ROE, ROE,-- WAIT, DON'T ROE THAT BOAT

So "Roe vs. Wade" was overturned last week. I've said little about the topic of abortion on this blog, aside from this conclusion from THE ILLEGITIMACY OF 'LEGITIMATE RAPE':

I am opposed categorically to the politicized sentiments of Akin's kind.  Their only solution to the multifarious problems relating to unwanted conception-- which include, but certainly are not limited to, conceptions through rape-- is an absolute refusal of the state's power to kill the unborn. 

And, unpleasant though it may seem, the unborn cannot be given special rights, despite any and all societal instincts to protect future generations.  It goes without saying that the state probably has made many mistakes in executing particular abortions, just as it has in executing particular prisoners.  But it does not follow that all of the executions were mistakes.  There are times when the unborn, innocent though they may be, simply have to suffer from living in an imperfect world.

I sympathize somewhat more with those individuals-- none of whom are affiliated with the anti-abortion crowd-- who recommend, not an absolute ban on abortion, but merely restrictions as to how *often* citizens might "choose" to have abortions.  But it's seems almost certain that our society, having become polarized between two extremes, will never explore this area of legal theory. 

Over the years I've heard many of those on the Far Right voice the opinion that the 1973 SCOTUS decision was rooted in "activism," and that its extrapolations of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights were out of line. I would agree only in one respect: of the various rights that the Constitution spells out, none of them relate to medical matters. One may speculate that lawmakers of the 18th and 19th centuries did not foresee the politicization of medical concerns, particularly abortion. So they never spelled out whether or not changing ethics regarding such subjects would truly fall under the so called penumbra of the "life, liberty, and property" guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment (that is, one could not be deprived of these without "due process of law.") This essay from CNN alleges that abortion was available under common law in the U.S. until 1880, though CNN may not be the best arbiter of our national history.

Though I may have become somewhat more conservative on this or that topic over the years, I've never had a problem, as shown above, with the notion that the state may expedite the termination of new life, simply because that state always has that power in essence. I favor neither of the hardcore absolutisms regarding the physical act, be it religion's arbitrary dictates about when the soul enters the fetus, or materialism's screeds about how the fetus just ain't alive until science says so. Neither are worthwhile guides as to whether a contemporary society should consider the option of abortion to be part of the "life, liberty and property" troika. 

I also noted in the segment above that I'm less than impressed with the extremism of some pro-choicers, who would not accept any restrictions whatsoever in their favored form of liberty. Yet it's possible that even if we lived in a time dominated by Classic Liberals rather than Progressives, the SCOTUS Judges would have made the same decision: that abortion could not be viewed as a federally mandated "right" that trumped the local politics of states. 

I do not know all the reasons that the Judges chose to nullify Roe v. Wade. I don't disbelieve their stated reasons, nor do I dismiss all of the animadversions expressed by those who hate the verdict. Nevertheless, I think it possible that, just as the 1973 decision had the effect of breaking down the power of the Religious Right, the 2022 decision may be a challenge to the power of the ultraliberal Left, which enjoyed a boost in cultural hegemony in response to the presidency of Trump and the devastation of Covid, which Lefties blamed on Trump.

In many ways, the Right's crocodile tears for the slain unborn are a way of stoking emotional response from the faithful, in much the same way that the Left sheds similar tears for the sufferings of marginalized women and POC. I think that in recent times the fanaticism of the Left has been more harmful to the culture as a whole, but I won't claim that a return to the values of the Right might not be worse. 

In other words, I cast a plague on both their houses-- albeit with the caveat that I don't really have a dog in the fight.

MYTHCOMICS: "COURTSHIP, KRYPTONIAN STYLE" (LOIS LANE #78, 1967)

Silver Age LOIS LANE comics have taken a lot of heat for making the female protagonist look foolish, often by some contrivance brought about by her supposed boyfriend Superman, seeking to teach the impulsive lady reporter some sort of "lesson." Some commentators have jumped to the conclusion that the LOIS book was some sort of kiddie-level diatribe against the female of the species.

