THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH

 The first time I encountered the following quote online, I didn't think it sounded much like Aristotle, even speaking as someone who's not an expert on the philosopher:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

And sure enough, it turned out that an accurate version of the quote from the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS reads:

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

The first quote apparently comes from an early mistranslation of the ETHICS. Possibly the translator was misled by the passage dealing with the relative nature of "precision" that one can discern regarding a given subject. (For instance, the chemical composition of a particular compound can be determined with far more accuracy than the nature of a process such evolution, which can't be broken down and analyzed in the same manner.) The mistranslation seems to be an endorsement of relativity for its own sake.

Now, I believe that in philosophy one can only entertain thoughts up to a certain point before accepting or rejecting them. However, in literature, "thoughts" are not truths, but rather "half-truths" as I argued here.  "The poet never affirmeth," said Sir Philip Sidney, which I interpret as meaning that the nature of "poetry" (i.e., literature) is one that changes depending on the viewpoints of both its authors and its audiences. Art is primarily meant to be an activity of "play," no matter how often it's used to perform "work." 

Now, even though the fake Aristotle quote doesn't apply to his philosophy, it does hew a little closer to one of his pronouncements in the POETICS, where the philosopher states that the act of poetry is mimesis or imitation, and that the poet must imitate one of three categories of phenomena: 

things as they are, things as they are said or thought to be or things as they ought to be

In Renaissance times mimesis became equated with verisimilitude, with imitating "things as they are," and thus the term passed into literary history with a meaning that endorsed a form of real-world fidelity that Aristotle would never have endorsed. Whatever the philosopher preferred to read or watch on stage, he explained that the range of imitation had to extend beyond the observable world, even though presumably Aristotle would have desired some "degree of precision" even when dealing with the hypothetical, with "things as they ought to be."

In my earlier essay I emphasized the idea of "half-truths" as a form of "weak proposition," meaning that the author may be as unserious about what his narrative proposes as the audience is in entertaining the notion. Of course, some authors and some audiences can become very serious about how much a given proposition represents reality, but it can even be difficult for an author and his audience to remain on the same page. For instance, take the well-known phrase, "Hell is other people" from Sartre's play NO EXIT. Sartre himself argued that he didn't mean to give the line the connotation that most listeners got from it. Yet the listeners are not necessarily wrong in the way that Aristotle's translator was wrong. 

One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 1

I've often discussed the problems of "victimage addiction" here, as in this 2015 essay. However, I confess that until recently it never occurred to me to relate the ultraliberal penchant for victimage to the concepts of "guilt culture" and "shame culture."

Wikipedia opines that Ruth Benedict's 1946 THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD did not originate the terms, but popularized them at a time when postwar Americans became curious as to how the culture of defeated Japan differed from that of the United States. Benedict observed-- admittedly on incomplete evidence-- that America was dominantly a guilt culture, in that its citizens were expected to feel internalized guilt if they did wrong, while Japan was dominated by shame culture, in that its citizens were expected to subordinate their personal desires to society's view of what was shameful.

I find this distinction useful in a general sense, and not only with respect to Japan and America. This HUFFINGTON POST essay provides this broad summation:

Shame cultures focus less on individual responsibility and abstract legal transactions, and more on how one’s betrayal of the community creates estrangement and stigma. In a guilt culture, if I do something wrong and the public does not know about it, I am still expected to feel guilty and to seek to make amends by being punished. This is not the case in a shame culture. In a shame culture, if I do something wrong and there is no public knowledge of it, then I experience no shame, and have no motivation to seek amends.  Shame is all about public identity, and whether or not one is honored or dishonored.

However, there is one particular arena in which American culture seems entirely governed by the shame ethos, and that is the arena of race relations.

For roughly three hundred years since the colonization of the U.S., there seems to have been little doubt regarding the supremacy of Caucasian Americans over that of "persons of color," as well as certain Caucasian groups regarded as "outliers," such as immigrants from Ireland. A representative example of the cultural distance between Whites and Others appears in Fenimore Cooper's "Natty Bummpo" novels of the early 1800s. Natty, despite frequently hanging out with various tribes of Indians, summarizes his separation from the Red Man by occasionally stating that "there is no cross in my blood," by which he means no interaction with non-whites. The clear implication is that to have sexual interaction would be shameful to a white person. There were certainly exceptions in which certain romantic entanglements were viewed through a sympathetic lens, as with Cecil B. DeMille's 1914 THE SQUAW MAN (which DeMille remade twice). Yet shame was still the dominant response to the idea of "mixing the races." Even simple interaction with non-white persons could be viewed as eroding the distinctions between the ruling white race and those not so privileged, and this emotion too would evolve not from personal guilt but from socially imposed shame.

