FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY PT. 2

 In THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT, I sought to clarify the terms of my validation of subjective experience as against objective evidence. In this essay and in FUN WITHPHENOMENOLOGY, I noted that my project had some parallels with that of the phenomenologists, though I’ve read few of their works in their original forms. Yet the parallels are not all-encompassing.

In the earliest days of this blog, my meditations on myth were strongly influenced by my contemporaneous readings of Cassirer. Perhaps I sought to ground my critical outlook, already informed by Frye, Jung and Campbell, with substance drawn from a more strictly philosophical continuum. Even had I read Cassirer earlier, though, I don’t imagine I would have been an acolyte, since my primary interest was/is literature, and Cassirer never wrote a poetics. Indeed, in one essay I expressed doubt that the Marburg scholar’s literary priorities would have resonated with me. That said, Cassirer’s ideas of both literature and “mythico-religious” narratives were informed by his notion of “expressivity”—the attempt to bring forth the subjective universe spawned by objective phenomena-- and in some of my early posts I agreed with him on this point of commonality.

To the best of my understanding, the disciples of Husserl don’t ground phenomenology in any concept similar to “expressivity.” Rather, phenomenologists speak of isolating the “essences” of actual physical objects by ignoring their “empirical contingencies” and subjecting the objects to “free imaginative variation” (both terms taken from Roger Brooke). I don’t dismiss this methodology out of hand, since I haven’t examined its logic in detail. Still, it’s interesting that in a 2008 essay I sought to frame my one reading of Husserl into a Jungian-Campbellian sphere:

One might well wonder whether or not Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious would constitute [Husserl’s idea of] constancy…

In recent years I’ve began emphasizing the concept of epistemological patterns as a method of judging the symbolic discourses of myth and literature, albeit with the caveat that I’ve always followed Campbell on this point, even prior to formulating the specific term. Campbell took much from Jung, but in his epistemology, he diverges from the Swiss master’s purely psychological approach. In his better moments, Campbell seems to comprehend that myth-tales are valuable precisely because they do not represent what Brooke calls “empirical contingencies,” but rather build upon those contingencies, in order to create poetry rather than science.

Campbell’s version of epistemological patterns may have elements in common with Husserl’s essences, if only because they both seek to validate poetic activity for its own sake. However, Husserl and his acolytes are apparently seeking to ratify “free imaginative variation” as being in tune with reductive science, rather than viewing such poesy as epiphenomenal to physical matter. Since human beings are animals who have evolved the ability to imagine deviations in perceived reality—an ability I see as crucial to “affective freedom”—then everything human beings do stands an outgrowth of a scientific cosmos. This goes a little further than Cassirer’s attempt to find validation for the subjective realm through the backdoor of “expressivity.” One might still state, as did Philip Wheelwright, that some imaginative insights are better than others. (Wheelwright used the term “eminent instance,” which he seems to have borrowed from a similar term I found in Melville’s BILLY BUDD.)

For instance, if one expresses the symbolic notion, “The lion embodies strength,” this is not just an aimless fancy, but the translation of a material fact into the world of mythopoesis. Yet though in a physical sense it might be even more correct to say, “the whale embodies strength,” the whale is simply not as “eminent” as the lion, in part because the world of the whale is comparatively removed from the world of human beings, who can under the right circumstances feel more kinship with the lion.

I don’t know whether I’ll investigate the phenomenologists in near future, but I note this divergence from Cassirer as a possible new road to explore.

FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY

 

I mentioned here that I recently decided to import the concept of intentionality into my system. One reason for this change of mind was a recent re-read of Roger Brooke’s 1991 tome JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY.

Though I’ve devoted several thousand words to the subject of literary phenomenality, I’ve had only a mild interest in the philosophy of phenomenology. One reason is that, even though I believe my Fryean-Jungian-Campbellian system is basically in sympathy with the project founded by Edmund Husserl, I found Husserl’s writing less than compelling, though at least he wasn’t as abominable as Hegel.

For me Brooke offers an easier introduction to phenomenology than did Husserl, precisely because Brooke is making an extended compare-and-contrast between the familiar conceptual terrain of Jung and the schemas of phenomenology. Brooke marshals ample evidence to demonstrate his thesis: that Carl Jung’s depth psychology was at heart in tune with phenomenology, despite assorted inconsistencies. Those problematic areas of Jung’s thought, according to Brooke, arose whenever Jung attempted to line up his psychology with hard science; what Brooke incisively calls “the bland positivist categorization of observables.”