Of course, this doesn't entirely cohere with the fact that girls of middle school age were most likely the audience that made LOIS LANE a successful magazine throughout the sixties, though the title petered out in the early seventies. Certainly the conventional wisdom of the times asserted that boys did not buy comics that starred girls, with the possible exception of the more lubricious titles (SHEENA and the other jungle-girls, for example). I was brought up in that Silver Age culture, and I can remember feeling disdain for "girl comics," even though I have no idea where that perceived taboo came from. So assuming that most of LOIS's readers were young girls, it's hard to see why they would have supported a title that made their gender look bad, even in the days before full-fledged feminism took hold.

Now, LOIS LANE, like its companion spinoff JIMMY OLSEN, varied between showing the protagonist as foolish in some stories but clever in other ones. Thus any girls who consistently read the book would probably have twigged early on that Lois wasn't ALWAYS a goofball. Given that circumstance, it's possible that those contemporaneous readers just didn't subject their comics-characters to intense sociological scrutiny, precisely because "clever Lois" counteracted the influence of "foolish Lois." This meant that at times Lois-- despite being locked in to her permanent status as "Superman's girlfriend"-- was shown as having her own agency.

"Courtship, Kryptonian Style" (whose title was borrowed from at least one of two similarly titled Italian films of the sixties) straddles the "Clever Lois/ Foolish Lois" categories, as well as extending the same largesse to the protagonist's frequent rival/guest-star, Lana Lang. Writer Leo Dorfman and penciler Kurt Schaffenberger jockey back and forth in their depictions of Lois and Lana, who both seek to free themselves from their enthrallment to Superman but still end up competing for his "hand" in the end.

"Courtship" is technically the second half of a two-part story, but the first part, from LOIS #76, is really just a set-up for Part Two. In #76, both Lois and Lana come across what seems to be a magical genie in a bottle. This genie comes complete with Middle Eastern garments and orange-hued skin (maybe brown skin was a bit too suggestive for the time?), and he calls himself Vitar. Lois and Lana both use Vitar to make frivolous wishes designed to gain attention from Superman, and each explicitly wants to trump her rival. However, it turns out that Vitar's origins lay in a totally different type of bottle-- the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city preserved as it were "under glass." Vitar, using some sort of cosmic viewscope to follow Superman's exploits, resents the fact that the hero keeps two women on the string (harem envy, anyone?). 

Vitar's genie-imposture doesn't make any sense, even for a Silver Age story. But Vitar's apparent sincerity-- that he would like to marry either Lois or Lana if they all get the chance to know one another well-- impresses the women. So, since any woman who married Vitar would have to join him in the Bottle City, both Lois and Lana elect to leave their regular lives behind and emigrate to Kandor. Dorfman, knowing that this is not a permanent change, expends no effort on explaining their mind-set. The only important thing was to show the women making an attempt to distance themselves from the man who repeatedly claims he can't marry any mortal woman, lest she be slain by one of the hero's many enemies.

All that said, Dorfman hedges his bets. No sooner do Lois and Lana begin their new life in Kandor than they start missing Superman, just as he is seen (however briefly) yearning after them. To their consternation, the ladies becomes jealous when they observe (via another cosmic viewscope) one of Superman's heroic deeds. They witness the Man of Steel enjoying the presence of two Kandorian girls who are exact doubles of Lois and Lana, who are allowed to leave Kandor to lend the hero a helping hand. (It's the Kandorian double of Lois that the reader sees on the issue's cover, bouncing bullets off her boobs, and neither she nor Kandor-Lana has any real designs on Superman.)

 The only real romance-oriented threat comes from Vitar's ex-girlfriend Serena Vol, who tries to sabotage the ladies' entrance into Kandorian society in a fatal fashion.

The ladies are told that Kandor does not allow "idleness" on the part of its citizens, so Lois and Lana have to have their aptitudes analyzed by an "analyzer beam" in the "psychodrome." The women are told that their real aptitudes are not their actual jobs-- reporter and newscaster-- but rather, that Lois would be best off as a detective and Lana as an archaeologist. This development is the psychological core of the story, for even though the ladies get their talents boosted by Kandorian info-downloads, the change gives readers the chance to see Lois and Lana living lives independent of Superman. 

