OO, THOSE AWFUL ONTOLOGIES

My title references an essay by snob-critic Edmund Wilson, who sneered at THE LORD OF THE RINGS with a snotty essay, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs." I say, if you're going to steal, steal from elitists; that way, you're just stealing from cheats.

My most sustained thoughts on the subject of "ontology" came about from my relatively recent attempts to suss out the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Even before finishing his most famous philosophical book, PROCESS AND REALITY, I wrote this essay to draw comparisons between his system and mine, based on a perceived conflict between his ontology and my epistemology. In response to Whitehead's statement that his philosophy concerned "the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world," I wrote: 

It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

I later referred to all such "data" as half-truths, because that's how "truth" operates in fiction. But in more recent months, I began to consider, in the essay A NOSE FOR GNOSIS, that Whitehead's concept of an "ontology of subjective data" might parallel my concept of an "an ontology of fiction," by which I mean everything that *literally* takes place within a fictional discourse."

...I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description."

A new wrinkle I'll now add on top of these previous observations is the following:

Since fictional ontology, whether one defines it as "literal content" or as "pre-epistemic prehensions," is comparable to "knowledge-by-acquaintance" rather than "knowledge-by-description," all judgments based on taste spring from a subject's response to a fictional work's ontology.

In 2012's THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, I defined the function of taste thusly: 

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

I still maintain that taste is not a matter of abstract justifications, though one can amuse oneself by debating the logical propositions that others use to justify the superiority of their tastes. Taste relates to the audience's identification with the travails, deserved or not, of fictional characters, and that means identifying with a work's internal ontology. 

The aforementioned Gary Groth, for instance, has often ridiculed the genre of superheroes with a variety of intellectual justifications. His few comments on his early comics-fandom have painted a picture of his younger self as simply ignorant of literary principles. But there's no reason to take Groth's word for his self-evaluation: that he formerly had the propensity to identify with fictional superheroes but then recognized their absurdity for intellectual reasons. A lot of readers fall out of love with a lot of genres that they may love intensely for a time, only to tire of them and chase after some other passion. Ontological identification arises from the reader's perception that the ontology reflects something he or she would like to see play out, regardless as to whether the fictional scenario reflects something the reader would like to see transpire in reality.

Now, if I am correct that reader-taste stems from identification with a work's ontology, how does that influence the same reader's ability to suss out a work's epistemology? My answer is that the reader's non-intellectual tastes can indeed influence whether or not one appreciates the epistemology that can be used to justify the ontology. Even without reading Edmund Wilson's famous anti-Tolkien essay, the title alone tells one that Wilson cannot countenance the basic appeal of villains who repel the reader on the basis of their ugliness and their violence. I'm sure Wilson had all sorts of intellectual justifications for that position, but I don't think that his judgments of taste, any more than those of Groth, stem from intellect, but from an ability, or lack of ability, to identify with the basic-- one might say "pre-epistemic"-- propositions of an ontological scenario. And if one can't grok the "knowledge by acquaintance," one is unlikely to find any validity in the "knowledge by description" used to justify the abstract principles aligning with the pure events of the story.

"CHALLENGE OF THE GIANT FIREFLIES," MYSTERY IN SPACE #67, 1961)

 

"Challenge of the Giant Fireflies" is not one of writer Gardner Fox's better titles, though he might have emphasized the incredible insects just because big fireflies looked neat on a comic-book cover. The true challenge for hero Adam Strange is a race of fire-creatures who supposedly live in the sun of Adam's solar system, and the big bugs are just the champion's means of "fighting fire with fire."

