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 II

 I've now finished the last two chapters of Whitehead's SYMBOLISM lectures, and as it happens, all the best stuff is in the first chapter.                                                                                                                                                           Given that Whitehead only focuses on his particular take regarding symbolism in the last (and shortest) chapter, the title is a little misleading. And when I checked the index for his synoptic work PROCESS AND REALITY, which he began in 1929, I saw that Whitehead only had a few pages devoted to the topic of symbols as such. Given the brevity of this 88-page book, I wasn't expecting anything as comprehensive as Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY or Cassirer's MYTHICAL THOUGHT. But that final chapter doesn't do anything but talk a little about symbolism as one of the abstractions necessary to human culture. In fact, he sums up his opinion of its importance most adroitly in a sentence from PROCESS: "Symbolism is essential for the higher grades of life, and the errors of symbolism can never be wholly avoided." I don't think Whitehead succeeds in establishing a standard as to what constitutes "error" in symbolism, though.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The real concerns of his book manifest in the second chapter; that of advancing his concept of the relatedness of all aspects of reality to one another, rather than trying to see particular aspects in isolation, which he attributes to both the empiricist tradition of Hume and the idealist tradition of Kant. In the second chapter he says, "This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume's naive presupposition of 'simple occurrence' for the mere data... I directly deny this doctrine of 'simple occurrence'... Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it." To sum up, the principal strength of SYMBOLISM is that it offers a very concise summation of some of Whitehead's concepts, which I confessed that I found hard to follow in the more ambitious PROCESS.                   

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.1

 I thought that I had gone into some detail regarding Susanne Langer's views of the distinctions between "myths" and "tales," but my previous posts on Langer don't seem to cover those distinctions in depth. In any case most of those earlier posts predate my formulation of the concept of "emulation," so that's as good a reason as any to start from scratch. Since the passage I'm reprinting from her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY is so long, I'll confine this post to preserving the passage as a resource from which I'll draw for Part 2.                                                                                                                          Here we have a literary product belonging to the civilized 

races of Europe just as much as to the savage cultures of darker 
continents. Aristocratic beings, chiefs or princes, now play the 
leading role; dragons and ogres and wicked kings, or beautiful 
witches of great power, replace the monkeys, crocodiles, angry 
dead men, or local cannibals of the older tradition. The wish- 
ful imagination of man has been disciplined, by public expo- 
sure and realistic reflection, into a genuine art-form, as far re- 
moved from personal dreaming as the ritual dance from self- 
expressive bouncing and shouting. 

Yet this high development of fantasy has brought us no- 
where in the direction of mythology. For although fairy-story 
is probably an older form than myth, the latter is not simply 
a higher development of the former. It, too, goes back to prim- 
itive fantasy, but the point of its origin from that source Ues 
far back in cultural history, long before the evolution of our 
modern fairytale — of Kunstmarchen, as the Germans say, or 
even Volksmarchen. It required not a higher stage of story- 
telling, but a thematic shift, to initiate what Miss Harrison  

called "the myth-making instinct."                                                              For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is franlily imaginary, and 

its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." Its 
heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, 
wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "a certain prince," 
"a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, 
though by no means always moral ; the hero's heroism may be 
slyness or luck quite*as readily as integrity or valor. The theme 
is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one — an enchanted 
maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool — 
over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, 
strong animals (e.g. Red Riding Hood's wolf), stepmothers, 
or elder brothers. In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful 
thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why 
it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even 
in the telling. 

Myth, on the other hand, whether literally received or not, 
is taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or as 
a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not Utopian; and 
its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of super- 
natural character. Two divinities of somewhat similar type — 
perhaps miraculously born, prodif'ious in strength, heroically 
defeated and slain — become identified ; they are one god under 
two names. Even those names may become mere epithets link- 
ing the god to different cults.  