Despite this backsliding, Jung’s core philosophical concept, that the psyche provided the core of human experience, mirrors Brooke’s chosen definition of the phenomenological concept of intentionality: “Intentionality means that consciousness is always and necessarily directed toward an object that is other than consciousness itself.” To be sure, Brooke finds some fault with Jung’s tendency to become almost solipsistic in his attempts to advocate the psyche’s centrality in human experience. Yet as it happens, in my early reading of Husserl I detected a possible current of solipsism, though Brooke does not signal any awareness of such vulnerabilities in his chosen philosophy. For instance, Brooke writes:

For Husserl the essence of a thing is not to be confused with its factically given properties (weight, extension, and so on). Rather, the essence of a thing is given within the imaginative intuition of the consciousness which discriminates that essence from its empirical contingencies.

A few pages later, Brooke writes that Jung’s concept of “amplification is essentially similar to Husserl’s method of free imaginative variation.” I certainly agree with Brooke and with anyone else who downgrades the sort of “empirical contingencies” that thinkers ranging from Comte to Freud have advocated. Still, Brooke doesn’t elucidate any phenomenological concepts that firmly avoid the critique he makes of Jung, that of being too enfolded in the solipsism of the psyche. That does not mean that there aren’t such concepts, merely that Brooke doesn’t map them out.

My own solution to this conundrum is probably nothing like whatever Brooke might present. In my essay AND THE HALF TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE I drew an extended comparison between two of my inspirations, Jung and Joseph Campbell. I found that precisely because Jung was so focused upon viewing every human experience as reflective of a shared, sometimes “collective” psyche, Campbell is more relevant to the study of literature because of the latter’s concentration upon what I call “epistemological patterns.”

Jung possibly followed Kant in the belief that observations about the “outer world” in which human beings live do not demonstrate any ultimate truth about that world. This may be true, and it’s possible that philosophy’s long preoccupation with “pure reason” was a mistake, except in a purely utilitarian sense. However, reason plays a vital (though not central) role in allowing humans to discern patterns in the world, whether cosmological or sociological, metaphysical or psychological. No humans share exactly the same perceptions of the world, and therefore every philosopher—and every creative writer—will see significance in different patterns, or combinations of patterns.

Neither Jung nor Campbell were as intensely focused upon art and literature as was Northrop Frye, and I would guess that neither Brooke nor any of his fellow phenomenologists concentrated on that discipline either. But all of them would seem to agree on valuing “free imaginative variation” as opposed to “empirical contingencies.” The role of reason is not to determine the forms produced by the imagination, but to provide something akin to a medium in which the forms may flourish. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but one needs water and the other air to do so.

It's arguable that for centuries art and literature have performed the task of searching for “essences” via the imagination. Brooke cites a commentator who summarizes Husserl’s process by saying “we carefully investigate what changes can be made in a sample without making it cease to be the thing it is. Through the most arbitrary changes, which wholly disregard reality as it is and which therefore are best made in our phantasy, the immutable and necessary complex of characteristics without which the thing cannot be conceived manifest themselves…”

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.

RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROBLEMS

Back in March 2014 I was deeply involved in sussing out metaphors for my conception of intelligibility. In the essay RIDDLE, MYSTERY, ENIGMA, I used those terms as analogues for the different types of phenomenality I've analyzed under the concept of the NUM formula. In this essay I'll use just two of these terms for a totally different purpose: to denote two poles of what's commonly called the "mystery genre."

Though mystery may have roots going back to the Greek Oedipus and the Hebrew Daniel, it's not inappropriate to credit Edgar Allan Poe with creating the genre. Poe was so deeply invested in working out his personal epistemology, his quest for the meaning of knowledge. that he conceived of both the "riddle" and the "enigma" versions of the genre.

