CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN

I've finished another book that I started back in December: Roy Bhaskar's A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE, first mentioned here.  I'm not going to devote anything like the extensive coverage I gave to Edward Skidelsky's book, however.  Bhaskar's book started out well, but quickly became repetitious and devoted to Wittengenstein-like logic-chopping.  The most interesting section is this one:

Regularity determinism must be straightaway distinguished from two
other forms of determinism: which may be called 'ubiquity'
determinism and 'intelligibility" determinism. Ubiquity determinism
asserts that every event has *a* real *cause*; intelligibility
determinism that every event has *an* intelligible *cause*; regularity
determinism that the same (type of) event has the same (type of)
*cause*. The concepts of 'cause' involved in the three determinisms
are of course distinct. For the ubiquity determinist the *cause is
that thing, material or agent that is productive of an effect*; for
the intelligibility determinist it is simply that which renders an
event intelligible to men; for the regularity determinist
it is the total set of conditions that regularly proceeds or
accompanies an event.-- Bhaskar, ARTOS, p. 70.



It occurred to me that given how often I talk about "causality" with respect to the NUM formula, as I do in this essay, I might experiment by comparing Bhaskar's distinctions about the "concepts of cause" to the nature of causality in my Cassirer-indebted schema.

The most obvious disconnect is that I'm interested in a schema that takes in all of the "symbolic forms," while Bhaskar is interested only in a theory of science.  Further, as I noted here Bhaskar cites three philosophical approaches to science and allocates each of the "determinisms" above to one of the three.  But Bhaskar's three approaches are irrelevant to parallels to Cassirer's opposition of causality and efficacy, which I've also identified as the split between the *cognitive* and the *affective."

With such a comparison in mind, both "ubiquity determinism" and "regularity determinism" seem like two closely related statements about the nature of "real causes," which means that they could be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the cognitive: "how we know the world." By contrast, "intelligibility determinism" makes a statement regarding humankind's perception of "real causes," which may be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the affective: "how we understand the world." In so saying I assert that the conviction that all things should prove intelligible is an affective, not a cognitive, state of mind, which may well be at odds with Bhaskar's intention.

In this essay I attempted to reconfigure my older cognitive/affective schema with one more aligned to Cassirer's concepts:

NATURALISTIC-- cognitivity and affectivity are defined by the causal order; i.e. "one definite cause yields one definite effect"

UNCANNY-- cognitivity is defined by the causal order, but affectivity exceeds causal order and participates in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

MARVELOUS-- both cognitivity and affectivity exceed the causal order and participate in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

But as I said above, this configuration doesn't adequately define causality.

I hypothesize, then, that causality within the sphere of human art is reducible to two interrelated aspects: that of regularity (cognitive) and intelligibility (affective).  With that in mind, then:

In the NATURALISTIC category, all phenomena are both "regular" and "intelligible."

In the UNCANNY category, all phenomena are "regular" in that they do not exceed the cognitive//physical nature of causality, but some phenomena are not "intelligible" given that they may prove unintelligible by the standards of the NATURALISTIC.

In the MARVELOUS category, some phenomena may be neither "regular" nor "intelligible."

This breakdown would allow for both of the following definitions of fantasy to be true.  The first speaks primarily of causality's cognitive aspect:

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality.”—Roger Caillois, AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE.

While this one challenges causality's affective aspect:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.”-- Lars Gustaffson, cited in Franz Rottensteiner's THE FANTASY BOOK.

I also note that Cassirer, in his comparison between the discursive mode of theoretical reason and the expressive mode of myth, essentially takes aim against the "regularity" aspect of causality:

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

And, a couple of pages later, he contrasts them on the principle I call intelligibility:

Here again it is not the concept of causality as such but the specific form of causal explanation which underlies the difference and contrast between the two spiritual worlds [of theoretical reason and myth]... Science is content if it succeeds in apprehending the individual event in space and time as a special instance of a general law... The mythical consciousness, on the other hand, applies its "why" precisely to the particular and the unique.  It "explains" the individual event by postulating individual acts of the will."

It's worth noting, too, that a page later Cassirer emphasizes that for myth-consciousness "all the forces of nature are... nothing other than expressions of a demonic or divine will."

Thus, when I experience "strangeness" in either an uncanny or marvelous work of art, I am feeling myself divorced by its violation of either the "regularity" or "intelligibility" aspects of causal law.