This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the fairy- 
tale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of 
Snow White's story resembles the gentleman who wakens 
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become identified. 
No one thinks that the trickster "Little Glaus" is the little 
tailor who slew "seven at a stroke," or that the giant whom 
Jack killed was in any way related to the ofjre defeated by 
Puss in Boots, or that he figured elsewhere as Bluebeard. Fairy 
stories bear no relation to each other. Myths, on the other 
hand, become more and more closely woven into one fabric, 
they form cycles, their dramatis personae tend to be intimately 
connected if not identified. Their stage is the actual world — 
the Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus, the sea, or the sky — and  

not some ungeographical fairyland...And myth has, indeed, a more difficult and more 

serious purpose than fairytale. The elements of both are much 
alike, but they are put to quite different uses. Fairytale is a 
personal gratification, the expression of desires and of their 
imaginary fulfilment, a compensation for the shortcomings of 
real life, an escape from actual frustration and conflict. Be- 
cause its function is subjective, the hero is strictly individual 
and human; for, although he may have magic powers, he is 
never regarded as divine; though he may be an oddity like 
Tom Thumb, he is not considered supernatural. For the same 
reason — namely that his mission is merely to represent the 
"self in a day-dream — he is not a savior or helper of man- 
kind. If he is good, his goodness is a personal asset, for which 
he is richly rewarded. But his humanitarian role is not the 
point of the story; it is at best the setting for his complete so- 
cial triumph. The beneficiary of his clever acts, his prowess, or 
his virtue is he himself, not mankind forever after. And be- 
cause an individual history is what the fairytale fancies, its 
interest is exhausted with the "happy ending" of each finished 
story. There is no more mutual reference between the adven- 
tures of Cinderella and those of Rapunzel than between two  

separate dreams. Myth, on the other hand, at least at its best, is a recognition 

of natural conflicts, of human desire frustrated by non-human 
powers, hostile oppression, or contrary desires; it is a story 
of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's com- 
mon fate. Its ultimate end is not wishful distortion of the 
world, but serious envisagement of its fundamental truths; 
moral orientation, not escape. That is why it does not exhaust 
its whole function in the telling, and why separate myths 
cannot be left entirely unrelated to any others. Because it pre- 
sents, however metaphorically, a world-picture, an insight into 
life generally, not a personal imaginary biography, myth tends 
to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning 
are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin 
enter into definite relations with each other. Moreover, because 
the mythical hero is not the subject of an egocentric day-dream, 
but a subject greater than any individual, he is always felt to 
be superhuman, even if not quite divine. He is at least a de- 
scendant of the gods, something more than a man. His sphere 
of activity is the real world, because what he symbolizes belongs 
to the real world, no matter how fantastic its expression may 
be (this is exactly contrary to the fairytale technique, which  

transports a natural individual to a fairyland outside reality) .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hmm, guess that will teach me the formatting perils of copying from a PDF. More shortly.

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.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Here we run into a dilemma, for what is truth and what is illusion? John Briggs, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, has described truth as "the freedom of letting things reveal themselves as they are-- but... when anything is revealed, other things are concealed."-- DREAMS OF ISIS (1995), Normandi Ellis, p. 266.

These two quotes both appeared in separate sections of the Ellis book, which is that author's personal account of her experiences with examining Egyptian concepts of spirituality and/or occultism. It's an interesting book, and I've read a considerable number of similar accounts from dubious biographies like the Don Juan chronicles and theoretical studies like those of Colin Wilson. While I've had occasion to believe in the reality of certain so-called "psychic" events, I hold no firm opinion one way or the other on subjects like soul transmigration or the existence of archaic gods, even on something akin to the "astral plane." I suspect that much of my interest in the occult stems from my desire to know, as much as any individual can, the outward limits of the imagination. I have a dim memory of a Percy Shelley reminiscence, in which he claimed that in his youthful years he read a lot of mystical literature because he was seeking "metaphors for poetry." However, I haven't troubled to look for that particular quote.

As for the quotes above, I knew Bachelard by reputation but have not yet read POETICS OF SPACE or any other work by him. I have read a little Heidegger, though not enough to have any notion as to what he may've said that author John Briggs paraphrased, or the context Briggs had in mind when he made the comment in his book FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE. Still, Briggs' purported ideas on aesthetics might prove interesting to my ongoing project. Bachelard's evaluations of science might draw some intriguing comparisons with the works of Whitehead on that subject.

