biblical Studies. Occasionally a book-length study arrives, laying out in painful detail just how far the misrepresentation has gone, or a paper such as Whitelam's attempts to do likewise on a smaller scale, but in general rhetoric seems to hold sway, even at the lofty heights of academia.

Although studies of the influence of rhetoric are increasingly common, the so-called criticisms we have been considering fail on another level, too: they do not understand the concepts they reject as invalid. Whitelam refers to Dever's claim that minimalists are engaged in a project of deconstruction, but it is difficult to find any indication that he (or those analogously hostile in other disciplines) appreciates that to deconstruct is not to "knock down" at all, as we have seen. Indeed, Dever's conception of the minimalists' goal goes well beyond misunderstanding to a plan which

Quote

... if it could be carried out, would in my opinion see not the advent of a secular Utopian "Brave New World" but rather anarchy, chaos, and ultimately those conditions of despair that have often historically led to Fascism.

Notwithstanding the unargued allusion here to historical laws, again we see the same tactic and the same attempt to give the reader the impression of closet Nazis endeavouring to bring about a fourth Reich as we find in the suggestion that antirepresentationalist historiographers are Holocaust deniers. Even so, if Dever comprehended deconstruction then he could not say that minimalists "are social engineers manipulating the biblical text for their own goals", since if il ny a pas hors du texte then everyone is engaged in the same game, including maximalists. Likewise, there is no reason to suspect that Rendsburg knows what nihilism implies, not least since he is not a philosopher and thus - by Dever's criterion above - should not pretend to expertise he does not have. This is the point, however: concepts like relativism are complex and not amenable (meaningfully, at least) to being mangled for the sake of a cheap rhetorical point. At the very least, a reader passing Dever's test would recognise the mischaracterisation immediately.

Rendsburg laments the unfortunate fact that "serious scholars must take the time away from their own productive scholarship to respond to the baseless twaddle of the minimalist camp", much as this sentiment surfaced in the wake of Derrida's death. The problem for Rendsburg is that it is difficult to find a representative minimalist or minimalist work to hold up as indicative of the kind of scholarship that should be rejected. This, of course, is a consequence of his false dichotomy in defintion, but it surfaces just as readily in the opposition to "postmodernism". The question "what is postmodernism?" is as impossible to answer as "what is minimalism?", given that supposed "postmodernists" disagree with one another as readily as do "minimalists". To get around this problem of an ill-fitting straw man, Dever employs another rhetorical strategy and asserts that the minimalist believes there was "no 'early Israel'". Shanks, similarly, declares that Whitelam would have us accept that ancient Israel "never existed" - just as the past is supposed to not exist for the historiographer who dares to question historical representationalism. However, to recognise (either implicitly or explicitly) that wie es eigentlich gewesen is beyond our epistemologies is not to make a metaphysical claim (which, in any case, is unargued by those who would suggest that holding the past to not exist is absurd), nor is it to suggest that we must let go the reins and accept all readings as equally valid.

In summarising his article, Whitelam makes an obvious point:

Quote

Biblical minimalism will not die because it does not exist as a coherent, self-conscious, closely articulated movement.

The failure of the frequently vigorous attempts to combat the ostensibly similarly dangerous doctrines of the "postmodernists" and "antirepresentationalists" in historiography and philosophy respectively may be attributed to the same, apparently lamentable circumstance that the targets of all this collective and righteous indignation simply do not exist. These relativists and nihilists appear to keep coming back for more, in spite of the best efforts of Rendsburg, Dever and others, because they are not there to be hit in the first place. By employing criticism that misunderstands the methodology of its opponents, fails to identify them meaningfully or to demarcate between degrees of supposed folly and relies wholly on a "rhetoric of misrepresentation", it is little wonder that minimalism still haunts the dreams of those who would presume to dictate the direction of learning while demonstrating their own unwillingness to do so.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:10:56 +0000 258be18e31c8188555c2ff05b4d542c3 Philosophy and the New Archaeology http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/history/philosophy-and-the-new-archaeology-r78 Paul Newall (2005)

Philosophy has always been involved in archaeology. This is an argument we will develop by considering the so-called New Archaeology and the debates surrounding it that have taken place over the past thirty years or so.