Adam's regularly scheduled sojourn to the alien world of Rann (and to his beloved Alanna) gets delayed when the means of his cosmic traversal, the Zeta-beam hits a solar prominence and temporarily carries a fire-creature from the sun to Rann. Parenthetically, Alanna mentions that for once, Rann's scientists solved another crisis without input from the Earthman, as a plague of big fireflies presented a danger but were largely quelled by weapons that extinguish the insects' fiery tails. Fortunately for the Rannians, this doesn't kill the bugs, but only eliminates their ability to create conflagrations. Fox skirts the fact that the bioluminescence of the real insects doesn't give off heat, though maybe the mutation of the little bugs into big ones changes that biological aspect.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "Sun-Beings" is that they don't have any desire to conquer or destroy Rann. They're utterly unaware of other worlds until the Zeta-beam snatched one of their number and temporarily deposits him on Rann. The effect wears off and the first Sun-Being goes back where he came from, but because he gained the power of sight on Rann, he talks his kindred into traversing the gulfs of space back to that world. (Bloody lucky they don't just decide to visit the third planet from their domain.) The Sun-Beings' only motive seems to be curiosity, and they presumably don't even understand that they're a danger to the residents. 

Though not a scientist himself, Adam knows his high school science and determines that they can put out the fire-aliens with carbon dioxide. And then the survival of the giant fireflies proves fortunate, so that the Rannians can ride the heat-resistant critters into battle and spray the Sun-Beings into extinction-- except for one, whom Adam allows to escape to make sure its brethren stay in their own solar courtyard. (Again, nothing about Fox's scenario keeps the Sun-Beings from visiting other worlds in the DC Universe.)

Naive as the story may be in some particulars, I find that Fox and artist Carmine Infantino are having some good myth-making fun with the phenomenon of fire, not unlike the way Windsor McCay did with cold phenomena in LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE. The deviations from actual science don't lessen the mythic discourse, for as I've frequently written, the truths of myth are strong precisely because they are "half-truths."

DIDACTICISM DELIBERATIONS

Originally this essay was meant to build on my distinction between problems and conundrums. In my September 2023 post WHAT VS. HOW, I gave examples of two narratives which used a particular psychological source of knowledge, that of Freud, as a "half-truth" to set up conflicts between fictional characters. The first narrative dealt only with the ontological pattern in terms of "what things happened in the story," so it used its pattern superficially, just to create a "problem" that the characters could solve. (A superficial use of the pattern would also be a "problem" even if the characters failed to solve the difficulty.) The second narrative did make a thorough use of its epistemological pattern in such a way that it illustrated a "conundrum" for the audience. This level of difficulty would continue to exist for real people in their world, no matter whether the characters did or did not solve the way the conundrum manifested in their world. Originally, I wanted to emphasize that fictional works in which the author thoroughly explores a given epistemological pattern parallel the way real humans beings are obliged, by the nature of the reality they experience, to judge the patterns of that reality and make decisions on their interpretations of experience.

However, in the course of ruminating, I reread another epistemological post from May of this same year, FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. In this post I distinguished two complementary terms, the "stereotype" and the "simple variable," as distinct from two other complementary terms, the "archetype" and the "complex variable," in that the latter possessed a greater than average functionality, itself termed "super-functionality."

All well and good, according to my system. But "stereotype" and "archetype" only apply to one of the two "vertical" systems by which authors and audiences derive knowledge-based meaning from stories. That virtue belongs to the "mythopoeic potentiality," which manifests through the elaboration of the *quanta* I term "correlations."

Still okay, but I've not said nearly enough about the other vertical system, the didactic potentiality, whose quanta I've termed "cogitations." Stereotypes and archetypes have often been applied to symbolic discourse, so those terms don't translate well to talking about didactic constructions of meaning. But I've certainly seen cogitations that I thought were simple and merely functional, as against those that are complex and super-functional-- but for the time being, I'm proposing no new terms for these respective states. 

In my survey of the individual episodes of Classic STAR TREK, I'm sure I generally confined myself to exploring the mythopoeic correlations of each episode. But in theory, I *could* have explored that particular series purely in terms of whether its didactic cogitations were "functional" or "super-functional." Here are two examples.

As most TREK fans know, showrunner Gene Roddenberry was an avowed atheist. Nevertheless, the scripts he accepted for filming (and which he always re-wrote to suit his beliefs) sometimes involved the role of religion in the future-culture of the Federation, and Roddenberry did not present a standard atheist's view of religion. He knew his audience would not accept overt atheism, so often the producer accepted scripts that simply talked in general terms about the role of religion in society.