Though about thirty years separate the quotes of Bachelard and Briggs, they seem to complement each other not a little in speaking of the difficulties of communication. Reading both quotes out of context naturally means that I don't know what general argument either writer was making, but I can respond to what the quotes suggest in themselves.

Starting with Bachelard, it's fascinating that he asserts that all one can communicate is something subjective, something that is explicitly not objective in nature, and that, even that "subjective something" is not the actual secret of the person transmitting it, but an "orientation" toward that secret. The opposition bears a structural similarity with Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal. I would guess that when Bachelard says that the implied "we" cannot "tell the secret objectively," he's at least partly agreeing with the materialist idea that subjectively speaking every man is an island, and that every such island harbors secrets that cannot be communicated as such to any others. Yet Bachelard is perhaps more hopeful than the materialists in saying that though subjective secrets of a private mind cannot be communicated-- possibly because they stem from so many intertwined, personal factors-- "we" can communicate orientations, as one presumes, for example, Socrates did to Plato. Last month I touched on similar limitations with regard to literary experience, under the heading of "intersubjectivity:"

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. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

Of course, I don't know if Bachelard is using the word "secret" with any special connotation in mind, but for the present I view it as general subjectivity. "Orientation" would be the part of an individual's secret subjectivity that can be transmitted to others, though always with the likelihood of misprision of some kind, like, say, Plato recording those aspects of Socrates' philosophy that resonated best with Plato himself.

Now Briggs' quote sounds a little more pessimistic, a little more "one step forward, two steps back." Briggs doesn't confine himself to communications between human beings; for him, even "things" can reveal themselves-- and conceal themselves, too. I assume that "things" would include all phenomena, from human beings to all aspects of the environment in which humans live. Shamanistic accounts, such as those on which Carlos Castaneda probably based his books, would allow for human beings to receive communications from birds or insects or even stones. 

However, in the folklore we have on such subjects, such communicates reveal, but they don't also conceal. So I tend to think Briggs is, in the final analysis, still talking about human communication, just like Bachelard. 

How does one reveal and conceal at the same time? In OEDIPUS TYRANNUS the Delphic Oracle reveals what is destined to happen to Oedipus. But the Oracle conceals the relevant info that he is not related to the two people Oedipus thinks are his natural parents. Revealing that, of course, would spoil the story, which depends upon a reaction to limited knowledge.

 In the world of intersubjectivity, too, Reader A can feel that this or that work by Author B feels revelatory. But of course, Author B is only revealing what is important to him, and in communicating one thing he may conceal a hundred others, both from himself and from others. Percy Shelley's incantatory poetry reveals his superabundant talent for versification. But nothing in the poetry will reveal many other aspects of Shelley, aspects that might distract from his poetry. In a somewhat more intentional concealment, Karl Marx enthralled countless believers into a sincere belief in his myth of the proletariat, but he omitted anything that might hinder that revelation.  And often there's no intent to conceal. If one chooses to follow one philosophy, it will always remain concealed as to what another path might have revealed.

And possibly the greatest concealment is that I have found both quotes to have revelatory content, though since I haven't read them in context, I might be "concealing" some or all of their "real" meanings.

HETERO FORMATIVE

The idea that sex functions to provide variation for natural selection to act upon was first advocated by August Weismann and it has dominated much discussion on the evolution of sex and recombination since then...  In summary, although Weismann's hypothesis must be considered the leading candidate for the function of sex and recombination, nevertheless, many additional principles are needed to fully account for their evolution.-- NIH abstract.

All normal human beings have soi-distant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not. --Robert Heinlein, FRIDAY, 1982.

I haven't written as much as I used to about the excesses of academic "queer theory" since the Hooded Utilitarian site closed down. But HU's demise was not an indicator of a general trend. This is confirmed by a recent jeremiad from London's School of African and Oriental Studies regarding philosophers who were too "white" and "heteronormative."