In the earlier essay, I used this definition of riddle:

a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer

This would aptly describe the "rational pole" of the mystery-genre, as represented by the stories of the so-called "first detective," C. Auguste Dupin. In each of his three tales, Dupin is confronted by some bizarre phenomenon that no one else can explain, but which he alone can resolve through his analytical power. The first of the Dupin stories, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," devotes its first four paragraphs to a discussion of said power, starting out by characterizing the genius of people like the story's main character, who will be able to entangle "enigmas," "conundrums," and "hieroglyphics" with equal acumen:

THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension pr�ternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

However, though Dupin never meets a problem he cannot solve, other Poe characters do so. In 1844, the same year that Poe wrote the last Dupin story, he also completed the less-heralded stand-alone story, "The Oblong Box," which I believe ends with an "enigma," defined earlier as:

"a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation"

Since the events of "Oblong Box" aren't as well as known as those of "Rue Morgue," I'll summarize the former's action. Poe's unnamed narrator takes a sea-cruise, and finds that the guests include his former fellow college-student Wyatt, his wife, and his two sisters, who also bring aboard the ship a mysterious "oblong box." The extremely nosy narrator observes some odd discontinuities in the behavior of Wyatt and his fellow travelers, and wonders if it somehow bears on the unseen contents of the box. While the unnamed fellow doesn't come to the correct conclusion, the resolution of the mystery-- one of the few in mystery-fiction that doesn't involve a crime as such-- is explained at the end. And yet, despite the (accidental) solution of the mystery, the nature of Wyatt's relationship to the oblong box is one that remains enigmatic even after the basic situation is understood-- with the result that the narrator is haunted by the disclosures, as C. Auguste Dupin never is, as the story's closing lines relate:

My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears. 

I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.

SUBS AND COES PT. 1

Upon re-reading my May essay TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES, I now believe that transitivity does not apply to the principle of centricity.

The word “transitive” descends from the Latin verb “to go across.” In past essays I’ve applies the term to other literary domains, such as dynamcity and phenomenality. Because there are gradations between the constituent levels within these domains. I’ve often investigated narratives in which it’s unclear as to whether a fight within a narrative “goes across” the conceptual barrier separating the subcombative from the combative, or whether a particular focal presence within a narrative goes across the conceptual barrier separating the naturalistic from the uncanny.

However, there are no comparable conceptual barriers in the domain of centricity. When I wrote the ENSEMBLES essay referenced above, I tried to apply “transitive” to characters who, though they might seem subordinate in some way to a featured character, actually participated in an ensemble with that main character, and so qualified as centric presences. My example of this was Robin, boy sidekick to Batman. Conversely, another “boy sidekick” could be “intransitive” even though that character served some of the same narrative functions as Robin to Batman, and here my example was Junior Tracy with respect to his preceptor Dick Tracy. Whereas Robin would align with the “centric will” expressed by the narrative, Junior would align with the “eccentric will,” as he existed to enhance the “centric will” incarnated only in Dick Tracy.

An author’s decisions about how much emphasis to place upon a character, or set of characters, may be made consciously, or he may proceed subconsciously, simply following other author’s templates. However, a given decision as to who gets ‘center-stage” in a given story is not constructed from the same sort of intra-textual discourses that I find in the construction of dynamicity or phenomenality. Whether the author is writing a stand-alone narrative or a serial one, each story or story-arc must keep a single focal presence, or a single ensemble of focal presences, and that is a predetermined decision, made for the sake of narrative clarity.

Within serial narratives, the ongoing composition of the centric will may change over time.  However, each change takes place within either a new story or a new story-arc. In the first few exploits of Batman, he alone incarnates the centric will of the feature. After Robin enters, the Batman and Robin team becomes an ensemble of two, still incarnating much the same centric will. Twenty years later, Batman plays a lone hand again, and then, if Robin (sometimes in the ID of Nightwing) appears, his status is that of an “eccentric” guest-star. However, when a new story presents a new Robin whom Batman must train, the ensemble-of-two is reborn as if it never left.

In contrast, the phenomenality of the BATMAN feature is built up through a discourse.  As long as Batman, with or without Robin, fights crime wearing a wild costume, this confers an element of the uncanny upon any adventure, even if the hero fights nothing but commonplace pool sharks and holdup-men. In such stories, the element of the uncanny vies with that of the naturalistic, and dominates it, satisfying the reader’s desire for a discourse in which something unreal dominates specters of the allegedly “real.” But centric will does not dominate eccentric will. The latter simply exists as a contrast to the former.

While cogitating on the possibility that centricity might be described through some better metaphor, I meditated a bit on Jung’s use of the term “superordinate.” Since this word is  defined as  “a thing that represents a superior order or category within a system of classification,” it seemed to apply to my idea of a centric will that was simply a given of the author’s whim, rather than through intra-textual discourse.