STRANGENESS ADVENTURES

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality.”—Roger Caillois, AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE.

In this essay I discussed parallels between Kant’s concept of the sublime and my concept of “the uncanny,” in terms of how both could be produced purely from affects within an experience of any kind. Both can suggest that the experience is “beyond nature” in a Longinian affective sense, without a literal violation of causality’s “acknowledged order,” as one sees in the category of “the marvelous.”

Shortly later this essay covered parallels between the Kantian sublime and "the mythic," which refers to all narratives that possess high symbolic complexity like that of archaic myths. I emphasized both in that essay and earlier ones that "the mythic" could appear in any of my three phenomenal categories, just as was the case for the sublime:

To expand on the caution I expressed before, this parallel does not imply identity, for the sublime can appear in any work regardless of its phenomenal category. I mentioned Maugham’s book THE RAZOR’S EDGE, which contains the sublime affect even though it’s an entirely isophenomenal work, while Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, a work of uncanny metaphenomenality, has its own sublimities. The same aesthetic applies to the marvelous form of the metaphenomenal, but I stress that a work is not automatically sublime just because it contains marvels that do transcend causality.

All that said, it should be obvious that there's some quality about my two metaphenomenal categories that is *not* shared by the "odd man out," the isophenomenal. And as it happens, Caillois also supplies the best word for this quality, when he defines fantasy in terms of "an irreducible strangeness."

My choice is deliberately ironic. Stanislaw Lem asserts that "étrange," the French word for "strange," is the actual word used by Todorov for his category "the uncanny." Possibly the translator thought Todorov was tossing around so many Freudianisms that the critic would not be averse to the association with Freud's famous formulation of the quality he called "umheimlich", "unfamiliarity," which was translated as "uncanny" for this 1919 essay. I would tend to agree that the translator was right, considering this observation by Freud:

"Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich."

Clearly this is in total agreement with this Todorov statement:

“It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.”

Thus it would seem that Todorov's "étrange” is very reducible to such influences as Freud’s infamous “family romance.”

In his 1978 work THE FANTASY BOOK, Franz Rottensteiner also cites Caillois: “Fantasy in the narrow sense, as defined by Caillois, is directly contrary to reason, describing events not susceptible to rational explanation by natural laws.” As I have not read Caillois aside from a few translated excerpts, I have no clue as to what works fall into Caillois’ concept of fantasy that is “irreducibly strange.” I would hope that a work like Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, which I judged to be “uncanny” here, would qualify: that Caillois would not, unlike Todorov, consider that USHER falls into “the category of the real” simply because Poe supplies the reader with possible “rational explanations.”

Rottensteiner provides a quote from another writer whom I have not read in full: one Lars Gustafsson, whose essay, “On the Fantastic in Literature,” appeared in a collection of essays a year before Todorov’s THE FANTASTIC was published. Rottensteiner finds Gustafsson to be in agreement with Caillois:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.” Rottensteiner supplies one example that Gustaffson found “fantastic,” a work by the artist Piranesi, but obviously this doesn’t give one enough to evaluate Gustaffson’s criteria in depth.

However, Gustaffson’s contrast between the “probable” and the “reasonable” is interesting. I’ve stated that “All fictional narrative concerns the atypical,” and functionally all three of my phenomenality-categories may be considered differing iterations of atypicality, though I generally use “the atypical” as short for the “base atypicality” that rules the world of isophenomenal causality, a.k.a. “the acknowledged order.” This is the world governed by what Gustaffson calls “what is probable,” as should be suggested by my observation from this essay:

“The pleasures and pains of character identification are in no way altered with respect to whether the story seems utterly fantastic, somewhat fantastic or not fantastic at all. However, the reader’s aesthetic perceptions are affected by their perception as to what phenomena are possible in the fictional world.”

A narrative world governed entirely by rational causation never deals with “reason” as a mode of being. It cannot, for nothing in that world can challenge reason; in that world there can only exist varying degrees of probability. In the two levels of the metaphenomenal, however—though of the “utterly fantastic” or “somewhat fantastic”—reason, at least in its commonplace form, is challenged.