SOAS, perhaps after thinking deeply about this for the past seven years, is now reviving the debate. It has issued a “toolkit” for secondary schools and universities who wish to teach philosophy (although you’d hope that other universities would have ideas of their own)... The toolkit sets out its position from the start. “Much academic philosophy in the UK, US, Australasia and continental Europe masks its structural antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able-bodied,” it begins. The document continues along very much the same lines for 27 pages.-- Roland White, THE TELEGRAPH, 2024.

The only possible defense for anyone to use a term as stupid as "heteronormative" is that they've allowed their minds to be polluted with Mickey Marx bullshit, and the knee-jerk inclusion of the word "bourgeois" confirms as much. And this narrow-minded, neo-chauvinist screed is rendered even more fatuous than usual when one views "normative sex" through the lens of evolutionary theory.

On a slight tangent, I read a lot of academic film criticism in the eighties and nineties. I'm not sure when I realized that almost all of the critics worshipped at the altars of either Marx, Freud, or some syncretic combination of the two, possibly to be named "Marfreud." Film critic Richard Grenier was a welcome exception. While I didn't agree with every essay in Grenier's 1990 collection CAPTURING THE CULTURE, he made clear how much the academic world had been influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the phrase "capture the culture" to describe the devious social conditioning of the bourgeoise. Grenier wittily pointed out that modern Leftist academics were just following the same program Gramsci projected upon "normative" culture, by undermining everything that "normals" valued. An example, from some book whose title I forgot long ago, was the assertion that the "romantic clinch" seen at the conclusion of countless Hollywood movies was merely a social construction designed to please the bourgeoise-- which was stupid even if the forgotten author didn't use the word "heteronormative."

I probably read that lunkheaded judgment sometime in the nineties, long before anyone thought of using four-or-more letters to mainstream the idea of "homonormative" pride. But even then, the judgment struck me as amazingly presumptuous. If there was no heterosexuality, there would be no human race to give birth to new offspring of any sexual proclivity. Heterosexuality was not something that existed to shore up non-Marxist values, as one might argue with some logic regarding racism. Nevertheless, some thirty years later, Marxists are still whining that if most of the world still trends boy-girl, it's a terrible sin against the Marxist ideal of totally capturing the culture so that homosexuality of one kind or another becomes "the norm."

Now, had evolution not chosen the path of heterosexual conjugation as August Weismann theorized, asexual reproduction might have continued, but there's little if any reason to suppose those life-forms would have arisen to their current level of complexity. Thus heteronormativity, which gets such massive disrespect, is the factor that promoted the immense variety of life-forms on this planet.

Now stating that fact in no way supports real bigotry against any of the many paraphilias-- which includes LGBT etcetera in my book-- that also evolved alongside vanilla old hetero sex. Contrarian conservative Robert Heinlein was certainly being facetious when he had the fictional characters of his novel speak of "mixed up glands." I largely included the quote because I happened to read FRIDAY for the first time while planning this essay. Yet even back in the early 1970s, Heinlein somewhat charted the course for many non-Marxists, who simply looked upon "gay rights advocates" as justified in their rhetoric, striking back against a chauvinism that often made the homosexual paraphilia illegal. This aspect of history should always be acknowledged, not least for the many abuses perpetrated by various types of heteronormative chauvinism. But the answer to one chauvinism is not another chauvinism, and statements like those of the SAOS are nothing but a chauvinism that exaggerates the significance of homonormative behavior at the expense of the entire range of human sexual behavior.

I feel sure, for example, that there exist other persons with non-homosexual paraphilias who view their sexual persuasions as being just as opposed to "the normal" as are homosexual paraphilias-- but some if not all of these may be able to produce offspring. For instance, a macrophiliac who's stimulated only by very tall women may not have a large range of potential mates, but mating and producing offspring is not impossible. But if he (and it's usually a "he") only gets stimulated by literal giants, then he will probably contribute no more to the gene pool than anyone confined to purely homosexual hookups.

 But paraphilias like macrophilia will never get courses devoted to their kink as universities, partly because most of them keep a much lower profile than LGBT. A truly liberal philosophy would embrace all sexual variations-- with the obvious exception of the one that will and should remain illegal-- without regard to who's given the most attention by lunkheaded academics.