I gave the second season episode a poor rating "Bread and Circuses" in terms of its mythopoeic correlations, but it doesn't fare any better in terms of didactic cogitations, as should be clear from this excerpt:

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are initially captured by a resistance-group fighting Roman hegemony. They are much puzzled by the members' claim to be worshipers of the Sun, and McCoy even states, with amazing falsity, that the Romans of Earth had no sun-worship. By the end of the episode, though, it's revealed that the renegades are actually the Christians of this pseudo-Earth; they just took an extra 2000 years to show up. Despite an early claim in the story that the Federation embraces many religions, the story ends on an egregiously proselytizing note. Safe back on the ship, the crew-members content themselves with the ideal-- derived from many a Cecil B. de Mille movie, no doubt-- that in due time the evil of the Romans will be conquered by the goodness of the Christians. One may safely assume that Magna Roma's destined religion will also eventually lead to liberal democracy.

In my view, the episode advanced the didactic view that the pattern of cultural development seen on Earth was going to be duplicated on the world of Magna Roma: brutal polytheism being succeeded by a kinder, gentler monotheism, which is turn would be succeeded (though the episode does not directly say so) by the sort of secular humanism one beholds in TREK. It's in such a secular humanism that it's possible, as my note specifies, that many religions can prosper alongside one another, though it's a mark of Roddenberry's true sentiments that one hardly ever sees religious celebrations either on the Enterprise or in Federation colonies. I think the proselytizing note with which "Bread" ends was nothing but protective coloration, to diffuse any possible accusations of "space atheists," but whether I'm right or not, the proselytization contradicts the earlier statement of overall tolerance, and so the "cogitation" is not well executed. Even the reference to "panem et circenses" in the title fizzles out after the first arena-scenes.

In contrast, another second-season episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais," while it only rates "fair" in terms of its mythic correlations, might enjoy a "good" rating in terms of didactic cogitations. I would surmise that Roddenberry was probably more in sympathy with the story's ethos, even though again he threw in a minor anti-atheistic statement:

The trope of "aliens who were once Earth-gods" has always been absurd, but Coon and Ralston strive to give it some gravitas. On one hand the future-men declare that they no longer need the parenting influence of gods-- though, perhaps to keep from sounding too atheistic, Kirk delivers a line about finding it adequate to have "one" god. On the other hand, the script attempts to capture the Glory That Was Greece in this science-fictional context, and to admit, however obliquely, that all human culture descends from early man's attempts to understand the universe through a multiplicity of deities.

This script is not interested in the actual dynamics of Greek religion any more than "Bread" was interested in the dynamics of early Christianity. Still, there's a much better understanding of how early religion provides a foundation for secular humanism, even though the two seem opposed. That's why, following Apollo's defeat and extirpation, Kirk wistfully wishes they could have burned one laurel leaf to the memory of the deities that brought humanity out of ignorance. And so "Adonais" provides a "super-functional" cogitation, and for good measure works as a elaborate "conundrum" within the didactic potentiality, while the story of Magna Roma is merely a superficial "problem."

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

WHAT VS. HOW

 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.-- THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH.

Today I thought of a simpler way to distinguish "problems" from "conundrums" as I originally defined them in  2021's PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS, to wit:

A narrative's "problems," its lateral/literal virtues as expressed through either the kinetic potentiality, the dramatic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concern WHAT THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

A narrative's "conundrums," its vertical virtues as expressed through the either the didactic potentiality, the mythopoeic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concerns HOW THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

I gave a few examples of specific problems and conundrums in the 2021 essay, but rather than go over the same ground, I'll try to show how one of the examples I gave in FULL VALUE can apply across the "problem/conundrum" continuum. I haven't encountered a surfeit of stories about the Hollow Earth, but certainly there should be a number of ways in which Freud's Oedipal theory has been used for both lateral and vertical formulations.

In the interest of testing my theory on as broad a canvas as possible, I'll choose my examples from among the most recent analyses I made of Oedipal narratives on my movie blog, rather than choosing examples from famous franchises like DRACULA or PSYCHO.

