NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART I

 Though I'll probably never gain a thorough knowledge of the Whitehead philosophy due to all my other irons in the Fire of My Philosophy, I did decide to invest some time in a slim book (88 pages) of lectures the author gave at the University of Virginia in 1927. This time, since it is so short, I'm not going to do a summary review as I did with his 1925 SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD. Here I'll just confine myself to some quick notes as I go along.

In his first lecture, Whitehead chooses to discuss the process of human symbol-making in two phases, "Presentational Immediacy" and "Causal Efficacy." I won't explore either of these concepts at this time. Here my only interest is in noting the similarity of the first term to Susanne Langer's dyad of "presentational" and "discursive" methods of symbolization as expressed in her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Since I've recently learned that Langer took some degree of influence from the earlier work of Whitehead, she may have borrowed one of her terms from him. Of course, when I first started writing about the Langer dyad on this blog, I confess I did not realize that her two terms in essence recapitulated a similar dyad in the late 1800s work of William James, that of "acquaintance" and "description," as I discussed in more detail here.  

My only other gleaning from the first lecture is that though I was puzzled by Whitehead's jargonistic term "event" in PROCESS AND REALITY, the first lecture makes his concept clearer, though he does not use that term. Here he states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A."     

ICONS AND IDENTIFICATION

In MY SHORTEST POST YET I sated that what I term "icons" are the parts of narrative through which readers identify with various presences in fictional narrative, and without such identificatory figures, no one would ever invest any thought or feeling into the broad plot-scenarios called "tropes." This assertion brings me back to an elaboration of my "law of identification," which I gave its first full elaboration in the 2011 essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY.                                                                                                                                                                                   Briefly, the essay addressed a speaker's failure to define fictional characters as vessels of identification, choosing to simply deem them "unreal" by a positivist philosophy. I responded by contrasting my law of identification with the "law of identity" attributed to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to wit:                                                           

"Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this: Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."                                                                   

I have sometimes wondered if, before Plato wrote down a sentence or two that Socrates may (or may not) have spoken, these respective philosophers were aware of pre-Socratic traditions, or even religious concepts, that asserted that two unalike things could be the same in some quasi-mystical fashion, and that the later philosophers were reacting against that idea in forming the rudiments of the "law of identity." Be that as it may, art, particularly in the form of literature, was already devoted to forging identification between fictional characters who did not exist and non-fictional readers/audiences who enjoyed at least a temporally fixed existence. In any event, it should be further noted that no individual's identification with a fictional character is completely identical with another reader's identification. It's only the broad process of bringing a character "to life" that is identical in all "real readers." The reader takes his cue from the expectations that the author sets up as to the "reality" of the text. But that reality can fluctuate, as noted in this essay: '"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.' By extension, this means that although in the real world, Old Gene Phillips sustains "the law of identity" with Young Gene Phillips, there is no such law governing Superboy and Superman, or Dick Grayson Robin with Dick Grayson Nightwing. The latter pairings have different end-results for their identificatory processes, even if the overall process remains the same, and so Superman can be "phase shifted" into the different identity of Superboy-- even though anyone reading the stories of either character knows that they are the same character at different age-ranges.         

MYTHCOMICS: "AM I MARO, ROMA, OR RAEM?" (PACIFIC PRESENTS #3, 1984)

This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe; and if (1) it is impossible that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject (the usual qualifications must be presupposed in this premise too), and if (2) an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, then obviously (3) it is impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have contrary opinions at the same time.... -- Aristotle, METAPHYSICS, BOOK 4, Part 3 (trans. W.D. Ross)

To modern ears the proposition "A=A" -- often credited solely to Aristotle-- sounds no more profound that the proposition, "If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck."

However, the above citation from the METAPHYSICS indicates that, Aristotle's philosophy arose at a time when Greek philosophers still had to fight against the mythic idea that a thing might be more than one thing. Archaic myths, obviously, had no problem with depicting such metamorphoses as giants' bones morphing into mountain ranges and the like. Probably Aristotle was not personally influenced by whatever remained of the Greek religious tradition in his time. Yet the passage shows that he still considered pre-Socratics like Heraclitus worth refuting. Thus he furthered Plato's conception of the "law of identity" and elaborated his own "law of non-contradiction."