Not for very long, though. Vitar (who no longer has orange skin, BTW) dates both women briefly, but he quickly intuits that they're still batty for the Metropolis Marvel. So he reveals, out of nowhere, that he has an invulnerability serum, but only enough for one of the ladies. It's presented as a given that if one of them becomes immune from harm, Superman will just have to marry the Invulnerable Girl, irrespectively of whether he really loves her better than Non-Invulnerable Girl. Vitar proposes a test-- like Superman, Vitar is big on testing his loved ones-- saying that the woman who can solve a recent crime, the theft of a Kandorian artifact-- will get the serum, and by extension, the Man of Steel. (Does Vitar contemplate making up to the less successful woman? Dorfman does not say so, but it would be a logical conclusion.)

So Detective Lois and Archaeologist Lana begin their separate paths to track down the artifact-thief, and Dorfman is at his most clever in figuring out ways in which both girls' specialties can shine. While they're still separate, both ladies are briefly menaced, and though neither woman sees her assailant clearly, they both assume it's that ex-girlfriend Serena Vol. It's strange that neither Earth-woman suspects the other Earth-woman, given that their history is one of undercutting one another. The two women come together and track down the thief together, though Lois technically wins the contest because she's had Kandorian karate-skills downloaded into her brain, allowing her to beat the guy up. Winning the contest means nothing, though, because Vitar then reveals that his invulnerable serum just wears off in a short time.

And what mysterious women were menacing the lady sleuths? No, not red herring Serena Vol. It was the two Kandorian doubles, with "Kandor-Lois" trying to help "Earth-Lois" win the contest while "Kandor-Lana" did the same for "Earth-Lana." This may have restored the readers' expectations in the tendency of Lois and Lana to trump each other-- even if their doubles do the dirty deeds. But this last bit of craziness turns the Earth-girls off Kandor, and they implore Superman to bring them back to their home, their status quo, and, one assumes, their uninterrupted day-jobs. For a romantic finish, Vitar marries Serena Vol, forgiving her for her rash actions because 'twas all for love, I guess. 

Having devoted all this time to the psychological myth of the empowered love-slave, I have to add the non-mythic note that I thought the name "Serena Vol" was unusually resonant for a nothing character who doesn't even have a line of dialogue. I finally recalled that about a year before this story, Leo Dorfman scripted the first Silver Age appearance of The Catwoman for two issues of LOIS LANE. And for one panel, Dorfman does use the canonical real-world cognomen for the Feline Felon-- "Selina Kyle." Perhaps he came up with a similar name because he subconsciously thought of Serena Vol as-- "catty?"

ABUNDANT EXCHANGES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA PT. 2

I should build on the formulations from Part 1 to clarify exactly what sort of freedom I've been describing.

Without doubt the intellectual ramifications of my NUM formula were spawned in reaction against Tzvetan Todorov's attempt to subsume all categories of fantasy under a conceptual umbrella he called "the real," which was very much in keeping with his Freudian leanings. In contrast, I assert that every literary phenomenality has its own unique nature, regardless of what one thinks about the configuration of one's lived experience.

All that said, the base purpose of fictional narrative is expressive, not intellectual, so the primary importance of the three phenomenalities is not their value as thought experiments, but as conjurations of the six forms of affect I last described in 2017's ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.

Being one mortal reader, I cannot know precisely what affects dominate the minds of other readers. However, I can use deductive reasoning to discern common ground. For instance, Todorov insists that because Poe's HOUSE OF USHER does not actually reveal any marvelous phenomena, its manifestation of the uncanny is subsumed by "the real." But if this was an accurate deduction that one could apply to other readers, why would cinematic versions of the story appear in practically every fantasy-film concordance? Are there any concordances of fantasy-films that go out of their way to emphasize only films of the marvelous; that keep only the sirens and the psychics but exclude all of the serial killers? I will go out on a limb and state that there are none, for the simple reason that the compilers of these works are not blinded by ideology as was Todorov. Even if none compilers of concordances would look with favor upon my overall system, the automatic association of Norman Bates with Odysseus demonstrates that the affects aligned with the uncanny are closer in spirit to those of the marvelous. 

There will still be disagreements. In MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH, I noted how Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS did not subscribe to my belief that costumed heroes automatically had a "weird" vibe, though he would include any characters garbed in macabre attire (skulls; phantom-like clothing, etc.) But he unequivocally covered both truly marvelous westerns alongside those that only suggested marvelous phenomena-- and that in my opinion is enough to suggest his awareness of a fundamental "strangeness" linking those categories; a strangeness one cannot find even in westerns with odd content (say, 1942's REAP THE WILD WIND, best remembered these days as the film where John Wayne fights an octopus).