Archaeology is generally taken to have become established in the nineteenth century with Jacques Boucher de Perthes' discovery of chipped stones in Somme river gravel quarries, alongside the bones of now-extinct animals. He interpreted the former as human artifacts (such as hand axes) and hence claimed that humans had existed for much longer than Biblical accounts apparently allowed (due to the inference that they appeared much older than anything mentioned in the Bible). Although there was some skepticism to begin with, the antiquity of humanity was accepted soon thereafter. Notice, of course, the inevitable speculative dimensions to this early conclusion: how do we know when we have a genuine artifact and when a mere product of nature? How do we date them?

One of the reasons for the relative ease with which archaeology took root was its association with two other intellectual currents. Firstly, James Hutton and later Charles Lyell had investigated rock formations and used stratification to support a principle of uniformitarianism, according to which conditions in the past were the same as (hence uniform with) our own, enabling us to infer things about the past from current geological arrangements. It was also argued that the processes that could account for stratification are still in operation today, such that the Earth had to be far more ancient than was otherwise believed.

Secondly, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and also implied a lengthy process by which modern humans evolved, giving archaeologists the chance to look for signs of this in the material remains. Evolution hinted, too, that perhaps cultures developed in a fashion similar to plants and animals, with this possibility influencing anthropology and (later) social theory. The confluence of these three strands helped archaeology move from speculation (as it was denigrated by some) to the firmer foundation of the assumption of antiquity and the principles of uniformity and evolution. Moreover, as the world became smaller with travel over long distances the new peoples discovered were beginning to be investigated by curious scholars, especially given the (widespread) assumption that so-called "primitive" cultures could provide us with insights into how our own culture had changed over time. The idea that progress from savagery to civilisation was possible and had occurred in the past again informed social theories and suggested that we could come to understand the way we are today by searching for our origins in the archaeological record. The discoveries made in Egypt by Napoleon's teams and the increasing excavations in Mesopotamia also provided archaeologists with plenty of new data on which to test their ideas, their efforts motivated in large part by Biblical accounts and the Ancient Greek poets.

If early archaeologists had been content to classify the remains they found and attempt to build a chronology from them, the influence of V. Gordon Childe meant that questions were being asked about why collections of artifacts were located in one place and not another, or what it meant to assume that such a collection implied a group had existed there previously. In short, archaeologists began to realise that a chronological ordering - even if "correct" (whatever that means and however we would determine it) - would tell us nothing about the past unless an interpretive step was added. In 1949 radiocarbon dating (C14) was invented by William Libby and suddenly archaeology seemingly had a scientific basis to back up the placing of finds in historical order, although it took some time for the consequences to become clear. Now archaeologists apparently had an independent means to determine the age of a site without needing to resort to written records (that may not exist) or comparisons with other cultures, removing speculation altogether and providing a firmer footing for chronologies. Other scientific techniques were employed, including chemical analyses, and soon the number of methods involved exploded. Unfortunately for this spirit of optimism, however, the surety of radiocarbon dating soon gave way to arguments over its application, validity and the approach as a whole. We will return to this controversy in due course.

As a result of these scientific aids, some archaeologists claimed that the discipline was no longer plagued by quesitons of dating and began to be dissatisfied with the conclusions that were drawn by their colleagues. After all, providing a timeframe for a site was one thing but it became more important to explain what had happened. Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips suggested a processual approach, wherein the archaeologist should look at the processes involved in the histories of cultures. This is where a major turning point in the philosophy of archaeology occurred: impressed with the superior epistemological model that science appeared to provide, some sought to set archaeology on a surer footing by reproducing the supposed "scientific method".

Following the lead of Lewis Binford, several archaeologists in the late 1960s began to argue for what came to be called the New Archaeology. Inspired by developments within the philosophy of science, they wanted to do more than just describe and believed that genuine explanations could be achieved by changing direction in archaeology. In the past, they claimed, archaeologists had made inductive inferences, collecting pieces of evidence and try to infer conclusions from them. There was (and is) a significant problem with this, however: given that the archaeological record is incomplete, how can inferences be accurate? One possible response is to wait until all the evidence is in, but this is impractical (or rather impossible, if we accept that the record must inevitably be incomplete); another is to give up making inferences at all, yet this leaves archaeology as solely as descriptive enterprise. In general, this was the well known problem of induction in action once again.