I don't know how much Aristotle Steve Ditko read, but I suspect he got most of his knowledge of the law of identity from its re-formulations within Ayn Rand's Objectivist writings. From his early professional years to his demise, Ditko remained, to the best of my knowledge, a devout Randian, frequently quoting the formula "A=A" and even incarnating his idea of that principle in the comic-book crusader "Mister A." Yet, because Ditko was an artist-- arguably a more consequential one than Ayn Rand-- his idea on identity and non-contradiction are imbued with his own take on the matters, which focuses on the moral compass one must have to choose between rational and irrational modes of consciousness.

One could even see this choice reflected in Ditko's interpretation of the established superhero-trope, "the scary crimefighter." For Ditko, criminals were, to paraphrase Bruce Wayne, "an irrational and impressionable lot," and, being irrational, they were wont to be terrified by heroes who projected irrational fears-- Spider'-Man's pupil-less eyes, the Question's featureless visage, and even the Creeper's clown-like riot of primary colors. That said, some Ditko heroes are more odd than scary, and this is true of the Missing Man, the hero of the story under examination (which I'll henceforth abbreviate as "Raem"). No origin is ever cited for the character, who enjoyed only three adventures. All the reader knows is that in his civilian identity, the hero is Syd Mane, computer tech-consultant. When trouble arises, the hero dons a pair of glasses, and he's transformed into what looks like an incomplete sketch of a human being, consisting of the magic glasses on his eyes, ears, a mouth, a head of hair, and very cartoony arms and legs, all of which are colored green-- while his hips and torso are entirely missing. (Insert Freudian joke here.) Further, as in his other stories, the Missing Man is mostly a prop through which Ditko interrogates the failings of irrational malcontents.


Syd Mane is working to fix computer glitches at "WRDS Processing," which is apparently Ditko's loose idea of what a 1984 software-firm might be like. (I should note here that the story is entirely Ditko's, though the credit-box attributes the dialogue to Robin Snyder.) A maniac, appearing to be all-human on his left side and all-robot on his right, invades the work-space and tries' to slay Syd's employer, the grey-haired owner of the firm, "Mister Wrds." No one knows who this cyborg is precisely, though an employee named Eva thinks he looks something like a fully-human former employee, Raem Lanet, who had been her fiancee some time ago. Syd transforms into the Missing Man and keeps Raem from killing Mister Wrds. Before security can arrive, Raem escapes, one of two times that this half-metal man will vanish from sight despite his eye-catching appearance.

Though the Missing Man and the other witnesses to the crime can see Raem's divided nature in an outward sense, the reader gets a pipeline to the cyborg's thoughts, where the division is even more pronounced. In a reversal of certain genre-tropes, the robot-half of Raem is the reasonable part of his consciousness, urging against violence and revenge, while the human half lusts to kill Wrds and anyone who gets in the way. Later the reader will learn that Raem left the employment of WRDS of his own free will, and that the villain is retroactively placing the blame for his decision on the shoulders of his former boss.

Ironically, though Raem's human half seems the messed-up part, Syd testifies in his clinical way to the fact that mechanisms too can suffer trauma: "The program is in a loop. Like a short circuit. Like a contradiction that will destroy the integrating function of the unit and kill the whole system." He makes this observation about a damaged computer, but it's clearly Ditko warning the reader as to the contradictions in the mind of the would-be killer. But just so that Mane doesn't have to do all the lecturing, Mister Wrds--  whose office is  filled with "alphabet-soup" arrangements of assorted letters-- boasts about his project to "define language:"

We're starting with reality and the law of identity, Syd. A is what it is, A. We intend to establish definition by essentials, root out false axioms, invalid anti-concepts and all the fallacies that permit the irrational to be treated as anything other than what it is: the inhuman.