Playful, expressive freedom is the essence of what makes fictional narrative valuable to human beings, in contradistinction of the "work ethic" that dominates non-fiction, no matter the quality of the reporting involved in a given screed. Thus I will stipulate that efficacy in my system concerns "a free selection of causes" with respect to all the affective and cognitive aspects of fictional narrative, but that the affective ones are somewhat more consequential.

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA

 I've only touched upon Ernst Cassirer's concept of efficacy in passing in previous essays, but I did recently conceive of a possible adaptation of the term for my own system.

Once more with feeling, here's what Cassirer wrote of the concept in MYTHICAL THOUGHT:

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

Cassirer is concerned only with contrasting efficacy, elsewhere described as a "free selection of causes," with the scientific concept of limited causality, so I have no reason to think that the philosopher would have had any reason to apply his categories to the subject of literary phenomenality. But it occurred to me recently that "free selection of causes" is a choice that potentially faces any reader/audience-member when presented with any narrative: that it may be dominated by either the naturalistic, the uncanny, or the marvelous phenomenality.

For once I won't put forth new examples of each phenomenality, but will default to the statement I made in last year's LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE:

In my discussion of Aristotle I mentioned that Classic Greek literature could embrace both “naturalistic tropes,” which were often with the limitations of human fallibility and mortality,” and with “marvelous tropes” about gods and ghosts, describing imagined states of existence beyond the realm of human limitations. Gothic fiction was instrumental, however, in promulgating the interstitial category of “uncanny tropes.” Such tropes had existed even in mankind’s prehistory, and in my essay UNCANNY GENESIS I cited some examples of uncanny tropes from archaic story-cycles, such as the extra-Biblical “Bel and the Dragon” and “the Six Labors of Theseus.” But there’s no doubt that Gothic practitioners like Ann Radcliffe had a much more sustained effect in elaborating stories in which supernatural occurrences were “explained rationally.” In truth, though, the “rationality” of uncanny stories like THE ITALIAN and THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is compromised from the start by even allowing for the possibility of the supernatural, in contrast, say, to Jane Austen’s Gothic spoof NORTHANGER ABBEY, in which the existence of the supernatural is not even slightly validated.

 All of these examples require that the reader fall into sympathy with whatever attitude the author projects regarding "the world of subjective emotions," even if that attitude may include total dismissal of said emotions. 

In life, each person makes a similar choice: whether or not to believe that emotions have "objective existence," or to credence that whatever abstract forms those emotional continua may assume-- Heaven, Hell, the astral plane-- have any meaning to them. But in fiction, the choice always remains open to interpretation with each new text-- which is one reason literature will always be oriented more toward freedom than to restraint.

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 2

 At the end of the previous essay I wrote:

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

The ancient Greek terms "perata and apeiron" appeared before in a round of essays I wrote back in January, entitled LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, starting here.

Simply put, the Greek terms connote respectively "things that have limits" and "things that are boundless." I used them thusly: 

 For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe  -- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

I went on to explore this dichotomy through the lens of Georges Bataille's distinction between "work" (productive activity, oriented upon humans dealing with the limited physical world) and "play" (unproductive activity, oriented upon humans taking a vacation from work and its attendant moralities). It should be noted that both of these dichotomies-- limited/limitless and work/play-- might be deemed as "codefinitional" in the sense seen in Kauffman's quote in the previous essay: that one concept generates the other. (Back in the 2012 essay PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I employed Martin Buber's term "word pairs" to much the same end.)

Yet another pair of linked concepts relevant to this discussion are the opposed concepts of "verisimilitude" and "artifice" that I formulated (or re-interpreted) in the 2016 essay EFFICACY, MEET MYTH. "Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

With all that in mind, I go back to the two versions of Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed by Stuart A. Kauffman in INVESTIGATIONS. The first version of Wittgenstein was one who, in accordance with the prevalent mood of the period, valued the concept of "logical atomism." Kauffman wrote:

Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

Before going on Wittgenstein 2.0, I pose the question: does the philosophy of "logical atomism" parallel anything with the corpus of literary criticism? And, perhaps not surprisingly, the parallel I draw is to a type of criticism described by Northrop Frye:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Since Frye is the luminary from whom I partly borrowed my verisimilitude-artifice word-pair, it should be clear that I'm saying that the "high seriousness" critic is the one who values verisimilitude above everything else, and that this type of thinking parallels that of the logical atomists. 

