COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 3

I won't spend a lot of time on the "cavils" I mentioned in Part 2, but the main one relates to author Ray Nayler's decision to use an eccentric pronoun whenever referencing his intelligent, but sexless, android Evrim-- for that pronoun is the now notorious "them." "Them," as many readers will know, is a pronoun enlisted by "non-gender-conforming human beings" to signal their independence from gendered pronouns. 

As far as I can tell, Nayler's 2022 novel THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA takes no position whatever on the concept of gender neutrality. MOUNTAIN is, however, without question a novel imbricated in Liberal (but not necessarily Ultraliberal) politics. The protagonist is a female biologist of Vietnamese ancestry, and her quest is to learn whether or not the sea holds a new intelligent species of life, derived from the non-intelligent species of the octopus family. The novel largely takes place in Asia, not just because Doctor Ha is conducting her studies on a Vietnamese archipelago but so that the author can focus upon a largely Asian cast of characters. Most tellingly, one of the other main characters is also a female biologist, something of a rival to Doctor Ha, and it's a validation of the infamous "Bechdel Test," in that when these two women get together, they definitely aren't discussing men.

All fine and dandy; I observe these tropes but do not condemn them. However, in Ha's extended lecture on the human propensity for language, and for imagining things that "are not here," I wondered if the author was working in an unspoken defense of just about every subgroup that feels itself marginalized by some more numerically dominant subgroup. After all, the android Evrim, whom Ha claims to be human because he participates in the "symbolic world," despite "how you are born."

All of this could be food for a greater discussion than Nayler provides in his novel. But I will note in passing that in her defense of language's symbolic, "unreal" qualities, Ha mentions that language can also be used to promote "absurdities." Again, as I said in Part 2, Nayler does not attack what I would consider the pat "absurdities" that an Ultraliberal would usually attack. So I will do Nayler the courtesy of not claiming, as do some Conservatives, that "non-gender-affirming" persons are themselves "absurdities." But it's certainly arguable that some of the POSITIONS endorsed by persons in this subgroup are absurdities. For example, if a male is sentenced to a prison term, he can "claim to be a woman" and perforce be confined in a women's prison, simply because the authorities don't want to provoke a legal battle. Such a legally spawned delusion is also a result of language's potential for distortion, as much as any spawned by religion or philosophy.

COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 2

 This essay is loosely related to the 2018 essay through this statement therein:

For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

The initiating subject of this essay, however, is a passage from a 2022 science fiction novel I don't intend to review, one which has nothing to do with the earlier essay's assertions on Rousseau, though I have a feeling that author Ray Nayler would be generally receptive to Rousseau's concept of freedom, rather than mine.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA is the "zoomer" version of a 1930s SF-lecture novel, in which the author uses the bare bones of a fictional conflict as a means of illustrating said author's theories on science, philosophy, history et al. I was not engaged enough by MOUNTAIN to get more than a general overview of the story, which I blame on the fact that the author's characters are little more than sounding boards for his lectures-- a failing I detect in most of the modern SF-books I've attempted to read. So I will not attempt to move this MOUNTAIN with any analytical review. But in the one passage I mentioned, Nayler does make a statement about the human imagination that I found loosely comparable with the one I made above.

In the lecture about to be cited, female biologist Ha Nguyen has just witnessed an intelligent android, name of Evrim, rage against a third party who regarded Evrim as a "robot," which offended Evrim deeply. Ha seeks out the android to explain her take on language and humanity.

Language doesn't just allow us to describe the world as it exists. It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways-- to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. 

After going on a little longer about things Ha considers "absurdities," she pronounces Evrim to be human despite his artificial origins.

You're more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn't matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn't what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world.

This is certainly a more sophisticated argument for the sentience of the many artificial life-forms that have appeared throughout science fiction from Adam Link to Hal-9000 to Data from STAR TREK, none of which, as I recall, seek to bestow humanity on human-looking robots because of their ability to participate in "the human symbolic world" in all its ambivalence. In fact, the argument has more potential complexity than the main point of the novel, in which biologist Ha seeks to find out if Earth's seas harbor a species of intelligent octopus. 