Nevertheless, according to the New Archaeologists the alternative was to adopt the methodology of science and formulate hypotheses, deriving their consequences deductively and - most importantly - testing them. This model, based largely on Hempelian deductivism, was a form of logical positivism (explained here). The New Archaeology also included functional approaches, wherein generalisations are made about changes in political, social and economic systems and how these cultural processes can aid in explanation - hence Processual Archaeology, another term often used in discussion.

Whatever the merits of the New Archaeology, one thing at least was clear: archaeology could never go back to what has since been called its "state of innocence". In order to practice archaeology it would be necessary to question presuppositions that had previously been implicit and reject them if required, as well as to consider the impact that the philosophy of science would have as debates therein changed the image of archaeology that had been crafted to date. This did not mean that philosophy came to archaeology from without, but rather that it had always been involved (although previously with little or no appreciation of the impact of assumptions). As Alison Wylie put it, "[w]hat you find, archaeologically, has everything to do with what you look for, with the questions you ask and the conceptual resources you bring to bear in attempting to answer them." This was a familiar point in science, especially in physics thanks to the philosophical investigations of Einstein and others following the advent of quantum theory, but now it would affect archaeology, too.

Although the New Archaeology introduced several currents, including the realisation that perhaps the best way to arrive at explanations would be to study societies of today, hence the advent of ethnoarchaeology with the adding of an archaeological aspect to ethnography. Even so, no sooner had archaeology seen an influx of positivistic thinking than criticisms in the philosophy of science began to chip away at the influence of the Vienna Circle thinkers and the earlier confidence began to look jaded. The most famous work of this period is probably Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but others can justifiably said to have played an even greater role. Then, as now, there were some archaeologists who paid little attention to theoretical debates and believed (along with some physicists and biologists) that it is possible to do science without worrying about the tortured timewasting of philosophers. This seemed especially so for field archaeologists, apparently far removed from debates in academia. We will see, however, that this separation becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Criticisms were made of the New Archaeology from several directions. Firstly, the philosophers of science N.R. Hanson and Paul Feyerabend discussed the supposed objectivity of science, one of its greatest assumed virtues, via the concept of theory-ladenness. They stressed that there can be no neutral observation statements; in archaeological terms, this is to say that data recovered from sites do not form a class of "facts" independent of the observer (or archaeologist) but are already filtered by us. Indeed, this insight was later developed by Paul Churchland in neurological terms such that this inevitable layer (there might be several) of interpretation is what makes our perception cognitive in the first place. The earlier example of Jacques Boucher de Perthes' is a case in point: he did not unearth human artifacts but some stones he understood in this way. Through this reading of the ostensibly objective data, they became evidence for the claim that humans had existed for far longer than had previously been thought. There was nothing about the stones themselves that made this conclusion a certainty, however; on the assumption that a natural process could occasion the same results, say, he might have scarcely given them a second glance. On the contrary, though, he came upon the stones with many preconceptions, not all of them explicit, including that stones cannot be weathered in this fashion; and so on. Today we might consider this a commonplace but the point is that we do not just arrive at virgin archaeological data but unavoidably bring our other ideas with us, without which we could not make sense of anything in the first place. This seemed catastrophic for the goal of objectivity.

Secondly, and again via the philosophy of science, Ian Hodder and others emphasised that interpretations of archaeological date are underdetermined; that is, many readings are possible (some would say an infinity of them) for the same set of data and hence our choices between them must rely on extra-empirical factors. This is to say that appealing to the evidence alone is inadequate to account for our decisions (hence the death of the more naive forms of empiricism - see here for more detail) and so we inevitably go beyond it in arguing for our conclusions. Much like theory-ladenness, this may seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight but it is important to remember that at the time some philosophers of science and New Archaeologists with them were contending that the sciences could avoid the arbitrary and in particular solve the demarcation problem, or how to separate science and non-science. There were and is no shortage of people claiming that this task can be done, in spite of the difficulties with the criteria proposed. What theory-ladenness and underdetermination did not mean was that archaeology - along with science as a whole - would have to descend into relativism, that poorly understood bugbear and the stuff of rationalist nightmares, even if drawing a boundary between archaeology (and history, too) and mere stories became somewhat troublesome.