Now for a return appearance, here's Kauffman on Wittgenstein's rejection of the atomist attitude:

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

And is there a parallel between this attitude and the opposing critical tendency described in Frye's essay? Let's see.

Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do no want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story.

 

Certainly Frye has ably contrasted the critic who wants "verisimilitude" as against the critic who wants "conventions." I would extend this to say that the appeal of the first is also, as stated before, the appeal of "cognitive restraint," and therefore perata, while the latter appeals in terms of "affective freedom," and therefore apeiron. I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation. And it is through being able to experience both of these proclivities that the often divided minds of humankind may potentially find at least a conditional wholeness.

 

 

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1

It's been nine years since I dove into the deep waters of a Stuart A. Kauffman book, which I examined somewhat in the NATURAL LAWBREAKING posts, all of which appeared in 2013, beginning here. That book, REINVENTING THE SACRED, came out in 2006, and the one I'm now slowly working through, INVESTIGATIONS, was written six years earlier. Both books are concerned with defining the processes by which life evolved on Earth, with Kauffman taking a less reductive (and thus more holistic) view of how a myriad of factors combine to bring about organisms capable of sexual generation. 

Not having ventured back into SACRED since that first reading, I don't remember if Kauffman had anything to say about the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, Kauffman has much to say in INVESTIGATIONS, noting that he derived the title of this 2000 book from the thinker's 1953 book PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. 

Now, my only direct contact with Wittgenstein was an unfavorable one, as I remarked in the 2014 essay WITLESS IN VIENNA-- in which, by an odd coincidence, I critiqued Edward Skidelsky's preference for Wittgenstein over Ernst Cassirer by comparing Cassirer's perspective to that of... Stuart A, Kauffman! The following quotes from the WITLESS essay accurately represents all I knew then about Wittgenstein as well as everything up until beginning Kauffman's 2000 tome--

It's been at least ten years since I plowed my way through Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  I found it thoroughly uninteresting and couldn't understand why this logic-chopper had become such a major voice in modern philosophy.

And--

I cannot speak to the veracity of Skidelsky's findings on Wittgenstein's motives.  I will note that my principal response to the TRACTATUS was that I too assumed that the author shared the purpose of the positivists: to devalue "sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience." 

And finally--

I cannot deny that Wittgenstein, even today, is viewed with more approval than Cassirer.  Yet I must ask: how many persons interested in philosophy are even aware of Wittgenstein's "mystical vision," or his critique of scientism, and how many have made the same assumptions that the Vienna Circle did, translating pure logic into empiricist epistemology?  Cassirer may not be understood by the average readers of philosophy today; he may well be regarded as "old hat." But do these readers understand that Wittgenstein opposed empiricist scientism?

I tend to doubt it, and I'm tempted to make a survey of philosophy blogs to determine how many people today write of "Wittgenstein, anti-empiricist."  Wittgenstein's focus upon a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content is at base allied to the language used by science

Now, without double checking I assume that everything Skidelsky wrote was based upon his admiration for the 1921 TRACTATUS, which bored the hell out of me. I don't think Skidelsky has much if anything to say about the closing works of Wittengenstein's life, which are the very works that Kauffman champions over the early ones.

In Chapter 3, Kauffman wrote:

In his early TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein had brought to conclusion the mandate of logical atomism from Russell. Logical atomism sought a firm epistemological foundation for all knowledge in terms of privileged "atomic statements" about "sense data"... One might be mistaken in saying that a chair is in the room, but one could hardly be mistaken in reporting bits and pieces of one's own awareness... Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

So this is the only Wittgenstein I knew, the one I remarked as having favored "a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content"-- by which I did NOT mean "sense data," but the content of the perceiver's personal reaction to the data. Kauffman, having outlined the position of 1921 Wittgenstein, then says:

It was Wittgenstein himself who, twenty years later, junked the entire enterprise. PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was his later-life revolution. His revolution has done much to destroy the concept of a privilege level of description and paved the way to an understanding that concepts at any level typically are formed in codefinitional circles.

What's "codefinitional?"