The very last Oedipal narrative I examined happens to fall into the category of "what things happen." The cheapie sword-and-sorcery adventure EYES OF THE SERPENT uses what might be termed a feminine "Oedipal conflict," but it uses the pattern only for the dramatic potentiality. In the rambling narrative, young princess Fiona falls in love with roving (and somewhat kooky) swordsman Galen. Fiona enlists Galen to help Fiona's mother Neema fight Neema's enemies and regain control of the kingdom. However, Neema covertly puts the moves on the younger Galen. It's loosely implied that Neema does so in order to keep control of the warrior, rather than her doing so just because she's attracted to him. In this, Neema is the mirror image of her sister Corva, in that both are ruthless in their pursuit of power, and the movie's conclusion, in which the two sisters destroy one another in battle, indicates that the "lateral meaning" of EYES is to validate the more innocent Fiona as the royal figure who deserves to control the realm. I will happily admit that the story of EYES has only a fitful claim to the dramatic potentiality. However, the scene in which Galen tells Fiona about Neema's treachery, and Fiona refuses to believe him, does have the bare function of establishing that at some point Fiona must come to terms with Neema's corrupt nature and bind herself to the comparatively virtuous Galen.

In contrast, the last Oedipal narrative I examined which concerns "how things happen" is 2010's THE WOLFMAN. In my review, I contrasted the clear Freudian schema of this film in comparison to the 1941 classic.

There's no rational-minded, overbearing dad this time. Scripters Walker and Self wanted a Heavy Father straight out of Freud's TOTEM AND TABOO. The original Larry Talbot left the British Isles for America for reasons loosely associated with sibling rivalry. In contrast, Lawrence is sent to an asylum after he, as a child, claims to have witnessed Sir John's act of uxoricide, slaying Lawrence's mother during one of the lord's beast transformations. (Lawrence, unlike Larry, at least has a mother in his story.) After years of being treated by the barbaric alienists of the late 1800s, Lawrence recants his story and becomes an actor. (I'm convinced Walker and Self made this alteration to the protagonist's background simply so that they could reference HAMLET, which Freud famously associated with Oedipal urges.) 

One point I didn't cover in detail is that the film implies an equivalence between both violence and sex in the wolf-persona of Sir John, though I did address somewhat the Freudian concept of the "primal scene:"

Freud hypothesized that children who witnessed their parents having sex for the first time-- the so-called "primal scene"-- might believe that the mother was being attacked, or even murdered. Lawrence sees his mother murdered for real, and then his brother is slain because his father craves the brother's future wife. 

To expand on this formulation slightly, even though Sir John gets his werewolf curse from an outside source, his actions can only be explained by Freudian dynamics about sex and violence, which explain "how things happen" in the WOLFMAN world. Sir John's murder of his wife can logically be viewed as the beast's way of satisfying both a lust for sex and for violence, though the film does not make this proposition explicit. But if it is true that the beast slew Lawrence's mother to satisfy both bloodlust and sex-lust, then it follows that deep down Sir John intends to wreak the same violence upon Gwen, whom Sir John believes to have a resemblance to the unnamed mother of Lawrence and the late Ben. (Viewers don't see the mother, so the default assumption would be that Sir John is correct about the resemblance, and it certainly fits the Freudian paradigm that both of the mother's sons fixate upon Gwen for the same reason Sir John does.)

So the TOTEM AND TABOO paradigm of a father-son battle is carried out in a very different manner from a similar trope in 1941's WOLF MAN, meaning that Lawrence must defeat his vicious father in lycanthropic battle. In the review I mentioned in passing that Lawrence, unlike Fiona in EYES OF THE SERPENT, does not prosper after slaying the Heavy Father. I stated that Gwen shoots Beast-Lawrence with a silver bullet to spare him further suffering. However, Beast-Lawrence is by his nature as great a physical threat to Gwen as was his nasty dad, and so there's certainly an element of self-protection in Gwen's action as well. By her action Gwen alone is spared the holocaust of the Oedipal conflict, though of course the film has no interest in what happens to her once the story is over. 