During the 19th and 20th centuries assorted philosophical and literary works put forth the case for the equality of the races and for the necessity of equal treatment, but in the United States the case did not gain any ground until the 1950s, marked by the legal ramifications of Brown vs. Board of Education. Having myself been a liberal of a slightly later period, I would assert as civil rights continued to make advancements, most liberals celebrated them, in the belief that true parity would evolve. The only exception would seem to be the hardcore Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote this sentence in a prologue for a 1961 Franz Fanon book:

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man.

About forty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, though, Sartre's ugly nihilism became emblematic of the Left's politics of ressentiment, as I summarized in COMBAT PLAY:

This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. 

Now, without making the assumption that the Left deserves total credit for the valorization of "people of color," it can be fairly said that liberals were most known for attempting to turn the earlier shame culture's priorities around. Natty Bummpo's assumptions of a beneficent whiteness gave way to portraits of white supremacists as either entirely vile, as seen in popular films like the 1951 anti-KKK film STORM WARNING, or as harmless by reason of sheer stupidity, as with Norman Lear's Archie Bunker. But even in these liberal attempts to reverse reactionary thought, one does not see the extremism of the Sartrean POV, in which ultraliberal pundits view "whiteness" to a source of shame as a *bouleversement* of the way non-white races were formerly treated.

And it's because of that massive reversal that Donald Trump came to power.

More in Part 2.

NOTHING NEW HERE: MORE COMMENT-PRESERVATION

A response to the usual cant on THE SUPERHERO HYPE FORUM.

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You say "white patriarchal SYSTEM" and my response is that the cultural response of POC has been to propound yet another SYSTEM, one in which both whiteness and patriarchy are eternally demonized. Marxist thinkers like Sartre and Barthes are arguably two of the main proponents of this outlook, and they produced this idea of a system with no intention of suggesting any way to bring about a rapprochement between white culture and the various forms of POC culture. They wanted a demon that could be ceaselessly attacked on all fronts, and in this they are unconsciously aping the ways in which white cultures of the 1800s demonized blacks, Asians, and even unacceptable Caucasians like Slavs, for the crime of not being Anglo-Saxon.

Your idea of "benefit" casts too wide and tries to take in too many forms of injustice. There is no immediate "benefit" to me or any other white person if a black guy is chary about coming in contact with a white child {note: my opponent cited an episode of BLACK-ISH featuring this scenario].. It can only be a benefit to specific groups who like to feel like they still hold a club over the heads of colored peoples.

It *would* be a benefit to me if I was seeking the same job that a black person was, and I got the job because the employer had some racially based reason for hiring me over the other guy. I would get the benefit, but I would still not be responsible for the employer's motivations, nor do I necessarily agree that those motivations would be systemic in nature.

Suppose then that the reverse were true, and the black guy got the job in order to fill a quota, or even because the employer personally felt that black people deserved a break. That would be a benefit to the black guy, but he too would not be responsible for the employer's motivations. The other way either of us would bear responsibility is if either had threatened the employer with repercussions for not hiring one of us-- sort of like the way the "Oscar So White" people decided that the only reason more black people weren't getting nominated for the awards was racism. That was a club held over the heads of the Academy, aimed at making the industry fear a possible monetary boycott. Thus so everyone who sought to force diversity upon the Academy is culpable in a form of extortion, just as *I* would be, *if* I had told the employer that he'd get in trouble with the Klan if he hired a black guy.

The idea that all POC are just helpless individuals constantly being preyed upon by the Big Bad System is also a favorite theme in Barthes, BTW.

REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 2

Now that I've investigated some of the basic components of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of "the Other," I can speak more fully as to how I choose to redefine the term.

I've stated that the concept of "the Other," when applied to a human being of a different race than that of the subject, is a nominal one when compared to the near-total lack of congruity between human being and animal. 

I'll further specify that a given subject-- let's say the usual culprit, a White Male-- *may* be more estranged from the culture of a Black Male than he would from the culture of another White Male. Obviously anyone can think of real-world exceptions to this proposition, but for sake of argument I'll assert that this is a dominant tendency, brought on by the White Male's conscious or subconscious responses to persons who do or do not share the overt physical markers that he possesses.

The usual ideological extrapolation from this sort of set-up is to *presume* that because the subject is "shamed" or "repulsed" by the Other, that subject sets up a defensive perimeter around himself and tries to deny the Other any selfhood. The commonest result of this denial is usually termed "projection," and reams have been written about how White Males have projected their various fears upon other ethnicities, often though not always People of Color.