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

These concepts are meant to serve Kauffman's long-range purpose of envisioning a biology not defined simply by mindless reproduction of templates, but holistic interaction of systems-- and that's all that I can say about Kauffman's biological agenda, having not finished the book yet. 

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "ATONEMENT" (HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY, 2013-14)

Manga-serials strongly based on fantasy-premises vary widely with respect to how assiduously their creators elaborate the rationales for those concepts. Some serials toss out a very basic premise and never develop beyond what is strictly necessary, as with Masakazu Katsura's SHADOW LADY. Another group of serials will explore their premises in a thorough and linear fashion until reaching a logical conclusion, as with Lynn Okamoto's ELFEN LIED. Still others articulate and follow a strong premise in one arc and then go on to develop the underpinnings of the fantasy-world in even greater detail, as fans saw when Nozomu Tamaki followed the first "super-arc" of DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND  with the shorter arc of SCARLET ORDER.

Suu Minazuki takes a more roundabout path to his premise in his most famous work, HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY. His narrative approach somewhat resembles that of the American teleseries LOST, which teased its watchers to the very end with expectations of a great "here's-the-explanation-for-it-all" revelation. Readers of PROPERTY do get a better explanation of that manga's fantasy-world than did the audience of LOST. Still, detailed explication was not one of Minazuki's priorities, though the manga's final arc-- which I've titled "Atonement" after one of the installment-titles-- succeeds in achieving a high level of myth-concrescence anyway.

PROPERTY's setup resembles that of many Japanese fantasy-based harem comedies: a relatively ordinary young man, ranging in age from middle school to college, has a bevy of supernatural beauties converge on his place of residence, sometimes with one or two regular Earth-girls around for variety. All the babes are in love with the main guy but their competition for his favor brings about an enforced chastity, since none of them get anything more than basic canoodling. 

In PROPERTY, middle schooler Tomoki Sakurai finds himself playing host to three young women who look like a cross between Judeo-Christian angels and Victoria's Secret models (even if one of them is closer to the measurements of Twiggy than of Heidi Klum). All three are beings called "Angeloids" and they come from a mysterious island in the sky called "Synapse," possibly derived from Swift's Laputa, but they can't talk about their place of origin-- which works out fine for Minazuki, since he wants to keep the nature of Synapse under wraps for most of his epic. The name "Angeloids" implies that the girls are androids, which is confirmed by the fact that all three have weapons-systems built into their bodies. However, they might also be cyborgs, since if you bonk them on their heads they get the usual mushroom-sized lumps. A few other Angeloids intrude on Tomoki's sanctum for shorter lengths of time, but the main three throughout the story are Ikaros (beautiful but bereft of expressive affect), Astraea (beautiful but stupid), and Nymph (beautiful, but was last in line when they were handing out funbags).

Prior to the Angeloids' advent, Tomoki lives by himself in the small Japanese town Sorami, his parents away on extended travels. His solitude may stem in part from his motto, "Peace above everything," meaning that he doesn't like to be stirred by anything. He has one friend, next-door neighbor-girl Sohara, who as I observed in my review of the TV show, often seems more like a discipline-minded mother than a potential girlfriend, often punishing Tomoki for offenses real or imagined. Sohara's plainly in love with Tomoki, but he just wants to go to school, laze around his house and read porn. He does have an odd recurring dream where a mysterious woman pleads with him to help her daughter, but this doesn't have any definite meaning for Tomoki.

Two of Tomoki's fellow students, Sugata and Misako, more or less con him into intercepting a predicted celestial event. Thus Tomoki is out in the wilds when an armor-garbed winged woman crashes to Earth. Tomoki's tempted to leave her to the authorities, but his basic decency asserts itself, and he takes the Angeloid Ikaros to his home.

Two traditional myth-narratives are conflated here. One, obviously, is the Christian myth in which former angel Lucifer/Satan is exiled from Heaven and flung down to Hell. The other is the Greek story of the great craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus, who manage to escape the prison of King Minos by flying into the sky with artificial wings. Icarus, unlike his father, crashes when he flies too near the sun, so that his wings break apart and he falls to his death. Neither fate is meant to seem beneficial, but in the case of Ikaros, it turns out to be a "fortunate fall," since by staying with Tomoki she begins to learn about her own potential humanity. (Incidentally, the woman from Tomoki's dream, loosely responsible for sending Ikaros to Earth, sports the name "Daedalus.")