So I then meditated whether or not the different functions of “characters in an ensemble” and “characters not in an ensemble” could be related to the superordinate position of the centric will. I started playing with the terms “coordination” for the first and “subordination” for the second, and then promptly looked them up on the Net to see if anyone had made previous use of them.

As it happened, I found that the terms did have a previous usage in linguistics, albeit not one that I remember from early language classes. These terms can apply to either conjunctions or to clauses, but the clauses seem most applicable to my project.

A subordinate clause is a clause that would make no sense if taken out of the whole sentence. A coordinate clause is a clause that has meaning independent of the sentence.

It seems axiomatic that the total meaning of a given narrative can be rendered into a single sentence, since students are perpetually forced to come up with such sentences when teachers assign them to boil down a work’s “theme statement.” With that in mind, from a structural standpoint, every character, setting, or event in a narrative is not unlike a clause within the narrative’s overall “theme sentence.”

Just as it’s possible for a sentence to consist of just one clause, a narrative can have a centric will represented by just one focal presence/ clause (Batman by himself).

However, as a sentence can also consist of several clauses, the centric will can also be comprised of an ensemble of two “clauses” or more. In the latter case, the individual members of the ensemble have, at least within my analytical system, the status of “coordinated clauses.”

There are, of course, other presences within the narrative, presences that I have identified as incarnations of the “eccentric will.” Their stature is not on a par with that of any of the “coordinated clauses.” They have, as per the cited definition, no meaning when taken out of the narrative’s  “theme sentence.” Thus Junior Tracy, unlike Robin, can only be a “subordinated clause.”

What makes Robin “coordinated” and Junior Tracy “subordinated” is essentially a matter of what I’ve called *stature.” Originally I used the term in STATURE REQUIREMENTS  to denote the stature that characters in different mythoi had with respect to one another. However, in that usage as in this one, stature is a quality that can only be deduced from the author’s arrangements of the story’s focal presences, and not—as I’ll say again, hopefully for  the last time—not from intra-textual discourse.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

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

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

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

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

BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 2

If anything good came of my reading Jack Zipes' THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, it is that my take on the author's use of the psychological term "the uncanny" spurred me to look for the first time both at Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" and at the 1906 essay by Ernst Jentsch, which Freud credited as a partial inspiration for his more famous work.

In the aforementioned take, I stated:

Freud came up with his term "the uncanny" in order to distinguish the questionable nature of a story like Hoffman's "The Sandman" from, say, the world of fairy tales, in which Freud says that "the world of reality is left behind" by a constant stream of marvelous things and beings.

Since Freud's remarks on literary phenomenology are crude and undeveloped, I wondered whether or not he had taken any cues from Jentsch in this regard. 

Jentsch, however, is concerned only with one psychological motif, which for him brings about the experience of "the uncanny:" 

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. The mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another kind of feeling. 

Throughout the rest of the essay, Jentsch's examples are all over the phenomenological map. He mentions, albeit briefly, the E.T.A. Hoffman short story, THE SAND-MAN in which Freud finds his own version of this "feeling of trepidation." Yet Jentsch also finds the uncanny in the thoroughly naturalistic ROBINSON CRUSOE:

The episode in the Robinsonade, where Friday, not yet familiar with the boiling of water, reaches into simmering water in order to pull out the animal that seems to be in it, is also based on an inspiration of the writer that is psychologically very apposite. 

Jentsch also finds the "animate/non-animate" quandary in vague daydreams, like those in which one sees in "the outline of a cloud... a threatening Satanic face," or in organized literary works, which engage an audience's empathy "with all the emotional excitements to which the characters of the play, or novel, ballad, and so forth, are subject." Sometimes Jentsch emphasizes phenomena that are more specifically "strange," like dryads in trees, and sometimes they're somewhat macabre, like the spectacle of dead bodies and skeletons. It can certainly be concluded that in this concept of "the uncanny" Jentsch casts his net far too widely.

According to online biographical material, Freud did not write "The Uncanny" in direct response to Jentsch, but chose to rewrite an earlier, unpublished essay-- no longer extant-- in order to frame his concepts. Freud  acknowledges some indebtedness to Jentsch, but clearly diverges from Jentsch's opinion that the most important source of "the uncanny" in THE SAND-MAN is that of a non-animate artiface, the life-size doll Olympia, becoming :animated." Rather, Freud rather conveniently finds the trepidation of the uncanny in all those motifs of the story that reinforce Freudian concepts of castration and the repetition-compulsion. 

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes; and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with this effect.