This is without a doubt Ditko at his most Randian, though he and Snyder may not have realized that they contradicted themselves here, since it is the "inhuman" part of Raem's cyborg nature that is the rational part, the part that knows Mister Wrds did Raem no harm. Later Wrds will blame Raem's insanity on "the interface with [Raem's] robotic half and his human half," but this tossed-off rationale doesn't dispel the conceptual dissonance.

Ex-fiancee Eva, instead of doing the rational thing and telling the police about her suspicions, seeks Raem out at a lonely cabin. In her presence the cyborg starts ranting about having alternate identities with the names of "Maro" (apparently "Man-Robot") and of "Roma" ("Robot-Man") which presumably illustrate his internal struggle. He conceives that Eva betrayed him, and despite the protests of his good side, strangles her. Since by the next day the police have found Eva's body-- though, in a bizarre touch, they rule her death "an accident"-- the reader must assume that Raem discarded the corpse somewhere far from the murder-scene.

Eva's death serves to center the Missing Man's investigation on her missing fiancee, so that he interviews Barker, another of Raem's employers, who (surprise, surprise) also talks like an Objectivist, and who says that Raem would "rather choose prestige over value." Raem eventually works himself to attack Wrds again, with the result that a lot of Ditko's alphabet-soup collages fall off the wall, or something like that. Fortunately the Missing Man shows up as well. With a clever trick the hero causes the demented cyborg to think Wrds is dead, and so again the half-robot manages to shamble away and not be seen by security. However, Wrds finally has a moment of clarity and recognizes Raem, which makes it possible for the software-maker to direct the superhero to the isolated cabin.

Missing Man finds the cabin deserted, but thanks to his other research, the hero's able to track the pitiable creature down to the laboratory where Raem was transformed into a half-robot. Then, for the story's final six pages, Ditko focuses not on a pitched hero-villain battle but on Raem managing at last to override his murderous irrational impulses, even though the effort results in his death. Standing over the dead cyborg, the Missing Man muses, "he died not as Roma or Maro-- but as a man-- as Raem!"

Not many comics-critics sympathize with Ditko's black-and-white morality, though I view the moralizing as a necessary evil that made it psychologically possible for Ditko to unleash his vivid if erratic creativity. This creativity was also accompanied by some definite quirks, like the artist's oddball affection for names that are usually awkward conglomerations of vowels and consonants. (Apparently Ditko never met a consonant blend he didn't dislike.) But in "Raem," Ditko is close to invalidating his own philosophy. If the irrational is "inhuman," as Wrds says, than why isn't it incarnate in Raem's robot half? There have been any number of SF-stories in which a robotized human regained his humanity through empathizing with other humans, but though Ditko' does use the same basic trope, his focus is squarely upon the Randian choice between the true and the untrue. Ditko may have intuited that there was no way to attribute irrational bitterness and violent intent to the robot half, so he ends up with a final scenario in which the rational renunciation of such "anti-concepts" comes from either the robot half alone, or from some belated interface of human and robot. Either way, "Raem" may be Ditko's most passionate defense of Randism-- and as such, may also be a back-door admission of the significance of emotional value.

MYTHCOMICS: HELLSING (1997-2008)

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.-- Nietzsche,  "War and Warriors," THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Since the rise of the distinct genre of horror-fiction in the 19th century, the vampire subgenre has often centered its horrific thrills upon the victim's loss of identity. The vampire breaks down the normal borders of his victim's whole being. The attack may be physical, as in drinking someone's blood, or it may be on a psychological/metaphysical level, forcing the victim to drink vampiric blood, so that he or she loses even the identity of a victim, becoming instead another being poised on the borders of the living and the dead. Bram Stoker's DRACULA provides the "ur-text" of vampire mythology for later authors, and the majority of authors have followed Stoker's example, focusing upon vampirism as a series of metaphysical and/or psychological assaults upon the victim's individual will. Vampire-tropes are less often used for large-scale sociological myths, except when they're merged with other metaphenomenal tropes, like the apocalyptic war between good and evil.