True, in the essay “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien is careful to state that fantasy “does not destroy or insult Reason.” Still, while LORD OF THE RINGS may present a world which is in some ways more “reason-friendly” than that of Poe’s USHER, in Middle-Earth commonplace reason is transcended by the forces of magic and magical entities. So in Tolkien’s world, the combat between “reason” and “unreason” is won by “unreason” simply by the act of depicting the marvelous as unquestionably real. This principle applies no less to science-fictional works wherein the marvel is explained by some science that is at the time still hypothetical, in that this hypothetical science is still outside the bounds of the acknowledged order.
In uncanny works the “reason/unreason” battle results in a draw. Cognitively the metaphenomenon does not totally dispel causation, but it can and does do so in the affective sense Thus it is fair to speak of both categories as sharing the quality of “strangeness,” for both challenge rationality and causation to some extent, while atypical works merely challenge one’s notion of probability.

Side-note: My above ruminations about how I’ve used “atypicality” make me aware that I shouldn’t use the same word for both a general category and a specific category within that category. From now on, what I’ve called “general atypicality” is better described as “the anomalous,” drawing on Frank Cioffi’s use of that term.

TODOROV O TODOROV PART 1

In this essay defining my term "metaphenomenal" I gave my rationale for introducing the new term, then compared it to the dominant use (in academic studies) of "the fantastic," a term propagated largely by Tzvetan Todorov in his book of the same name:

I consider [the metaphenomenal] a better catch-all for all things that owe their existence to mankind's imagination than the usual catch-all employed in academic studies: "the fantastic." There's both logic and tradition to using the latter term, yet it seems at times cumbersome when dealing with phenomenon that go beyond phenomenal limits within a given universe, and yet are not supposed to be regarded as "fantastic" within that universe even though they may be to the majority of readers. "Metaphenomenal," to my mind, efficiently takes in both the viewpoints of readers and of the characters designed for the story as to whether a given element is within the sphere of ordinary phenomena or not.

As I mentioned earlier I first encountered Todorov's definiton in my college years, and though I didn't write any essays on Todorov back then I'm pretty sure my contemporary version recapitulates my negative feeling toward Todorov, with particular reference to his overblown, quasi-Aristotelian emphasis on the quality of "hesitation" as it applies to "the fantastic." In a future essay I plan to shred hesitation with all dispatch.

In the Caillois resource I mentioned that Todorov had quoted one of Caillois' definitions of "the fantastic," and that I could not judge the original intent of Caillois since the book apparently has not been translated to English. Todorov also quoted another of Caillois' definitions from the same book:

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowl­edged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality.”

I might venture that if the first definition is a little too much on the "affective" side, saying only that the fantastic work conveys a "sense of strangeness," this one compensates in that one can imagine the "break" as being either an objective phenomenon (or "anomaly," to employ Frank Cioffi's term again) or a subjective one (the madness of a Poe narrator, for instance).

That's not to say that Caillois' definition is perfect. For instance, whatever one thinks of the LEFT BEHIND books, they are depicting a metaphenomenal reality where the Rapture actually takes place, but that "irruption" is hardly "inadmissible" within the sphere of Christian belief. One presumes that this contrarian view of the metaphenomenal stems from Caillois' affiliation with the Surrealists-- an improvement on the Marxists, but still not without definitional problems.

More on the metaphenomenal and its opposing number next time.

CALLOU, CAILLOIS: RESOURCE

While waiting to get ahold of Todorov's THE FANTASTIQUE I did some online research on Roger Caillois, the French surrealist and "social theorist" (sez Wiki) from whom Todorov quotes as follows:

Caillois, too, proposes as a “touchstone of the fantastic ... the impression of irreducible strangeness.”

As I'm quoting from an online excerpt I can't tell whether or not Todorov's book quotes the source of this definition (which will be important in evaluating Todorov's own theory). I did find that source elsewhere online, though:


http://books.google.com/books?id=oDvs9PqvMbcC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=todorov+caillois+strangeness+ozick&source=bl&ots=SKTKXmKiRt&sig=nYu-auTwjlH69WZrbrWE7YMo9wI&hl=en&ei=cRrPTO_fHcGblgex5KiXBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=todorov%20caillois%20strangeness%20ozick&f=false

Apparently the quote comes from a Caillois book named AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE, which as far as I can tell has not been readily translated to English. Todorov is apparently rejecting Caillois' definition(s) as too limited, however.

More on these matters later.