If objectivity was problematic, that did not mean that it could not serve as a rhetorical trope. More importantly, though, its apparent demise led other archaeologists to consider what else had been lying hidden in their discipline, unexamined. This helped bring about what came to be known as postprocessual archaeology, in spite of there being much debate over whether the critiques of the New Archaeology could properly be said to have superseded it or rather complemented it. Nevertheless, neo-Marxists and others emphasised that the responsibility of the archaeologist should not just be to describe or explain the past but to use whatever they gained from both to make positive contributions to the present, striving to make the contemporary world a better place. For them it was not enough to promote archaeology as an objective science going about its business while politicians worried about poverty and power structures. In a manner similar in some aspects to Feyerabend previously, archaeologists such as Christopher Tilley went further and suggested that science is itself part of a system of economic and social hegemony, set up as an ideal without sufficient inquiry into whether or not its benefits would outweigh the costs to the individual or whether scientific (and thence archaeological) work actually aided power structures throughout the world. Once again, this was a criticism of the supposed objectivity of science by pointing to its (potential or actual) consequences, especially for the poor and disadvantaged. At the very least, archaeology led to some difficult questions that continue to be asked today. What happens, for example, when some remains are found on land ostensibly "belonging" to native inhabitants of a country? Do archaeologists have the right to investigate? What if the tribal group, say, forbids unearthing anything? That instances of just this issue have occurred recently (such as Kennewick man) show that archaeology is not able to pursue a neutral path, avoiding political and cultural conflicts, particularly when its results may impact on the wider world and social debates.

At any event, one of the results of the debates in the philosophy of science and in postprocessual archaeology was widespread agreement that there is no such thing as the "scientific method". Just as physicists do not behave as biologists or geologists do, with significant differences within these disciplines, too (compare organismic and molecular biology, say, or condensed matter and particle physics), so do archaeologists employ a range of methods. This does not mean that "anything goes", possibly the least understood argument in the philosophy of science, but only that the myth of science as a unified epistemology has had to be discarded in favour of a far more nuanced appreciation of what scientists actually do - aided, in a nice irony, by sociological investigations of their actual behaviour. It has also not stopped the so-called scientific method being used rhetorically to deny credibility to some ideas, in legal as well as public discourse, but it is interesting to consider how these issues impact upon archaeology.

We have looked at some of the philosophical difficulties faced by the New Archaeology and now we will expand on them in turn, considering the problems confronting archaeology and how the New Archaeologists proposed to solve them. In so doing we will again come to appreciate that philosophy was not a distraction from the business of archaeology proper but an inevitable part of the discipline that could not be ignored.

As we have seen, developments in the philosophy of science had led some archaeologists by the 1960s and 70s to question what archaeology is and how its practice should be understood. Note, however, that the clean break with the past suggested by the very name for this so-called movement – the New Archaeology – has been subject to skepticism itself. In 1955 B.J. Meggars had written of "the coming of age of American Archaeology" and raised many of the same philosophical issues that were discussed at length in the following decades, while criticism of the supposed foundations of archaeology was already well advanced in the late 1930s and the 40s in the writings of Kluckhohn and Bennett, amongst others. (See Wylie's How New is the New Archaeology? for an extended analysis.) Indeed, it may be that the view of the New Archaeology as a revolutionary break with archaeology thus far was (and is) itself influenced by currents in the philosophy of science, particularly Thomas S. Kuhn's famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The most forceful objection to Kuhn's ideas (due to Lakatos, Feyerabend and others) was that the periods of "normal science" – in which scientists working within a paradigm are resistant to anomalies until it is finally toppled after the fashion of a revolution – never really existed in the first place. In archaeological terms, this is to say that there was no period of philosophical naivety wherein archaeologists ploughed ahead with scant concern for wider intellectual debates, but rather a continual internal dialogue and questioning of assumptions.