I may conceive of other demonstrates between the pathways taken by "what" versus those of "how," but for now these two suffice for my purposes.

THE INFORMAL POSTULATE

 As I started the prologue of the 2007 film criticism book HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY, I encountered this justification of the book's premise:

Many viewers have observed that Alfred Hitchcock focuses on ideas in the construction of his films. The French director-critics Claude Chabrol and Eric Roemer... claimed that each of his classic films is based on a sort of "formal postulate."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of Hitchcock's signature works are "idea-centered," but it's certainly fair to say that certain ones, particularly ROPE and VERTIGO, have a sort of ordered intellectual approach that I tend to line up with what I've termed "the didactic potentiality." However, I don't see so much focus on ideas in such films as 1943's SHADOW OF A DOUBT or 1960's PSYCHO. To invoke my own terminology once again, the latter two seem to belong to the mythopoeic potentiality, in that the films focus more on correlations than cogitations.

But I can understand the editors of the Hitchcock book seeking to draw parallels between the popular productions of the director and the high-toned cogitations of philosophy. In fact, even though I don't agree with Chabrol and Roemer, I'm glad that they advanced the term "formal postulate," because this fits in with the rational discursiveness of the didactic potentiality. In contrast, works heavily invested in the mythopoeic potentiality might be said to be more concerned with "informal postulates." This notion reminds me not only of my own notion of "half-truths," but also the way film-critic Raymond Durgnat summarized the appeal of the Frankenstein Monster terms of symbolic oppositions:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

But when one wishes to convince others that a given work, medium or genre deserves respect, it's a lot easier to persuade an audience using the idea of formal postulates than informal ones. Informal postulates communicate, "I think this hidden complexity is there,"  while formal postulates make it sound as though the complexity is there for anyone to see. 

I also encountered this preference, possibly expressed on an unconscious level, when I finished Jess Nevins' interview with Alan Moore in the 2004 concordance A BLAZING WORLD. On page 254, one reads Moore claiming that his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series is predicated, at least in part, in "pulling down the barriers between High Literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that." Makes Moore sound like he's kissing-cousins with Durgnat's advocacy of "the poetry in pulp," right? But then on page 267 he advances this lofty sentiment:

Art is not about reassuring people. We don't read Art to be reassured, we read Art to be challenged and to challenge our assumptions and to maybe extend our ideas in certain areas, which you really can't do without challenging them.

No poetry here, despite the fact that Moore has produced some of the most resonant poetic-pulp in the annals of the comics medium. This "formal postulate" rather sounds a lot like what Northrop Frye wrote of those critics he called "Iliad critics" with respect to their idea of literature's purpose:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

Without repeating myself too much, I've also noted that Frye's two breeds of critic, "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics," seem to line up, respectively. with the mythoi of drama and irony for the first and with comedy and adventure for the second. One might agree with Moore that the former mythoi emphasize the challenging of assumptions, but if so, that would only be because those mythoi depend on putting their characters in deeply conflicted situations. In contrast, it's evident that a great deal of comedy and adventure does offer a kind of "reassurance," though maybe not in the way Moore imagines that reaction. That reassurance might be better compared to Tolkien's concept of "consolation."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(I note in passing that in the course of the interview Moore expresses a distaste for Tolkien's signature work in the context of complaining about "big, stupid clashes between good and evil.")

In conclusion, I realize that to some extent the preference for intellectual directness over intuitional indirectness is an individual one. However, knowing that does not make me amend my preferences in any way.

ADDENDUM: I thought I might expand further on the "formal/informal" dichotomy accidentally implied by the editors of HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY. However, upon re-reading my own CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS, I see that I included a reference to Whitehead's concept of "prehensions and apprehensions," glossed by another writer's assertion that the former focuses upon "soulful understanding" (aligned in my system to the mythopoeic potentiality), while  the latter focuses "intellectual understanding" (aligned in my system to the didactic potentiality). That's probably enough expatiation on the "formal/informal" dichotomy for now.