Now, because the speaker is a scientist, it's a given that her character will not consider a number of "absurdities" that a pluralist like myself would consider. That said, the list of three "impossible things" cited by Ha surprisingly does not include religious belief, which as I recall is barely referenced in MOUNTAIN. But the list of absurdities DOES include such ideas as (1) we live in a computer simulation, (2) consciousness is an illusion, and (3) that Holy Writ of Atheism: "we are nothing more than blind chemical reactions without any 'real' awareness or free will." I imagine I would have found it more interesting had Nayler chosen to explore his concept of free will, rather than spending most of the novel noodling over his intelligent race of octopi.

As authorial lectures go, this one is one of the best I've read in a long time, much better than anything in another "Big Thoughts" novel I reviewed here the same year I wrote COGNITIVE CHAINS: Kim Stanley Robinson's 1985 MEMORY OF WHITENESS. (The word "whiteness" in the title related to a science-fictional "white energy"phenomenon, as opposed to its current reverse-racist connotation.) 

So even if I didn't feel like the MOUNTAIN was worth climbing, I did esteem one of the author's intellectual "foothills." But I also have some cavils against one of Nayler's applications of his symbolic world in terms of his implied political stance-- cavils I'll detail in the upcoming post.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 3

I foregrounded this essay in the first paragraph of BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE:

My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint.

The primary linguistic terms I'm invoking are the two most crucial to the concept of symbolism: the *simile* and the *metaphor.* Truth to tell, the particular significance of the simile became clearer to me when I looked again at my argument in the POWER AND POTENCY series, regarding G. Wilson Knight's assertion that Shakespeare's Hamlet was "a superman among men:"

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

The rest of Part II I devoted to showing how other manifestations of uncanny phenomenality seemed to possess some potency that exceeded the world of naturalistic causality. Since uncanny works by definition cannot exceed the coherence aspect of causality, they can only exceed naturalistic causality in the sense of *intelligibility,* which is why I argued that such fictional presences as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan are more allied with the world of the metaphenomenal than that of the isophenomenal.

So, what does it mean if the world of the uncanny is governed by the construct of the simile, and do the other two phenomenalities accord with other linguistic forms of speech?

Well, as noted earlier the simile and the metaphor are often paired as related but non-identical linguistic terms. The simile draws a comparison between two or more phenomena, one which may be expressively memorable but is not meant to change one's view of consensual reality. The metaphor, however, expresses the identity of two or more phenomena, in a manner that parallels the direct association of phenomena in Cassirer's view of mythical thinking:

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

 In THE GREAT CODE, Northrop Frye spun forth a mammoth theory of language derived from the work of Renaissance scholar Giambattista Vico. In essence, Frye asserts that human language has three phases: the *hieroglyphic,* which is the language of the gods, the *hieratic,* which is the language of the aristocrats, who also give birth to what Cassirer calls "discursive reason," and the *demotic,* the language of ordinary-world description (what Wheelwright calls "stheno-language.")

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.)

I don't intend to draw direct comparisons between Frye's formulations and mine, for as I've mentioned elsewhere, Frye has no real interest in phenomenology. But I mention Frye's schema as a prelude to outlining my own, which concerns not the nature of language but the application of linguistic terms to the three phenomenalities, to wit:

The NATURALISTIC is governed by the concept of the "stheno-symbol," of the base sign that is supposed to represent exactly what it shows and nothing more.

The UNCANNY is governed by the concept of the "simile," in that there is a restricted level of symbolism. Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs can compare his hero Tarzan to a "forest god," which gives the hero the semblance of godliness to the character, yet without actually imputing the nature of a god, or that god's power, to Tarzan in any literal way.

The MARVELOUS, however, is governed by the concept of the "metaphor," in which the symbolism is meant to imply some base identity between two or more phenomena, as seen in Cassirer's last two examples, the sun being created from a stone and men being created from rocks or trees. Within fiction, this transcendence of experienced reality may be explained by magic, by some not-yet-discovered principle of real-world science, or by nothing whatever. But the action involved is always that of an identification of two disparate phenomena, becoming associated after the "magical" fashion of the metaphorical connection.

BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE

...the first Greek philosophers were looking for the "origin" or "principle" (the Greek word "archê" has both meanings) of all things. Anaximander is said to have identified it with "the Boundless" or "the Unlimited" (Greek: "apeiron," that is, "that which has no boundaries")... some have pointed out that this use of "apeiron" is atypical for Greek thought, which was occupied with limit, symmetry and harmony. The Pythagoreans placed the boundless (the "apeiron") on the list of negative things, and for Aristotle, too, perfection became aligned with limit (Greek: "peras"), and thus "apeiron" with imperfection.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.-- HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2.