In any case, the problems with what was called traditional archaeology were threefold: two philosophical (specifically epistemological) and one methodological. Firstly, the New Archaeologists complained that the traditional version relied on a form of empiricism that was hopelessly outdated, which involved only the observable (i.e. archaeological data) and systematising it. This had been shown to be untenable. Secondly, and resulting from this, the study of cultures had to be restricted to inferring motivating beliefs from material remains. After all, people of the past are unobservable, too, and hence if archaeology were limited to the narrow empiricism the New Archaeologists opposed then it would be impossible to set anthropology on an archaeological basis. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, the belief that these were methodological restrictions meant that archaeologists could not go beyond the resulting form of archaeology, whether that was considered to be antiquarian cataloguing or unbridled speculation. Where a method is assumed to be fixed, of course, it is not long before its advocates claim that their investigations are therefore neutral and use their "method" as a rhetorical tool to deny recognition and support to alternative ideas not following it.

It is worth dwelling on these concerns because it was not that empiricism was the problem, or philosophy on general, but bad philosophy. No one lamented the intrusion of philosophy but rather that concepts that had been shown to be flawed by the philosophers were still alive in the social sciences. As Kluckhohn wrote in 1939, it was not a case of choosing

Quote

… between theory and no theory or a minimum of theory, but between adequate and inadequate theories, and, even more important, between theories, the postulates and propositions of which are conscious and hence lend themselves to systematic criticism, and theories the premises of which have not been examined even by their formulators.

This indispensability of theory combined with the necessity of continually challenging and reassessing the concepts we employ in the sciences was also recommended by Einstein. When archaeologists or scientists at large proceed as though philosophical issues are irrelevant to their work, then, they do so not because they have examined their method at length and found it to be neutral but through ignorance and without realising that the assumptions we bring to inquiry can influence what we find. This insight was formalised as the problem of theory-ladenness: when the clear distinction between facts and theories failed, the New Archaeologists insisted that their discipline could no longer be viewed as the collections of "facts" and that the presuppositions that implicitly guide research should be stated openly and questioned forcefully at every available opportunity. Moreover, archaeologists would have to recognise that they are involved in their investigations rather than passive collectors of these "facts". Indeed, from the 1930s an increasing number of critics were noting that the huge volume of data accumulated was not matched by a richness of interpretation.

A nice example of a debate entered into by the New Archaeologists (although it was being addressed well beforehand) was that surrounding classification. Are the categories used by archaeologists to sort material – systematising it – inherent in the remains or just instruments to help us make sense of it? This is a particular instance of the problem of universals, an issue in metaphysics that has been discussed for thousands of years. When archaeologists develop taxonomies by which data are sorted, are they arbitrary or are they to some extent forced by a "natural order", so to speak? For the New Archaeologists the claim that classifications could exist with or without archaeologists to employ them was just another instance of the idea that archaeology was a neutral science with the preconceptions of its practitioners not affecting the conclusions reached, as opposed to facts unavoidably being theory-laden.

For the New Archaeologists, then, traditional archaeology was crippled by philosophical problems. In order to avoid the complaint (often levelled at them) that the discipline was thus entirely subjective, they sought to replace na�ve empiricism with a far stronger theoretical basis. This could be achieved, they thought, by accepting that interpretations of the archaeological data are underdetermined but that nevertheless a form of empiricism can be used because the evidence can be appealed to when judging between different hypotheses. Data could then be admitted to be theory-laden but still used to test claims – or so they hoped. In addition to their criticisms of traditional archaeology there was also an effort to develop alternatives, including an argument that archaeology should move away from descriptive accounts and provide explanatory ones. It was here that the New Archaeologists appealed to the work of the logical positivists, especially C.G. Hempel, insisting that an archaeological explanation must be governed by laws. For Binford, this meant going beyond the particular to the general, aiming ultimately at understanding "the total range of physical and cultural similarities and differences characteristic of the entire span of man's existence".