ABUNDANT EXCHANGES

I've now finished the remainder of Stuart A. Kaufman's INVESTIGATIONS. To be sure, I had to skip most of the heavily statistical stuff, but I flatter myself that I understood most if not all of Kauffman's abstruse concepts. 

In THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1, I primarily contemplated Kauffman's response to Wittgenstein's philosophy vis-a-vis "codefinition," which parallels Kauffman's concept of "coevolution." Briefly summarized, Kauffman believes that evolution is not always, as in the popular paradigm, a matter of each individual organism blindly chancing upon whatever adaptations help that organism survive. Survival is still paramount in Kauffman's universe, but in some situations evolution may have taken place due to an exchange between two separate entities-- for instance, as may have happened when some prokaryotic cells bonded with others in order to produce eukaryotic cells. which unlike the earlier type of cell possess a nucleus and mitochondria. I note in passing that in 1967 Lynn Sagan/Margulis termed this process "endosymbiosis," but for whatever reason Kauffman does not use this term or mention Margulis in the bibliography to INVESTIGATIONS. 

Kauffman devotes most of the book to coevolution. This doctrine hinges on the concept that organisms co-evolve not by blind chance alone-- though Kauffman does not deny the chance-factor of mutations-- but out of some prehension (as Whitehead would term it) of a need for greater diversity and therefore abundance. From page 150:

...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world.

The idea of such a "knowing" is of course anathema to reductive science, which cannot imagine organisms without brains as manifesting anything like consciousness, much less a desire for abundance. I interpose that word, which is not in INVESTIGATIONS, in keeping with my one use of it in the essay ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY, just to keep myself on track about relating Kauffman's biological theories to my cultural/literary theories.

Kauffman devotes his next to last chapter, "The Persistently Innovative Econosphere," to a sustained comparison of biological exchange (in the "biosphere") with the human custom of trade (in the "econosphere," saying:

The advantages of trade predate the human condition among autonomous agents. Advantages of trade are found in the metabolic exchange of legume root nodule and fungi, sugar for fixed nitrogen carried in amino acids. Advantages of trade were found among the mixed microbial and algal communities along the littoral of the earth's oceans four billion years ago. The trading of the econosphere is an outgrowth of the trading of the biosphere.

Kauffman also disputes the definition of exchange as based in the scarcity of goods, and instead champions an aesthetic of diversity/abundance, saying on page 227: 

Think of the Wright Brothers' airplane. It was a recombination between an airfoil, a light gasoline engine, bicycle wheels, and a propeller. The more objects an economy has, the more novel objects can be constructed.

This statement bears on what I deem the "narratosphere"s" need for novel objects, which also depends on the recombination of elements taken from the co-defined spheres of "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint," as discussed in WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2.  This is why, throughout the history of this blog, I have disputed "Iliad critics" who interpret fictional narrative as comprising a vast series of moral or rational lectures. While the cogitations of cognitive restraint are indispensable to fiction, said cogitations cannot produce novel objects in themselves. The correlations of affective freedom are necessary to break through habitual patterns of thought. (I note in passing a possible comparison between Kant's distinctions between productive and reproductive imagination, explored in 2011's FINDING SIGMUND PART 1.)

The belief that literature can and should pursue all imaginative linkages-- even those that some may find tainted by racial or sexual chauvinism-- lies at the heart of my devotion to the practice of archetypal criticism.

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE PT. 2

Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific "causes" and specific effects, mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal... Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46.

In Part 1, I wrote:

...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.

The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions. Once more with feeling:

The DIDACTIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

Ernst Cassirer's passage above is one of many I've cited to clarify how modern "empirical thinking" (or "theoretical thinking" in other passages) develop out of mythical thinking. Both "symbols" and "ideas" are abstract constructions, but symbols offer the artist "a free selection of causes"-- which I have aligned with my concept of "affective freedom"-- while ideas depend more upon establishing a chain of cause and effect, which I have aligned with "cognitive restraint." But both abstract constructions depend upon the use of fictive epistemology.