War threatens the human sense of identity in a much less personal manner. When wars are staged on the apocalyptic scale, it doesn't matter whether they take place in naturalistic or metaphenomenal domains, for all such "world wars" draw countless persons from numerous realms, forcing them to subsume their individual desires in order to defeat a common enemy. DRACULA presents the reader with a covert, small-scale conflict between the Transylvanian Count and a band of English citizens (and one American) led by the Dutch doctor Abraham Van Helsing. But what if a "world war" took place between the living and the undead, with two of the undead pledged to defend the living against a mad warmonger?

Kohta Hirano's ten-volume manga epic HELLSING takes its name from Stoker's vampire-hunter Van Helsing, though it's hard to imagine that the author wasn't aware of the accidental pun in the name, implying that "hell" could "sing." The story takes place in what seems to be an alternate world, in which Protestants and Catholics still mount armed campaigns against one another. The Protestants of England are represented by the organization Hellsing, masterminded by Lady Integra Hellsing, descendant of the original Dutch doctor. However, the group Hellsing's purpose is not to skirmish with Catholics but to guard against eruptions of the supernatural. Only two historical events are repeatedly stressed in HELLSING: the Van Helsing group's original defeat of Dracula in the late 1800s, and the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. How much time has passed, and how many other differences there may be in the world's post-WWII makeup, are not things Hirano bothers with, as one of his primary purposes is to render to his readers a big, noisy shonen fantasy full of blazing guns and bloody fangs. It's also a loving tribute to other pop-cultural myths other than than Bram Stoker's, for it includes references to APOCALYPSE NOW, DUNE and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. Even Hirano's generic name for the monsters in his world-- including not only vampires but zombies and a few werewolves-- betrays its pop-culture roots, since the name of the monsters, "Midians," is most likely borrowed from the monster-filled city of Midian in Clive Barker's 1988 novella CABAL.

And yet, Hirano weaves a tapestry that is as deep as it is wide: one that evokes not only the vampire-myth's concerns with personal identity, but also the philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche as they apply to the chaos of war and the nature of the human will.

Even before the threat to England proper begins, Integra is forced to fight for control of Hellsing following the death of her father. Her corrupt uncle plots to slay Integra and almost succeeds, except that Integra stumbles upon a hidden secret of her distant Dutch ancestor: the dessicated corpse of Count Dracula, held in a room in Hellsing headquarters. In time-honored cinematic tradition, Integra sheds blood upon the corpse and it comes back to life, slaying her attackers. But unlike most versions of the master vampire, this one becomes the servant of the female descendant of his own slayer, and becomes her primary weapon in the ensuing conflict. He even signifies his subjugation by taking the reverse-name "Alucard," even though Integra is fully aware of his true identity. However, as if to prove that old habits die hard, especially among the undead, Alucard uses his power to enlist his own servant: another Englishwoman, the naive but feisty police officer Victoria Seras. Throughout the hellacious battle that comes, Victoria serves as something akin to the callow new recruit in war-films, and it's through her eyes that the reader sees the horrors of bloody battle.

Stoker's fictional Dracula was the bane of England in the 1800s, but Nazi Germany became a real-life threat over thirty years later. In the midst of sectarian quarrels between the Protestants and the Catholics, a recrudescent quasi-Nazi movement arises. I say "quasi-Nazi" because the movement has no preoccupation either with the tenets of Nazi belief or with Hitler's desire to bring all of Europe under his aegis. Rather, a mysterious leader, known only as The Major, marshals massive forces against England, forces including both mortal men and "Midians," since only the latter have the power to battle Alucard. The Major's only purpose is to unleash "the dogs of war" at every opportunity, apparently agreeing with Nietzsche ( though the philosopher is never directly quoted)-- regarding the salutary effects of war:

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.

I won't go into great detail about the military maneuvers of this "Second Blitz" or about the many side-stories respecting supporting-characters. However, I should mention Iscariot, the Catholic assassination wing, in which Hirano seems to have conflated the stories of the arch-traitor Judas and those of the Hebrew Zealots, the anti-Roman terrorists from the era of Jesus of Nazareth. Iscariot's foremost killer is Irish-Catholic Anthony Anderson, an inhumanly strong human being who would rather fight the master vampire than the Major. To religious fanatic Anderson, the vampire is the epitome of blasphemy. (Anderson's scenes, though brutal, always convey a bit of humor, since the assassin speaks in a thick brogue that makes Barry Fitzgerald sound like Noel Coward.)