SUFFER THE LITTLE MASTERS

I've just finished reading NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for the first time. I probably have not read any Dostoyevsky in twenty years, despite my admiration for his major novels and my knowledge that he was a major influence on Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy.

I won't review the book as a whole, since there's far too much to unpack in the space of a blogpost. The wider context of UNDERGROUND is that the book consists of the diary-like ramblings of an unnamed Russian clerical type. He addresses many of Dostoyevsky's own concerns about the pending modernization of Imperial Russia and the project to make the nation able to compete with the great countries of Western Europe. Parts of the narrative are a coded response to another Russian intellectual of the period, who advised a utilitarian, reason-based conception of culture. 

The strangest thing about UNDERGROUND is that Dostoyevsky makes no attempt to make his narrator seem admirable, which is a frequent strategy for authors trying to sell whatever philosophy their characters expouse. Rather, Nameless Man admits that he's perpetually full of spite and given to imagining grand schemes of revenge against those who offend him-- schemes which he has absolutely no real desire to carry out, even if he possessed the will to do so. He seems in many ways the incarnation of Nietzsche's "ressentiment," except that he's aware of his own absurdity, excusing it only in the sense that all of humankind is no less absurd.

Because Nameless Man is something of an unreliable narrator, one can't be entirely sure that everything he advocates is what Dostoyevsky himself advocated, any more than Captain Ahab represents the totality of Herman Melville's beliefs. But the author clearly meant for readers to carefully weigh the opinions set forth by the narrator, and one of the most interesting opinions concerns the rejection of utilitarian "reason" as the defining characteristic of human beings.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.

The Nameless Man doesn't really define the nature of the "will" that he believes a fuller expression of humanity, so there may be no way to know if he's referencing something akin to Schopenhauer's "universal will." He does seem to have some of the Gloomy Philosopher's attitude toward suffering, however.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive – in other words, only what is conducive to welfare – is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. 

I agree that "will" should be seen as the totality of human thought and expressivity, and that the full expression of will is indeed the key to "our personality, our individuality." It's also universally true that people chafe against living their lives only for "advantage," and that they may rebel against their own interests, seeking to "smash things" to assert their individual will. George Bataille built much of his philosophy upon the opposed ideas of "consumption," all reason-based activities that keep a culture alive and viable, and "expenditure," those activities that have no real rational ends. 

I would part company from Dostoyevsky on the subject of suffering, however. Without doubting that many persons "kick at the slats" of their cultures simply to feel the thrill of defiance-- or else use fictional proxies for the same purpose-- there is a broader context to suffering in world cultures. Here's Nietzsche on the subject:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering?” -- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

This particular Nietzsche quote does not directly cite his concept of uberwinden, "self-overcoming," for which I substitute (for possible greater clarity) the term "self-mastery" in my own philosophical ruminations. But clearly, he has stated that suffering can bring forth all of the "inventiveness and bravery" that humankind has used to mitigate or alleviate misfortune. 

As I am not an expert on Dostoyevsky, I don't know if anything comparable to Nietzsche's concept appears in his other works, but it's not in UNDERGROUND. I believe that the great Russian writer was just as opposed to small-minded utilitarianism as the great German philosopher. But my best guess is that Dostoyevsky was narrowly focused upon the goal of refuting a particular utilitarian writer through this nameless spokesperson, and so he did not make any connections between suffering and self-mastery. Or perhaps Dostoyevsky made some such connection, and thought it contravened his ideal of a "will" that had absolutely no practical applications.  

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART

 In the last couple of days I was able to finish the remaining portion of Donald Hoffman's CASE AGAINST REALITY. One reason is that it's both an easy read and just a little over 200 pages. But the other reason is that I could skip over a lot of Hoffman's fine points about tests of perception. This sort of slow case-building is necessary in science. But it wasn't strictly necessary for me to grasp his main thesis: the idea that all human perception is seen through the matrix he calls an "interface," as opposed to the common notion that "what we see is what there is." Hoffman's main concern is to demonstrate the superiority of his interface model, and for most of the book it appears he has no interest in inquiring into whatever aspects of reality that we, as products of evolution, are not privy to.