As we have noted, however, this was occurring just as positivist ideas in the philosophy of science were beginning to crumble. When he appealed to a Hempelian form of explanation, in which an observed event is said to be explained if it fits an already established regularity such that we should have expected it to happen, Binford did not realise that he was invoking exactly the restrictions of na�ve empiricism by relying on observed regularities. In short, his version of positivism was as bad as the philosophical approach he had objected to. Moreover, Binford advocated Hempel's hypothetico-deductive model – that is, offering an explanatory hypothesis, deducing its consequences and testing for them – even though it was quickly shown to be flawed. The most common example used in this context is a proposed law such as "all swans are white"; if true, it would follow straightforwardly that all swans are white, but in order to confirm this we would have to check all swans – so it can never be confirmed deductively. In archaeological terms, this would be much like explaining the collapse of civilisations by a specific set of circumstances: in order to confirm that we have a law, we would have to check all civilisations anywhere and at any time. The hypothetico-deductive model can thus only apply in restricted (usually trivial) domains. Perhaps even more significantly, though, even if it were possible to arrive at laws explaining present conditions and behaviour, to infer anything about past cultures from the (relatively scant) material data available to us requires inductive steps – precisely what the New Archaeologists were supposed to be moving away from.

There is a rhetorical dimension to the New Archaeology that is worth considering, too. It has been suggested that moves toward positivism in archaeology was but an extension of a larger endeavour on the part of naturalists to make the social sciences harder, invoking models that might apply to physics, traditionally the "hardest" science of all (hence the conceit that its methods are the ideals to be aimed at everywhere else). This was a reaction to a widespread concern that Enlightenment ideals of reason and civilisation were under threat from relativists and subjectivists, and particularly philosophers of science who claimed that science was irrational and no better than astrology or voodoo. These charges were – and are – empty but it is rare to lose money betting on how zealously people will defend simplistic models of science if civilisation itself is alleged to be under attack and losing ground. (Indeed, it is not difficult to find instances of this behaviour today in several contexts.) Nevertheless, by placing the social sciences on a positivistic base it was hoped that they could be saved from degeneration and contrasted with so-called pseudoscience and groundless speculation. The great irony was – and again, still is – that those who so desperately wanted to improve on a naive and untenable empiricism in order to counter a crude version of archaeology (and science in general) and to oppose "cranks" resorted to a positivism that was just as unsophisticated and relied on just the same uncritical empirical foundations. The problem was that too many archaeologists were caught up in a (false) dilemma that defined the rhetorical backdrop to the debate: either archaeology had to follow the other sciences and be rigorously recast along positivist lines or the entire game was lost and would unravel into skepticism. This is a tactic that – once more – is still employed today for much the same reasons, but a bad idea does not become a good one just because the only alternative provided is supposed to be even worse.

Meanwhile, the insistence that archaeologists should seek explanations rather than descriptions led to a great deal of discussion concerning what form such explanations should take. While New Archaeologists were advocating a Hempelian theory of covering laws, critics like Merrilee Salmon came up with counterexamples in the form of generalisations that would cover a phenomenon but not explain it. For instance, men who take birth control pills do not get pregnant, but this is an explanation we would not consider. Likewise, prisoners who are deprived of writing materials do not reproduce verbatim the works of Shakespeare. Why not? There are (implicit) generalisations here that cover and yet we do not accept them as explanations. We thus see that covering is not enough; it is necessary, we might say, but not sufficient and on its own gives us no guidance as to whether or not the true explanation has been found. Some theorists responded by appealing to higher-level regularities, but this led to a regress problem because resorting to a presumed regularity of a different order to explain which of several possible regularities was the correct one led to the same question on the new level, and so on. Indeed, whenever we can explain a phenomenon because we have good (empirical) reasons to suppose the existence of the causes invoked by the explanation, we can always ask where these causes came from and how they operate – requiring explanation all over again.

Perhaps the most important aspect of traditional and New Archaeology and the criticisms of both is that everyone involved (along with others in the philosophy of science) was directly or otherwise addressing the questions of what science is and what it aims at. Some opponents of positivism advocated a realist perspective, which they thought could improve on the philosophical dead ends, and hence we come full circle to having to understand the role of philosophy and the part it invariably plays in the discussion and practice of archaeology.


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Selected References:

  • Binford, L.R., In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
  • Feyerabend, P.K., Against Method (London: Verso, 1975).
  • Hodder, I., Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
  • Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
  • Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P., Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practices (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).
  • Wylie, A., Thinking From Things: essays in the philosophy of archaeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
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