Alucard shares sentiments of both the Major and Anderson. In life, Alucard fought in the wars between his people and the Ottoman Turks, and saw so much slaughter that he came to conceive of human fighting as a form of "prayer" to an uncaring God. At some point he even thinks that hecatombs of wasted lives will attract God's attention, thinking that "Jerusalem will descend" as a result. Yet Alucard, unlike Stoker's Dracula, is disgusted with his prolonged existence, and fantasizes about being destroyed by someone like Anderson. Further, whereas Stoker's Count never remembered any of his victims, Alucard is a composite being, who has no true shape (or identity) of his own, and who is made up of all the previous souls he's devoured. In fact, in the climax the Major even finds a way to use Alucard's formless nature against him.

The climax illustrates Hirano's skillful opposition between the human will and the will-lessness of monsters like Alucard. The Major reflects to Integra that he knows it would feel "wonderful" to become a vampire, to exist through "combination with the existence of others, the fusion of lives, the unification of minds." Yet he believes that fragile humanity is more glorious, due to the individual's sense of identity. "What's mine ist mine. Each hair, each drop of blood. I am me," says the Major, putting forth a Nietzschean take on Aristotle's law of identity. Even after it's revealed that the villain is a cyborg-- accounting for his youthful looks many years after WWII-- he insists, prior to his destruction, that "so long as I haf my own vill... I'll still be human!"

Admittedly, because HELLSING is a big noisy shonen manga, it's not concerned with philosophical subtleties. But among the ranks of hyperviolent fantasy-adventures that also have philosophical undercurrents, HELLSING is one of the best of its kind.

HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY!

Socrates: How about sounds and colours: in the first place you would admit that they both exist?
Theaetetus: Yes.

Socrates: And that either of them is different from the other, and the same with itself?

Theaetetus: Certainly.

Socrates: And that both are two and each of them one?

Theaetetus: Yes.


No matter how much time I've frittered away on message boards, I'm always pleased when I come across something so wonderfully absurd that I have to write an essay to refute it.

Take this CBR thread, which begins by asking the question as to what posters would say if God revealed himself to them.

Probably to no one's surprise, the thread doesn't particularly stick with that topic. My participation in it has thus far been minimal. However, at one point I made a simple objection when one poster equated "truth" with "scientific fact."

Since this isn't the case even for the most naive of naive positivists-- who must deduce their philosophical truths logically, rather than observing them in nature-- I stressed the need for a distinction. Thus I harvested this delightfully absurd response from one of my sometime opponents:

A child in his imagination may truly say "I'm Daredevil", but he'd be ill-advised to go jumping off tall buildings.

That's why I keep going back to comics-messboards. Where else can you find someone attempting, however indirectly and incorrectly, to establish Aristotle's "law of identity" (possibly derived from the doctrines of his mentor Plato; see above) with a comic-book character?

The obvious problem is as follows:

Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this:

Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."

Nor, even by the assumptions of positivism, does that act of identification cease to be real within what the poster chooses to call "the imagination," unless of course the matrices of memory cease to preserve even the imperfect record of the experience.

Now, the phenomenology changes somewhat when dealing with fictionalized versions of historical figures, no matter how greatly they may have been altered from their original forms. It's not possible to invoke the law of identification to say, "I am Spartacus," because one always knows (or assumes) that there was some real Spartacus way back when. Similar problems pertain even to deific figures who have no ties to recorded history but whose adherents assert that (for instance) Great Shiva has existed since the dawn of time.

The salient point, though, is that one need not attempt to "jump off tall buildings" to prove one's identity with Daredevil: the identity exists through the act of identification.

Fortunately for all those readers who don't like Daredevil, their antipathy keeps them from sharing his identity-- which I am sure would please them as much as I am pleased not to share any identity with David Boring.