Freud also concludes-- in contrast to his later quasi-follower Tzvetan Todorov, for whose system "intellectual uncertainty" is critical-- that once Hoffmann has completed his story, the author has made clear that this is clearly "a purely fantastic one of his own creation," at least partly because Hoffmann makes such an indubitable identification between "Coppola the optician" and "Coppelius the lawyer," both of whom are the "secret identities" of the Sand-Man.

Yet, having claimed that Hoffmann created a "fantastic" world rather than one based in reality, later in the essay Freud makes clear that he's not extending his special interpretation to just any old fantasy, which is one of the section with which Jack Zipes so fervently disagrees. 

Fairy-tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when inanimate objects—a picture or a doll—come to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive and nothing could perhaps be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life. 

And later:.

The story-teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality their usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods. We order our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact.

So it's clear that even though Jentsch has cast his net too widely, Freud casts his own within a quite narrow range: that is, "the uncanny" applies only to fantasies, whether psychological or literary, that reflect Freudian concepts. 

For me, one of the most interesting revelations of this comparison is that it shows that Tzvetan Todorov, though he only quotes Freud's "The Uncanny" in his book THE FANTASTIC, seems to have far more in common with Ernst Jentsch in terms of identifying the idea of the uncanny with what Freud calls "intellectual uncertainty." Here's Todorov defining his category of "the fantastic," within which "the uncanny" forms a subcategory:

The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and [viewpoint] character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (p. 41).

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 1

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.

It's recently occurred to me to pose the question, "When did human works of art and/or religion manifest the phenomenality of the uncanny?"

After all, as the above passage from Cassirer indicates, most if not all early religion concerned itself with marvelous magical transformations. This is not to say that early humans did not have their share of mundane stories along the lines of "the one that got away" or "who's so-and-so's wife is sleeping with," much of which would approximate what we now deem naturalistic narrative. At the same time, it should be considered a given that in archaic times, even the most skeptical disbeliever lived in a culture dominated by conceptions of the marvelous. Thus a story like Homer's ILIAD, a tale of human beings going to war, is continuously entangled with the narratives of the gods behind the scenes.

But what about the interstitial category of the uncanny? This phenomenality, as I've often mentioned, shares with the naturalistic the characteristic of casual coherence, yet also shares with the marvelous the characteristic of anti-intelligibility-- though most of the artifacts I've identified with this phenomenality are of comparatively recent creation.

Is it possible to find this phenomenality within the earliest myths and tales of humankind? Rudolf Otto, one of the key philosophers to employ the term "uncanny," thought so. However, he applied the term largely to pre-Christian religions, rather than analyzing a variety of religious and literary works across the span of human history. Here's Otto's most concise judgment on the matter, from Chapter 4 of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY:


let us give a little further consideration
to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous
dread or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really
characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and
there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely naive and
primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to
which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more
highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its
mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long
attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible
for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part
of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and
so to be experienced afresh.

So for Otto, "the uncanny" was essentially an early if crude form of "the mysteriously impelling power" that he calls "the numinous." Man's capacity for experiencing the numinous stands as an ideal function of the human mind, one that is best developed by the higher religions, though the numinous experience cannot, he says, be boiled down to anything like Kant's notion of "the sublime." Otto clearly deems "the so-called Religion of Primitive Man" to be an illusion born of "naivete," but this has nothing to do with the actual content of most primitive religious narratives, which are implicitly dominated by the marvelous.

If the tropes of the uncanny exist in early literature, presumably they would exist with the same status as naturalistic tropes, within the greater scope of a marvelous phenomenality. For instance, all three phenomenality-tropes appear in the non-canonical Hebrew text "Bel and the Dragon:"

The NATURALISTIC part appears when the prophet Daniel exposes the way the priests of Bel sneak into the temple to eat the sacrifices, the better to convince the naive that the gods are real.

The UNCANNY would be Daniel's investigation of yet another hoax, but one with a greater degree of mystery to it, when he finds that some colossal animal inhabits (presumably) another temple, which the local priests consider a "living god." Apparently the "dragon" is not a common animal that anyone in town might recognize as a simple creature, so within my system I would deem it an "astounding animal." Daniel's method of slaying the creature I might further deem a "bizarre crime." The thrust of the story is that the "dragon" dies specifically because it is does not share the marvelous nature of a god, so that it is strange enough to be anti-intelligible but not something outside the bounds of causal coherence.