In the next to last chapter, "Scrutiny," Hoffman repeats examples from earlier chapters regarding creatures whose evolutionary instincts, which should promote fitness, may lead them down blind alleys. One prominent example is that of the Australian jewel beetle, which came near extinction because the males kept trying to mate with beer-bottles which resembled the markings of female jewel beetles. However, in an earlier chapter this was presented as no more than a comedy of mating errors. In "Scrutiny" the author goes a little further, claiming that fitness-conditioned entities as a whole cannot help but prefer "extreme" versions of normative stimuli, termed "supernormal stimuli."

Astute readers of this blog (or, more likely, of the works of Joseph Campbell) should recognize these two words. I believe Campbell first used the term in his 1959 book PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, and he derived the phrase from ethological writings of his time. I printed a representative excerpt from said tome in my 2012 essay VERTICALLY CHALLENING. I'm not surprised that Hoffman doesn't mention Campbell, but his only footnote on the stimuli-subject is for a 2010 book that uses that very phrase for its title, SUPERNORMAL STIMULI. Maybe that book properly credits the ethologists of the 1950s. 

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous. I have no doubt that Hoffman embraces the notion because it supports his general theory regarding the limitations of fitness-based perception.

Only in the last chapter does Hoffman venture some thoughts about the excluded perceptions. I was sure that, even though he makes a brief reference to Kant, that Hoffman had no interest in either Kant's philosophical project or any of the religious systems to which Kant was somewhat indebted. What I did not expect was that his version of excluded perceptions would sound not unlike the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

The claim of conscious realism is better understood by looking in a mirror. There you see the familiar-- your eyes, hair, skin and teeth. What you don't see is infinitely richer, and equally familiar-- the world of your conscious experiences. It includes your dreams, fears, aspirations... the vibrant world of your conscious experiences that transcends three dimensions.-- p. 186.

And here's Whitehead writing about his version of "conscious experiences," almost a hundred years ago:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.-- PROCESS AND REALITY.

However, philosophy is not Hoffman's metier, and he proves it later in the same chapter, when he cites this statement by Richard Dawkins:

Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

Immediately after, Hoffman says:

I agree with Dawkins. If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry, the scientific method.

A little later, Hoffman claims that his "conscious realism" system might effect a "rapprochement" between the worlds of science and spirituality. But how could any detente be forged if science alone, even one based in Hoffman's "case against reality," is in the driver's seat? 

I understand that for scientists, religion's history of infringement upon "existence claims" like those of Galileo cast a long shadow. But if Hoffman really valued what he terms "conscious experiences," the hallmarks of a consciousness not yet explained by current science, then he might have seen that a religious "existence claim" is substantially different in nature from one of science. A story about humanity's origins in the Garden of Eden does not compete as an "existence claim" with the story of evolution. The latter is about viewing the universe as what Whitehead called "inert facts," allegedly objective evidence. The former is about the full range of subjective human feelings, extrapolated into a system of mythopoeic correlations.

And so Hoffman's case fails in the light of superior testimony by Alfred North Whitehead. But Hoffman's argument is at least less polarizing than that of science-worshipper Dawkins, and so the court of public opinion may see a better thinker come forth to forge the desired rapprochement.

UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR

 In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).

So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.

It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.

I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence." 

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound." 

So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above. 

HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.

 LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived. 

I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.

ANOTHER EINSTEIN INTERSECTION

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.-- Albert Einstein.

I encountered these two quotations in Graham Joyce's excellent novel SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE. Both quotations appear on the Net, which does not necessarily mean that Einstein said those precise words, given the many ways in which celebrity figures are frequently misquoted.

But if one could prove definitively that Albert Einstein, a genius in the realm of the physical sciences expressed these unbounded sentiments in favor of unrestrained fantasy-- what would that mean?

My guess is that Einstein felt that fantasy enlarged the scope of his ability to imagine new patterns, and then to test them as to whether or not those "shadows of imagination" represented anything in the perceived patterns of consensual reality. If this was the case, then one might accuse Einstein of advocating fantasy for utilitarian purposes, as Peter Washington said of Calvino in this quote:

By presenting possible worlds, [the writer] 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.