Now, to repeat my conclusion from Part 1, all epistemology in fiction can only lead the reader to the experience of "half-truths," whereas epistemology in philosophy can lead the reader to the perception of "truth," at least for that particular reader.

In CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2,  I discussed some of the interpenetrations of the mythopoeic and the didactic potentiality. My example of a work dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality was Gardner Fox's Hawkman origin, but even while establishing that primacy, I also mentioned that the author had utilized "metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents." In contrast, the various CEREBUS excerpts I analyzed were all dominated by the didactic potentiality, but I asserted that author Dave Sim was at his best when he created an "expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought."

Nevertheless, even though Fox is of the "affective freedom" party and Sim of the "cognitive restraint" persuasion, both authors construct their narratives around principles of an abstract nature, and so are both purveyors of sacred half-truths.

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

From the first posts on this blog, I've asserted a commonality, though not an absolute identity, between religious myth and all later forms of literature. I've also claimed that the basis of that commonality is "symbolic complexity." Here I want to address in greater detail the way this complexity operates in both myth and literature.

I'll start with my reading of Jung:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked.

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.-- JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (2012)

Since Jung was focused almost entirely upon explaining everything in myth and literature in terms of "inner psychic events," I've frequently turned to Joseph Campbell to deal with the specific ways that myth and literature translate "outer sense experiences" into archetypal discourse.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.-- INCEST WE TRUST PART 5 (2010)

In the first citation I spoke of ancient myth-tellers orienting their stories upon "sacred clues" regarding "the nature of divine power." Such "clues" might be better termed "epistemological patterns," whether they fall into one or more of Campbell's four categories. Further, when I used the phrase "the nature of the divine power," I was not speaking of my own interpretation of the symbolic process in myth and literature. Rather, I sought to approximate the way that an ancient myth-teller *might* believe that his observations about celestial movement or vegetative reproduction reflected something vital about either his gods or the ways in which the gods chose to make the world.  For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Now, Wikipedia supplies a detailed definition of epistemology as it is generally used in philosophy.

Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,^[1][2] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",^[3] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",^[4] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?

By this definition, neither myth nor literature are relevant to epistemology as it exists in philosophical discourse. These expressive forms assert epistemological patterns but even the most complex works of myth and literature do not seek to subject these patterns to sustained philosophical inquiry. I wrote last year:

...literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

(Parenthetically, I'll note though this quote addresses only literature, I see the same spectrum in archaic mythology as well: some myths are oriented on "affirming" truths that are pleasing to a given community, while others are more free-form.)

So if philosophical epistemology is concerned with the nature of absolute truth-- even if it might be, as in William James, to disprove its existence-- then mythico-literary epistemology is concerned only with "half-truths," with exposing its audience to pure possibilities. Supposing that one could find a particular storyteller who first contextualized the daily revolution of the sun as "Helios driving his chariot across the sky." That storyteller might "affirm" this story in a religious sense, in that he might choose to believe that Helios or some other god inspired to relate the narrative, or he might know that it was purely his own conceit. But no matter what his personal attitude toward his story might be, the story can still go one of two ways for his audience: either believing the story as a literal revelation or simply regarding the narrative as a useful metaphor for a largely incomprehensible physical phenomenon.

The phrase "epistemological patterns" more or less supplants a term I used only once in COSMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS, that of "simulacra of knowledge:"

Thus it should be seen that the forms of knowledge within a fictional universe should not be downgraded because they do not align with what is deemed "scientific knowledge" in the real world. All forms of knowledge in a fictional universe should be deemed *simulacra of knowledge.*  The same holds true for the other functions. Audiences need not believe in Jung's psychological concepts to regard Fellini's Jung-influenced films as illuminating the human condition; need not validate the socialist fallacy of "the rise of the proletariat" in order to derive pleasure from Jack London's IRON HEEL, nor even credit Dave Sim's fusion of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to get insights out of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK.

Further, the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, I will trace back my preference for "half-truths" over alleged "philosophical truths" in my definition of "affective freedom from 2016's AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.