The MARVELOUS phenomenality, however, dominates the story as a whole, in that Daniel is thrown into the lion's den and succored by angels. This section of the story provides beings whose nature exceeds both intelligibility and causal coherence-- not to mention being the best-known part of the story for most people today.

Just as a guess, I would imagine that oral culture may have produced assorted stand-alone stories that would conform to my definition of the uncanny phenomenality, wherein which the tropes of the naturalistic or the marvelous did not hold sway. But most such stand-alone stories were not written down until the dawn of European rationalism, and if we have them in any form, they were probably incorporated into longer tale-cycles, like the Six Labors of Theseus that precede his encounter with the marvelous Minotaur.

More to come.

WHAT PHANTASMS AND PSYCHOS MAY COME

The subject matter of LUNATIC LAWMEN got me thinking once more about the elements of artifice that I've said are responsible for propelling a narrative from the naturalistic world of affects-- one where all affects are dominated by either fear or admiration-- to the uncanny world of affects, dominated by dread or by fascination.

Once more, here's one of my most recent statement on "artifice" as a principle in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4:

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." Indeed, I have rated both EYES OF A STRANGER and NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY as "poor" in terms of their mythicity, but the former is uncanny specifically because its author(s) show a greater appreciation for the culturally transmitted tropes of slasher-fiction, while the authors of LADY do not.

Once again, I started thinking about what makes "Psycho A" dreadful and "Psycho B" merely fearsome, and somehow I also started thinking about another of my phenomenality-tropes, the "phantasmal figuration," probably because I'd just reread what I said about that trope having influence upon the conceptual domain of Shakespeare's HAMLET.

Then it struck me that the salient difference that I perceived in Psycho A and Psycho B had much to do with what I called "the eerie vibe" in M FOR EFFORT: 

The "eerie vibe" I look for in uncanny works with the "phantasmal figuration" trope is produced when some agent within the story has managed to produce a phantasmal effect-- but only through some sustained effort. That effort might be fairly compared to the effort that the story's author must sustain in order to produce that effect within the story proper-- which may in future need further exploration in tune with my concept of artifice. 

This suggests to me that there's a threshold-crossing 'effort" involved in the villain who creates the titular deception of Doyle's THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, while there is no such effort in, say 2009's ONDINE. It's significant to me that though I reviewed ONDINE in 2014, before I'd formally conceived the principle of "effort," I stated that Ondine the phony mermaid was of a naturalistic phenomenality because she didn't really try to be anything else:

Ondine herself does little to build up her mythic persona; both Syracuse and Annie want to believe it, perhaps to escape their own mortality and limits. However, in the end it's revealed that Ondine's name is the only thing mythical about her. She is in reality a Romanian drug-mule who lost her last shipment. She fled to Ireland to escape her vengeful bosses, but the stranger in town spots her and brings in his confederates, resulting in a fight between the drug-runners and Syracuse.

In similar wise, the "uncanny psycho's" physical acts may be identical to those of the "naturalistic psycho"-- but what the former has, and the latter lacks, is that the former has a deeper investment in the insane rules of his world, rather than being determined by the "physiological factors" that dominate the latter's world. I return to C.S, Lewis, who manifestly did not believe that "dread" was simply an extrapolation from "fear:"

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread.

Building on Lewis's comment, then, Psycho A is dreadful because the viewer sees more of "what he is," through the culturally tropes of psycho-fiction. Thus he, like Lewis's ghost, is dreadful because of what he is, and not what he can do.

Further, Psycho A projects his twisted vision of the world in defiance of the "real world," just as the instigator of a "phantasmal figuration" does-- or for that matter, any agent of any of the other eight "uncanny" story-tropes I've identified. I won't go down the list at this time, but an equally relevant trope is that of "delirious dreams and fallacious figments." Leaving aside the "figments" part of the equation for a possible later essay, "uncanny dreams" also require much more "effort" on the part of their diegetic dreamer than "naturalistic dreams" do from their creators.

For instance, in my review of THE STILL OF THE NIGHT, I noted that Roy Scheider's dreams were almost totally derivative of experienced reality:

However, though the imagery is creepy-- a weird little girl with a teddy beat, for instance-- the images are clearly straightforward representations of things the dreamer has seen in real life, which marks STILL as being strongly influenced by Sir Alfred's SPELLBOUND. 