My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint. So first I'm going to take a shot at clarifying how these concepts diverge from language and all the forms of symbolism underlying language.

I always meant to draw some comparisons between Anaximander's apparent categories of apeiron ("the boundless") and "perata" (the limited) with my categories of freedom and restraint. Admittedly, Anaximander was addressing the origins of the physical universe, which has no direct bearing on my explanation of the universe of art and literature. For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe-- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

However, the closest I came to systematizing these ideas of affective freedom and cognitive restraint is probably this passage from this essay:

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

Persons of a positivist slant might point out that one cannot truly call the human "ability to imagine" to be truly boundless. Still, as Hamlet points out, the imagination certainly makes it possible for one to escape the bondage of a nutshell-- even a nutshell called Denmark-- with the vision of being "a king of infinite space." True, the Dane is too melancholy to enjoy such fantasies, because he's also hemmed in by "bad dreams," presumably brought on by his knowledge of the real-world corruptions of his mother and uncle. But Hamlet is a character in a tragedy, doomed to perish along with most of the Danish court, and so his verdict on the imagination may not be the final word.

The tension between these two states-- of being able to imagine anything, yet being hemmed in by the physical world in which one necessarily exists-- is one that Northrop Frye attempted to define:

Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social context rather than of literary form, and the constructive principles of story-telling remain constant through them...-- Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

My ARCHETYPE VS. ARTIFICE series, beginning here, was devoted to explaining why Frye's use of the term "myth" was not viable, and why I coined the term "artifice" to replace it. "Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude.

Further, an author's usage of tropes, whether it is dominated by artifice or by verisimilitude, creates a "literary universe" for each narrative universe, be it a stand-alone novel or a series of interconnected stories. Since I've asserted that no author of fiction ever fails to use tropes both from the domain of artifice and of verisimilitude, this has led me to distinguish three modes of literary "universe-building," which I have termed "the naturalistic," "the uncanny," and "the marvelous." I went into considerable detail about the definitions of each universe when viewed through a lens provided by science-philosopher Roy Bhaskar, but happily these deeper definitions do not pertain to the current argument.

All of the concepts relating to the phenomenality of fictional universes are communicated through language, but they are not linguistic concepts as such. Thus, when I attempt in UNCANNY GENESIS PT 3 to explicate the three phenomenalities with reference to linguistics, this must be seen as a illustration and not as an attempt to conflate the very different domains of language and of phenomenology.

COGNITIVE CHAINS

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.-- Rousseau.

I don't have any interest in visiting Rousseau's antiquated explanation of the disparity between freedom and its lack, but his aphorism does throw a little light on the acquaintance/discursive duality I've been investigating lately.

I re-read the relevant sections of Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, and her division of "presentational symbolism" and "discursive symbolism" are definitely structured in a similar fashion to the dualities propounded by James and Russell. The main difference between Langer's formula and earlier "a/d" formulations is that Langer has been heavily influenced by Cassirer's distinction between "mythical thinking" and "theoretical/discursive thinking." Thus, rather than conceiving of "acquaintance" in a generalized sense, Langer substitutes presentational symbolism as a way of conceiving how human beings separate the data of the senses into discrete, meaningful symbols that do not "describe" anything, but simply "present" themselves to the subject in terms of their emotional values.

I favor Langer's alteration, but as I noted in FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, the two forms of symbolism interpenetrate one another, possibly more than Langer credited:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind...

Earlier I expressed these two tendencies in a more opposed fashion in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not... Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

This is where Rousseau becomes relevant. For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

More later.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

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.

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

ADDENDUM: I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 2

At the end of Part 2, I said:

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.

The "acquaintance/description" duality appeared in the works of two philosophers I've often quoted, Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. In Cassirer's LANGUAGE, he says:

Like thought, language must pass from the known to the unknown, from what is perceived by the senses to what merely thought...

While Langer's dichotomy of "the discursive" and "the presentational" has often influenced my own examination of symbolism. In this quote, Langer aligns her concept of presentational symbolism with the immediacy of sense-impression:

  "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-experience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

I discussed Langer's two forms of symbolism first in RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT PT. 3,  where I associated "presentational symbolism" with fantasies without an appeal of logic, while I associated "discursive symbolism" with fantasies governed by logical rules about what can or cannot happen. However, obviously the two constantly intertwine, not only in fantasy-literature but in all art, myth, and in human language itself. Prior to Kant, most European philosophers subscribed to what Cassirer called "the copy-theory of language," in which it was assumed that reason and logic guided the evolution of language. Toward the end of LANGUAGE, however, Cassirer naturally argues that the formation of language is as much aesthetic as logical.