But of course Einstein didn't make any definitive statement as to the utility of fantasy. All he says is that fairy tales are good for intelligence, and that the gift for fantasy has meant more to him than his lauded capacity for "abstract, positive thinking," which I compare to Cassirer's concept of "discursive thinking." 

Purely for motives of self-flattery, I'd like to think that he had some intuition along the lines of my own: that the capacity for fantasy, for representing what may not be real, goes hand in hand with the capacity for testing reality, for representing what seems to be real. 

But as I said-- no one really knows.

ANOTHER FORUM-DERIVED ANSWER WITHOUT THE QUESTION

 Back to my debates with online materialists, one of whom tried to counter my position with the idea of "atheists who still believe in things supernatural, just not gods."

__________

If you choose to search this forum for the word "psychic" you will see that I've noted, possibly a half dozen times, that belief in psychic forces does not presuppose belief in gods.

That, however, does not mean that the former belief was not influenced by the growth of materialist interpretations of the universe. 

On this page I responded to (name withheld) as to previous posts in which I asserted the possibility that gods were not necessarily purely imaginary, but may rather have been inchoate forces molded by human imagination into culture-specific icons. This theory is not one in which I "believe," but is rather an agnostic counter to the materialist belief that all gods must be purely imaginary.

But this informal postulate, which I did not originate, was also influenced by mainstream materialism, albeit without being in any way identical with mainstream materialism. This "spiritual materialism" is what is represented by your non-mainstream atheists who assert that supernatural forces are generated by humans and disembodied principles rather than by gods.

I've said repeatedly that theism and atheism grow out of intellectual discourse. Theism is almost certainly first. It's possible that early man did sense what the Polynesians called "mana" in both living and unliving phenomena, but such inchoate forces lack any power to personify the mysteries of the universe for human meditation. Thus we get the articulation of "departmental gods" who administer different aspects of reality, whether physical phenomena like storms or social phenomena like war. Possibly in their earliest forms one would not even call such figures "gods," but something more like the millions-of-years-later Japanese concept of kami.

​

This informal postulate, though, does not assume that even if this is the way belief in gods evolved, that tribal peoples were conscious of such formulations. They would not have been able to stand back from their own assumptions, just like modern materialists. Therefore it's probable that most tribal humans really did believe that gods had existence independent of human interaction. Naturally any given tribe would have become aware at an early date that the neighboring tribe might have different gods, but this would not have led to the assumption that all gods were imaginary in nature. Rather, it probably led to henotheism, the idea that rival gods exist in the common universe but that the god of one's own tribe is the biggest and the best. This form of theism appears in a few Old Testament passages in which it's implied that the Hebrew God does share his celestial space with rival gods, rather than being the only one.

Eventually we do see the historical development of actual atheism, the spawn of intellectual discourse that I've fruitlessly tried to explain to my opponents. It might have appeared earlier than the documents of the Greeks, but that's our main source for the history of that philosophy. One assumes that theists pushed back against the atheists, as attested by Socrates and his deadly cup, but theists were not the only opponents of atheists. 

It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed.-- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.

We have only sketchy documents of what figures like Epicurus and Lucretius believed, but I think it likely that they are among our first "spiritual materialists." Lucretius believes in the gods as principles more than as departmental chiefs, and while he's not agreeing with "natural philosophers" who believed that Greek science explained everything, he's been influenced by them.

So when we come down at last to modern spiritual materialists, we are dealing with individuals like Lucretius, who have some notion that supernatural forces exist but do not conceive of gods in the sense of mainstream theism. Moderns who attest to supernatural force residing in their chakras, but not in the universe as literal gods, have been influenced by mainstream materialism; in a "man is the measure of all things" formula. By taking this human-centered form of supernatural belief, the supernatural materialists are still subscribing to one doctrine taken from mainstream materialists: that gods are not necessary to explain the functioning of the universe. And thus the discourse of the supernatural materialists remains influenced by atheist discourse, accepting that at least some phenomena are entirely explained by material evidence, including the chakras, which may have also started from theistic belief but grew independent of it thanks to the influence of mainstream materialist discourse.