Contrast this to the way the dreamer of FRIDAY THE 13TH foretells the recrudescence of Jason Voorhees, even though her conscious mind knows that "his" crimes were committed by Jason's now-dead mother:

What's fascinating about this sequence is that even though Alice, like all of her friends, is fundamentally innocent, on some level she accepts and internalizes the guilt of Mrs. Voorhees.  Even though she wakes from the dream, she ends the film telling the surrouding officials, with an unshakable conviction, that Jason is "still down there," under the lake, haunting it with his unquiet spirit.  

The dreamer in an uncanny film, just like his uncanny brethren the psycho and the phantasm-maker, is always fully invested in the larger-than-life artifice of his world, making a consistent effort to embody those tropes rather than allowing them to be banished by the clear light of day.

ADDENDUM: Though "the uncanny" as I've defined it can only exist within the sphere of narrative literature, I will note that there have been incidents in the real world in which living persons attempted to take on the aura of something uncanny. I mentioned one such example, the real-life "Jack the Ripper," in A MOVABLE HELLFEAST.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 2

VERTICALLY CHALLENGING was the first essay in which I attempted an in-depth exploration of the applicability of Joseph Campbell's heuristic system of "supernormal sign stimuli" to works of differing phenomenality. I reprinted a section from PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY in which Campbell listed an assortment of possible sign that might stimulate human beings in a "supernormal" fashion:

A suggestive analogy is to be seen in the case of the grayling moth, which prefers darker mates to those actually offered by its present species. For if human art can offer to a moth the supernormal sign stimulus to which it responds more eagerly than to the normal offerings of life, it can surely supply supernormal stimuli, also to the IRMs [Innate Releasing Mechanisms] of man and not only spontaneously, in dream and nightmare, but even more brilliantly in the contrived folktales, fairy tales, mythological landscapes, over- and underworlds, temples and cathedrals, pagodas and gardens, dragons, angels, gods, and guardians of popular and religious art. It is true, of course, that the culturally developed formulations of these wonders have required in many cases centuries, even milleniums, to complete. 

I also mentioned in the same essay that this list was something of a catch-all, and I attempted to impose some order upon it with reference to Huxley's theory of vertical transcendence. I also compared my own distinctions between "reality-fiction" and "fantasy-fiction" to Campbell's distinctions between the differing ways in which animals may react to its environment.

"The world of reality," then, would line up with the animal responses that are designed to "match the natural environment," while "the world of fantasy" parallels those responses that are "unmatched by nature."  This in turn suggests a further parallel with Kant's concepts of reproductive and productive imagination, though I'll pursue that on its own terms in a forthcoming essay.

Now that I've re-read Burke's ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL, I find it interesting that the eighteenth-century philosopher also made a distinction between the aspects of art-- which he calls "poetry" for short-- in terms of its abilities to imitate observable nature, and of its abilities to go beyond nature.  In the ENQUIRY, Burke entitles one short section-- the next to last of his sections-- "Poetry Not Strictly an Imitative Art," and presents the argument below:

HENCE we may observe that poetry, taken in its most general sense, cannot with strict propriety be called an art of imitation. It is indeed an imitation so far as it describes the manners and passions of men which their words can express; where animi motus effert interprete lingua.There it is strictly imitation; and all merely dramatic poetry is of this sort. But descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of realities. Nothing is an imitation further than as it resembles some other thing; and words undoubtedly have no sort of resemblance to the ideas, for which they stand.

In the next and final section of the ENQUIRY, "How Words Influence the Passions," Burke details three modes of influence. One mode deals with the influence of our opinions and those of others. The second deals with those things which "have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven, and hell," though Burke does not explicitly confine these  representations "which can seldom occur in the reality" only to representations of the marvelous-metaphenomenal.  And then Burke's final mode of influence practically provides a gloss to my own formulation of the combinatory-sublime.

Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words.

Though I've noted in earlier essays that I had read Burke before, I doubt that I remembered this section of the ENQUIRY when I formed my term. To the best of my recollection, I derived my term "combinatory" from my readings of both Cassirer and Tolkien.

For Burke, this final emphasis on the mind's power to combine disparate objects proved important enough that when the ENQUIRY, first published in 1757, received a second edition two years later, Burke expanded on this combinatory theory, prefacing his "sublime and beautiful" arguments with an essay entitled "Introduction on Taste," published for the first time in that 1759 edition.  Here he descants upon his opinion that there is an imagination-stimulating pleasure in finding "resemblances" between disparate phenomena, while no such pleasure attends discovering the sort of differences one expects to find in such things:

When two distinct objects are unlike to each other, it is only what we expect; things are in their common way; and therefore they make no impression on the imagination: but when two distinct objects have a resemblance, we are struck, we attend to them, and we are pleased. The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images; we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature. 