...it lies in the very nature of language that each of these syntheses is not governed exclusively by theoretical but by imaginative factors as well, and that consequently, much of linguistic "concept formation" seems to be less of logical comparison and combination that of the linguistic fantasy... In so far as we can gain insight into them, the factors which guide language in its classifications seem closely related to primitive mythical concepts and classification"-- LANGUAGE, p. 297. 

So Cassirer offers a view of the interactions of what Langer calls 'the discursive" and "the presentational," though I would say that he does not explore  such interactions in depth, any more than does Langer. I believe that I've come up with an interesting take on the matter, courtesy of Jung's theory of archetypes.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

Today I looked at Part 2, and added a sentence to describe how declarations are supposed to carry truth-value. The affected paragraph now reads:

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

This was necessary because I later stated the equivocal relationship of literary declarations to the truth of experiential reality.

Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

In the play-religion of the Discordians, their Principia Discordia asserts that the worshipers of the Goddess Eris do not have dogmas, but "catmas," which are defined by the felicitous phrase "relative meta-beliefs." Be this as it may for the Discordians, literature has always been about "relative meta-beliefs," as per my earlier citation of Sir Philip Sidney. Much later, Northrop Frye would speak of a "protecting wall of play" that insured that the reader's investment in stories was less than 100%.

That said, some "relative meta-beliefs" are better justified than others. That's why I borrowed Susanne Langer's term "consummation." I don't think that Al Capp consciously planned out the themes I find in his stories, but I find the ones in "D. Yokum's Visit" to be consummately worked out on the symbolic level. In contrast, in the subsequent storyline, only the sequence directly pertaining to General Bullmoose, his son and the lady wrestler Tara Legoff rises to a high level of symbolic density. Partisans of gender politics would probably decry a perceived reactionary attitude in the sections pertaining to Li'l Abner dressing up like a girl, because at no time does he embrace his "feminine side." For me, though, the sections misfire because they don't really play with any of the symbolic qualities of being male, female, or even something in between. Even worse is a section that takes place merely to delay Abner's return to Dopatch for a few more weeks. He gets trapped on New York's "Floogle Street" by a curse from Evil-Eye Fleegle, and Mammy Yokum has to intervene to disperse the curse. This could have been a cool sequence all by itself had Capp chosen to use it as more than a gimmick to keep his narrative pot boiling, but such are the vagaries of deadline creativity.

FTR (if any), the way in which the "Bullmoose" sequence retains its symbolic integrity despite being part of a greater whole is comparable to the way a given story in a greater continuity may be set apart from that continuity, as I considered when I analyzed "The God Killer" separate from Don McGregor's rambling "Panther's Rage" narrative.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

Just a minute ago, I concluded Part 1 by saying:

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

I'll try to set down my theme statement as succinctly as I can, but some grounding for my use of the word "proposition" is necessary. 

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

Now, this is surely true when one is speaking of language as it is used in one-on-one discourse, or even in discourse between one and a multitude. However, 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.

Further, even within literature, there's a hierarchy of strength between the concrete, lateral/literal meaning, and the abstract, vertical meaning of both overthought and underthought.

To return to the two LI'L ABNER sequences referenced in Part 1, it's evident from the way Al Capp works that his cycles-- usually running from four to six months-- could be unified in terms of their action, like "D. Yokum Visits," or simply a motley group of episodes, like "General Bullmoose Debuts." 

The propositional strength of the lateral meaning in both is equally strong, for the lateral meaning is identical with "everything that happens in the stories." Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

Yet the abstract vertical meaning is even weaker than the assorted vicissitudes associated with "the stories." Many readers can read past the symbolic discourses in LI'L ABNER without noticing their existence, while others will read them purely in terms of their alliance to didactic discourse, as in "Capp is a great satirist, because he makes fun of rich people").

Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions. 

At the same time, even though "Visits" is like a well-constructed brick kiln, while "Debuts" is sort of a tumble-down brick house, it's the latter, less organized work that gave birth to one of the strip's more recognizable characters, General Bullmoose, while Disgustin' Yokum is most probably barely remembered even by Capp's remaining fans.

Thus the weakness of weak propositions can be both a strength and a weakness at the same time.