CORRELATING COGITATIONS

I formulated the literary "word pair" of the ontocosm and the epicosm back in this May essay, and so far it's lasted. I have overturned a few neologisms in the space of a few days, while other formulations have lasted a few years before I abandoned them. So I may or may not keep these two terms in the distant future. However, for now I'm moved to correlate various past dichotomous cogitations under the aegis of each category, if only to keep them all straight in my head.

THE ONTOCOSM of a literary work includes:

All LATERAL meaning, relating to both the KINETIC and DRAMATIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "WHAT THINGS HAPPEN."

All FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE.  

All PRE-EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-by-acquaintance."

All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT.

THE EPICOSM of a literary work includes:

All VERTICAL meaning, relating to both the MYTHOPOEIC and DIDACTIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "HOW THINGS HAPPEN."

All SUPER-FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

All EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-about."

All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH.

 

I may develop some or none of these correlations in future. But for the time being, I'll content myself with noting the essays in which each paired cogitation appeared.

I first mentioned "lateral meaning" in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, which contains one of those word pairs I abandoned ("underthought and overthought"). And later I perfected the application of both lateral and vertical meaning in THE LATERAL AND VERTICAL MEANINGS OF LIFE.    

The duality of "what things happen" and "how things happen" is discussed in WHAT VS. HOW.

"Functionality" and "super-functionality" are first discussed in the 2014 essay A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY.

Perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge appear in the works of both Arthur Schopenhauer and William James.   

Assorted essays on William James discuss the Two Forms of Knowledge, while Alfred North Whitehead is my source of the terms "epistemic" and "pre-epistemic."

The terms "might and myth," a slight play on the standard phrase "might and main," appears in MIGHT AND MYTH. The somewhat more involved cogitations concerning the "dynamicity mode" and the "combinatory mode" of sublimity are explored in the series TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I, beginning here. 

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3

 In January I wrote two essays under the heading DUELING DUALITIES, here and here, regarding how William James' "two forms of knowledge" probably influenced Carl Jung's four functions. The first essay is also one of those incidents where I used the words "ontology" and "epistemology" a bit incorrectly. I corrected that oversight in May of this year with A TALE OF TWO COSMS, substituting the terms "ontocosm" as "the totality of lateral values" in a work and "epicosm" as "the totality of vertical values." 

In TALE, I gave an example of two classic comics-serials in which one showed a stronger epicosm than an ontocosm, and vice versa:

Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm.  

I should qualify this, though, by stating that FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age (particularly Stan Lee's red-headed stepchild, the Pym of a Thousand Names). In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them. This may be because, IMO, The Inhumans were primarily Jack Kirby's concept, and Stan Lee never really "got" them. So, taking in the totality of lateral elements-- which are, I should reiterate, the elements through which readers most directly relate to the characters' exploits-- the FF-ontocosm is weaker than that of SPIDER-MAN. These factors may also relate to the reasons why SPIDER-MAN quickly overtook FANTASTIC FOUR as the flagship of the Marvel line, while the FF often struggled to remain relevant in the decades following the Silver Age.  

Possibly because Lee and Ditko were so focused upon melodramatic exigencies, though, there wasn't much room to focus on dialectical and mythopoeic values. Ditko's villains are "marvels" of costume design, but they don't arouse many abstract associations in comparison to Galactus, the Puppet Master, The Red Ghost, Klaw and Doctor Doom. This contrast raises the possibility that, to borrow from another set of Jamesian terms, SPIDER-MAN was focused more on "the perceptual" while FANTASTIC FOUR was focused more on "the conceptual."  More on these matters later, perhaps.         

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."     

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Doyle character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

WHITE NOISE

I've posted a short review of Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS here, noting one of the more interesting philosophical observations:

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing.  But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

Perhaps because Robinson's characters exist in an era far removed from the twentieth century, they don't discuss in detail the archaic origin of their philosophical ideas. Indeed, Robinson has a little bit of fun with the idea of attribution, implying that over time scholars may simply get things wrong, as when one character calls modern literary critic Harold Bloom an "alchemist." However, Dent Ios's dual forms of knowledge may have been borrowed from a similar dualism propounded by Bertrand Russell in 1910: "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." That said, Russell's duality seems to have been preceded, according to this Wikipedia entry, by similar formulations by at least three other philosophers: John Grote, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James. I have no idea what if any indebtedness Russell might have to these predecessors, but James apparently reproduces Grote's categories exactly in James's 1890 book THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Now, most of these philosophers seem to be talking about how humans organize knowledge according to what James calls "perceptual" and "conceptual" knowledge. The characters of MEMORY, however, are not concerned with the way language encodes perceptions, but with the way that music, the least "linguistic" of the arts, does so. On the next page following Dent Ios's assertion, he adds that, "Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static." This seems like an odd thing to say right after he's claimed that discursive knowledge is as important as that of acquaintance. The second statement seems to privilege the dynamism of the direct sense-experience, and to downgrade the "static" qualities of what Grote and James call "knowledge-about." In the 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer categorically downgrades music as against the more "assertive" arts:

 "[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

I would tend to agree with Langer more than with Robinson's characters. For exanople, although I agree that discursive knowledge is *primarily* linear, I don't think it is necessarily "static." Great philosophers-- and critics-- always combine the linear/horizontal logic of the discursive process with what I have called "vertical meaning." Such meaning is put forth roughly along the same lines that Levi-Strauss imagines myths being a combination of "harmonic" and "melodic" elements. Plato's TIMAEUS, in seeking to describe the perfect society already envisaged in THE REPUBLIC, does not depend purely on linear logic but finesses that logic with a mythic image from outside the immediate argument: the image of the city Atlantis, whose extinction signals a counter-example to the "perfect society" once represented by its contemporary opponent Athens. 

LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 4

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities, - his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted; that even when their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.-- William James, THE WILL TO BELIEVE.

In PART 3 I said that I would "address pluralism's vision of freedom."  This, I reiterate, must be opposed to the dominant idea of "free will" as elaborated by Judeo-Christian philosophy: that the entire purpose-- or perhaps, *the telos*-- of free will is to encourage the subject to make "the right choice" over "the wrong choice."  Modern elitist criticism, or at least those critical outlooks that subscribe to a reductive vision of life, dispenses with Judeo-Christian standards, but preserves the supremacy of the "right choice/wrong choice" dichotomy:

We may never be truly free, but those who know that they are not free have reached a superior level of cognition to those who are unaware of the fact.

I refuted this reductionist view by citing philosopher Larry Krasnoff and lit-critic Leslie Fiedler:

Krasnoff and Fiedler, albeit in very different ways, advocate a form of agency in the human subject; an ability to choose, even when one makes the wrong choice in a given situation.

For both of them "agency" requires the will to "overturn all external constraints." Fiedler might not agree in all respects with the second part of Krasnoff's formula: that the same subject would " realize that this [overturning] is a futile and irrational activity."  Still, he was undoubtedly aware that many individuals did disavow their early rabble-rousing: in one essay Fiedler castigates William Faulkner for having reduced the taboo-breaking characters of his 1931 novel SANCTUARY into much milder forms in the 1950 work REQUIEM FOR A NUN.  That said, Fiedler in his own mature years clearly set himself apart from the ethical and aesthetic critics, emphasizing rather an appreciation of the "ecstatic" nature of art.

This ecstatic nature, found equally in art-as-work and art-as-play, bears on the idea of freedom as being a will oriented not as fulfilling any particular utilitarian agenda, but as what William James calls the "quest for the superfluous."  In elitist circles this human love of superfluity is often condemned as essentially "escapist." In essence Stuart Kendall agrees with James in his Bataille-derived statement, stressing that the forces of necessity and "consumption" are secondary to those of "expenditure:"

Consumption is, in short, a means by which individuals negotiate their identities through expenditure.-- Stuart Kendall, GEORGE BATAILLE.

I should note in passing that Bataille's meditations on this subject were certainly informed by his reading of Nietzsche, another prophet of ecstacy, under the rubric "will to power:"

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.-- Friedrich Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

I think Nietzsche overstates the case somewhat: for me neither the will toward practical self-maintenance nor the will toward expenditure are "cardinal."  Kendall's statement, though it privileges "expenditure" over "consumption" somewhat, shows the two tendencies as innately interdependent.

By now the experienced reader of this blog may anticipate that my definition of freedom is going to be no less twofold than the definiton of art cited above. However, there is a difference: art is fundamentally about play, even when that play is turned to the purpose of utilitarian work.  But freedom, and its expression in humans in the form of free will, is not fundamentally oriented on "play" or on "work."

For the pluralist the best understanding of freedom may be seen through an appreciation for a plurality of choices, rather than the ritualized choices between "good" and "bad" as encoded by religion or by philosophy, particularly that of Kant, who at times seems to be reinstuting the old maxim that "service is perfect freedom."  I do not define freedom as service, but neither is it rebellion against service.

I am not arguing for relativism, but rather a form of Nietzchean perspectivism.  Free will proves difficult not because it's hard to choose the straight path over the crooked path, or to choose tough-minded reductive realism over escapist fantasy.  It's difficult because we as humans can see every situation from many perspectives, and can only choose in terms of what we think may lead to the best conclusion.

In some situations, moral rigor may be called for.  However many factors contributed to America's decision to oppose the Axis powers in World War II-- initially through indirect means, such as the lend-lease program-- some degree of moral umbrage informed that decision.

And yet, at another time and place, moral rigor was misplaced.  American soldiers returned from the war and almost immediately started looking for new foes to fight, whether they were Communists or comic books.

Fredric Wertham was certainly a demagogue who had no appreciation for the function of *expenditure* in children's entertainment: for him, children were meant to be nurtured like flowers in a garden.  One can see a slight validity in his queasiness: few would agree that children should be exposed to everything adults can behold.  But Wertham's narrow definition of the process of "self-preservation" made him blind to a type of "play" that was fundamentally harmless.

At the same time, one cannot always live on a quest for the superfluous.  While I've railed against critics like Berlatsky and Darius for trying to reduce art to a series of "right choices," I'm aware that art-as-play needs art-as-work as a complementary force.

Ergo, pluralist freedom is the free will to choose-- even when one makes the wrong choice-- with the knowledge that *the wrong choice always has the potential to be the right choice in another set of circumstances.*