But there's a crucial element omitted by Sartre and all who follow in his wake: the possibility that the subject sees something in the Other that is literally there-- particularly some evil or at least undesirable trait-- because such traits common to both representatives of humanity.

I am not saying that no projection takes place. Though it's become de rigueur to view the character of Fu Manchu as nothing but a projection of British fears of "the Yellow Peril," I certainly wouldn't deny that such projection is an element of Sax Rohmer's creation, particularly since according to his biography, Rohmer didn't really know much about Chinese culture when he created the character. At the same time, that doesn't mean that every observation Rohmer was automatically incorrect, even if he lacked in-depth knowledge. What might it mean if a relatively modern Chinese citizen were to advance the same notion toward some members of his own culture that Rohmer does of Fu Manchu? Director Chang Cheh critiques one of his feudal-period characters for having the same torture-happy attitudes we see in Fu Manchu, as seen in my review of FIVE DEADLY VENOMS here-- and one certainly cannot suspect the Hong Kong director of "Yellow Peril" fears. This comparison raises the question as to whether Rohmer's creation was entirely rooted in facile "projection." 

As I said in Part 1, Sartre's concept of the Other is informed by a desire to rein in the forces of authority represented by European colonialism and capitalism. I suggest, however, that because of this ideological orientation, he could not see the same forms of evil as being either real or potential within the culture of the Other. To rewrite the injunction from the Gospel of Matthew, Sartre could see the beam in a Frenchman's eye, but none in the eye of an Algerian.

I've already discoursed here on what I consider the important difference between "a racial image" and "a racist image," and these distinctions can in turn be glossed by my meditations on "benign chauvinism" and "malign chauvinism," here. And with these distinctions in mind, I will proceed to cite an example of a "racial mythcomic" that would certainly never be honored by Black History Month.

REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT. 1

In the first essay I wrote for "Racial Other Mythcomics Month," I said of one Don McGregor Black Panther story:

In the McGregor mythos of the Panther, while the slaying of animals is necessary for survival, the beasts constitute an "other" beside which all human-centered "others" are nominal by comparison. 

This basic ethos-- that the cosmos that revolves around humankind still shows more internal congruity than is possible for humans and any other living creature-- would have been either anathema or an irrelevance to the man who most popularized the phrase of "the other," which now turns up with tedious regularity in hundreds of scholarly papers.  I'm not about to critique even a small part of BEING AND NOTHINGNESS on a blogpost, but as it happens Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a more succinct version of his opinions on his "other" concept, when talking about the famous-- and according to him, generally misunderstood-- quotation of a line from NO EXIT rendered as "Hell is other people."

. . .“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

Even if I were not a Jungian, I would find it hard to credence Sartre's statement that "when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge of us which other people already have." In my experience few people would count it a great gift, as per Robert Burns, to "know ourselves as others know us." If I am seeking knowledge of myself, I may indeed make some use of "the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves," by which I assume Sartre means one's cultural code of ethics. I will, in addition, seek validation from other human beings in the hope that they will support my findings and/or my path. Yet at the same time there exists, even in children, an individual will that rejects the summary judgments of all those outside it, a will that thunders a Carlyle-esque "NO" to "the Other." The singer Britney recently co-opted the phrase "you don't know what it's like to be me," but the sentiment has existed since the infancy of humanity, and no matter how banal the phrase might sound, it has more to do with the establishment of an individual's identity than some overly dialectical mirroring process. To use the metaphor of the alchemists, the human self is constantly in a process of "breaking down" old patterns and "building up" new ones. The new patterns may turn out to be recapitulations of the old, but that possibility does not invalidate the self as simply being the product of cultural factors-- a point of view Sartre shared with Karl Marx.

 Yet to speak of this rich and variegated process of human interaction in such clumsy and moralistic dialectical terms shows the fundamental poverty of Sartre's intellect. Even Freud, with his image of the human psyche split between a raging id of desire and two spectres of egoistic control, came closer to the mark.

Sartre, like most ideological thinkers, has an agenda in reading human response in this manner. NO EXIT may be the story of a trio of petite-bourgeoisie malcontents who simply can't relate to one another as Sartre thinks that they should. However, when in the above section Sartre speaks of relationships that are "twisted" and "vitiated," he's assuredly thinking not just of individual people but also of cultural constructs that encourage such twisted relationships: colonialism, Mammonism, and all the other usual Marxist suspects. Thus it's not surprising that the term "racial other" has become a routine way of characterizing encounters between disparate cultures, even where they may not technically belong to different races. "Ethnicities" seems to have become a preferred term, since it can take things like the relationship of Europeanized Jews to European-descended WASPS, but I suspect "ethnic other" will not displace the older term any time soon.

More in Part 2.