For most of the PROPERTY narrative-- both before and after the next two Angeloids are added to the cast-- most episodes seem like what I DREAM OF JEANNIE would have been if Major Nelson had been a sleazehound. Tomoki soon learns that Ikaros and her friends have vast super-scientific powers-- which gives the youth the chance to carry out the pursuits dearest to his heart: ogling pretty young girls and fondling pretty young girls. (For the most part, he seems uninterested in any girls but those in his own class, including Sohara.) In one episode, Tomoki has his body transformed into the water in a swimming pool, retaining just enough solidity to fondle the girls' nubile forms. All of these pursuits end with Tomoki reverting to his normal form at the wrong time and getting mercilessly pummeled by Sohara and the other girls, though none of the beatings dissuade him from trying the same thing again in some other form. Late in the series it's suggested he gets his extreme sleaziness from his mother's genes, but Minazuki is careful to show that when he's not overwhelmed by horniness, he's actually a decent enough fellow-- and the combination makes Ikaros, Nymph and Astraea all fall hard for him.

While all these hijinks are going on, Minasuki teases out little bits and pieces about the world that birthed the Angeloids. Hardly any non-android inhabitants of Synapse are seen, except for the winged (but implicitly organic) ruler of the floating city, whose name is finally revealed to be (naturally enough) Minos. Minos is the epitome of the bored autocrat, torturing his own flunkies-- particularly the naive Nymph-- just for entertainment, and he regards earthbound mortals as "bugs." He sends both Nymph and Astraea to recover Ikaros, but Tomoki's kindness converts them. Minos continues to send other Angeloids to kill his mortal foe, and most are killed or otherwise compromised by Tomoki's trinity of protectors. Only one Angeloid becomes a recurring menace: a child-like cyborg named Chaos, curiously dressed in the traditional outfit of a nun (though this doesn't seem to signify anything more than a little casual nunsploitation). Chaos is fascinated by the "love" that has changed the loyalties of the other Angeloids, but she thinks it has something to do with physical pain, which makes for lots of sadomasochistic schtick.

After a minor Angeloid character is slain by Chaos, "Tomoki's Angels" finally decide to make a frontal assault on Synapse, which is where "Atonement" begins, and where Minazuki finally decides to unveil the nature of the floating city. Chaos, temporarily allied with Sugata, takes him to Synapse and shows him "The Rule," an arcane column with many writings on the surface. Chaos explains that these were wishes inscribed by citizens of Synapse, but unlike the idle fantasies of Tomoki, these wishes had deep costs, both for the mortal world-- which gets remade by these wishes-- and for the Synapseans. It's revealed that the reason most Synapseans aren't around is because they've all entered cryosleep, deeply disillusioned with having too much control of the world, so that everything comes too easily. And now the world is about to be reset once again, eliminating everything in Tomoki's existence.

Tomoki and his Angeloids assault the floating city, but the cost is high. Astraea perishes fighting Chaos, Nymph expires while destroying Synapse's defenses, and Ikaros is erased by the act of venturing back to the place of her "exile."

In the end, though, they still participate in the defeat of Minos, for when Tomoki faces the corrupt ruler, he wields the core taken from Ikaros's dissolved form, which contains the spiritual force of their evolved humanity. After defeating Minos, Tomoki receives the guidance of Daedalus and is able to inscribe one last wish upon the Rule column. His lesser self tempts him to alter the world to reflect his own needs, but in the end he does the right thing and remolds the world to what is was before the attack. Despite all his desire for a "peaceful life," he's once more got a houseful of unruly Angeloids and a quasi-girlfriend who karate chops him all the time. A coda suggests that the bond between Tomoki and his first angel Ikaros is really the "true love" of the tale, but like most harem stories, the movement into adulthood will never take place.

Because this post is long, I'm glossing over two major subplots, one involving the backstory of Sugata, and the other an unexpected connection between disciplinarian Sohara and "mother of angels" Daedalus-- who in some ways seems like a "good mother" substitute for the "bad mother" who actually birthed Tomoki. Both of these subplots share the same concrescence as the Synapse revelation, and are brought to fruition in the "Atonement" arc.