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.

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 1

The title of this  essay is an extremely forced pun on the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose 1792 VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN I've recently started reading. I knew when I began that VINDICATION is a precursor to "first-wave feminism." However, even though I have always approved of the practical goals of the first wave, I never thought Wollstonecraft would prove so useful to me in combating "third wave feminism," that bloated monster of Nietzschan ressentiment. Further, the author-- whose name I'll abbreviate to MW just because I feel like it-- proves insightful in buttressing some of my own theories on what I'll call the "sexual division of creativity."

In one respect I might have anticipated such an application, once I knew that one of the bastions of male privilege whom MW assaults is the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Camille Paglia, whose views on gender-creativity I'll soon reference, asserted that Rousseau was the font of Western liberalism. Paglia does not comment on Rousseau's sexism, but claims that he is one of the main sources of the liberal idea that social engineering can "fix" any apparent problem-- an outlook shared by most if not all third-wave feminist authors.

For example, most third-wave feminists would agree that if there is an apparent discrepancy in the creative accomplishments of the two primary genders-- the dominant one being that there are no female playwrights equal to Shakespeare, no female comics-artists equal to Kirby or Tezuka-- then that discrepancy must spring from social inequity, and social inequity alone. It's all about the old boys' club, silencing women's voices, and other forms of ressentiment. The sexual division of labor can have no relevance when one is seeking to prosecute a supposed enemy.

In the first chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE, Paglia asserts that there is a real gap in the accomplishments of feminine creators in comparison to those of masculine ones. Her explanation for this discrepancy is rooted in a complicated synthesis of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, though Paglia freely calls upon various Nietzschean terms, such as the "Apollonian-Dionysian" duality, Freud will be seen to be the dominant influence:

Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the gru¬ 
elling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, 
reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new 
forms bob, gasping for life. Dionysus was identified with liquids— 
blood, sap, milk, wine. The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. 
Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one being 
from another. All artifacts are Apollonian. Melting and union are Dio¬ 
nysian; separation and individuation, Apollonian. Every boy who leaves 
his mother to become a man is turning the Apollonian against the Dio¬ 
nysian. Every artist who is compelled toward art, who needs to make 
words or pictures as others need to breathe, is using the Apollonian to 
defeat chthonian nature. In sex, men must mediate between Apollo and 
Dionysus. Sexually, woman can remain oblique, opaque, taking plea¬ 
sure without tumult or conflict. Woman is a temenos of her own dark 
mysteries. Genitally, man has a little thing that he must keep dipping 
in Dionysian dissolution—a risky business! Thing-making, thing- 
preserving is central to male experience. Man is a fetishist. Without his 
fetish, woman will just gobble him up again. 

Hence the male domination of art and science. Man’s focus, directed- 
ness, concentration, and projection, which I identified with urination 
and ejaculation, are his tools of sexual survival...

Thus Paglia is firmly in the Freudian camp that claims "biology is destiny." There's even a passage a few pages later in which Paglia seems to be advocating Freud's tendency to view male sexuality as primary and female sexuality as epiphenomenal, as when she claims that "art is [man's] Apollonian response toward and away from woman."

As stimulating as I find Paglia, I can't subscribe to her system, since I regard biology as being at best "partial destiny."

So, even before reading MW, I began to think in terms of sociological explanations that would be rooted not in Rousseauist wishful thinking, but in the sexual division of labor as we understand it today. The statement that "men hunt and women nest" may not be entirely fair to either gender. However, it certainly has broader applicability than the old "damn that boy's club" rant.

As it happens, MW seems to have touched on this problem in her time. VINDICATION continually argues in favor of women receiving a broader education than European culture tended to allow in that time. However, despite taking males to task for the faulty reasoning, MW seems to be a stranger to the circular argument of endless ressentiment seen in third-wave feminism. Rather than simply prating about boys' clubs, MW says:

Let it not be concluded, that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must, therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain, that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.

To be sure, lest this be misinterpreted, Carol Poston, editor of Norton's second edition of VINDICATION, adds this footnote:

Being physically inferior can lead to women's being morally inferior: not just physical size but [man's] worldly pursuits allow men a greater opportunity to make moral choices and thus attain virtue.

MW, in addition to cautioning her readers that she does not "wish to invert the order of things," asserts that men may at a particular time attain greater virtue than women because their "worldly pursuits" give them the chance to make moral choices. This in no way contradicts her advocacy of woman's right to full education, but rather, sees the division of labor as bringing about womankind's inability to attain virtue through informed choice.

MW is not addressing artistic creativity at all, but her concept of "virtue" applies to my concept of creativity as it exists in the temporal world-- as I'll argue further in Part Two.