Here too it is not incorrect to see another parallel between "reality" and "fantasy." Reality is the domain of distinctions between this or that: all things that "match the natural environment," while fantasy is the domain that annihilates those distinctions, producing "new images" that are "unmatched in nature." And I may as well throw in Tolkien's remarks on the "newness" of what he calls "creative fantasy:"

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was  dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.

Having demonstrated some of the interesting similitudes between Campbell and Burke, my next essay will talk in more detail about Burke's concept of the sublime, and why it has superior application to art and literature in contrast to Kant's concept, on which some of my earliest essays on the sublime were perhaps overly dependent.

AFFECTIVE EFFECTS

Thomas Aquinas calls that which is in the soul "res" (quod est in anima), as also that which is outside the soul (quod est extra animam). This noteworthy juxtaposition stilt enables us to discern the primitive objectivity of the idea in the thought of that time. From this mental attitude the psychology of the ontological proof becomes easily intelligible.-- Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, p. 42.

Jung doesn't spend much time on Aquinas in this section of this book, which for me is just as well, since I've nearly no familiarity with the father of Thomism.  I speculate that Jung simply mentions this interesting formula because his concern in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES is with finding a "middle ground" between the extremes of what he terms "nominalism" and "realism," which he uses as exemplars of his concepts of the "extravert" and the "introvert" respectively.

Jung's summation of Aquinas' position, to whatever extent it is accurate, bears some interesting comparisons with Ernst Cassirer's position, quoted here:

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

What I find in both of these quotes is the same thing that attracts me about the concept of phenomenology proper, defined thusly by the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.

As noted in this essay Cassirer confessed some influence from Husserl's phenomenology. and I've already noted in this review how Jung called himself a "phenomenologist," whatever his influences may have been.  However different the projects of Husserl, Heidegger and other phenomenological scholars, Jung and Cassirer have in common the desire to examine the "forms of pure expression," and to reify them as being no less "real phenomena" than the objects of physical nature.  Za Hranice in the linked essay above notes that for all the differences between Cassirer and Husserl, the two are linked by their rejection of knowing phenomena only through positivistic (or what Cassirer calls "theoretical") sources of knowledge:

Therefore Cassirer’s

phenomenology is, like Husserl’s, no historiography or factual investigation of reality, as

it might seem at first glance. Husserl’s and Cassirer’s philosophy are doing transcendental

philosophy in their own respective ways, taking distance from Kant, however. Thereby,

unlike Kant, they try to cope with all possible subject-matters of investigation, namely

‘phenomena,’ and pivotally ground them in a modulated transcendental-philosophical

way.

I myself have no doubt been influenced by simple "theoretical" models of cognition, by Kant's "reproductive imagination," which reduces any imaginative construct to "random associations, or to cognitively-reasoned associations (i.e., allegory), or any combinations thereof."  I've recently looked back at my original statements of the NUM formula.  I don't think any of them are fundamentally mistaken regarding the sussing out of phenomenal natures in art and literature, but I don't think that I was aggressive enough in defining the distinction between what I termed "the cognitive" and "the affective," as in this passage.

If the anomaly takes place within a world where the cognitive order rules, and where affectivity is indeed the tail wagged by the dog, then the narrative’s phenomenality is “atypical.”


If it takes place within a world that breaks with the cognitive order, in which causs-and-effect is in some way suspended, then the phenomality is “marvelous,” and the affectivity produced is one that also strives to go beyond the cognitive order.


If the work seems to suggest that the cognitive order is violated, when in fact it is not, its phenomenality will be “uncanny” as long as the work succeeds in evoking an affectivity that symbolically exceeds the cognitive order.

Though I find the logic of these statements solid, I can find some fault with my tendency just to use the psychological terms "cognitive" and "affective" without bringing them as it were, into my phenomenological system.  For instance, this joint usage of the two familiar terms places an emphasis on defining "the affective" as something confined to the individual subject, and thus in a larger sense epiphenomenal:

Cognitive-affective theorists argue that behavior is not the result of some global personality trait; instead, it arises from individual's perceptions of herself in a particular situation.

Patently this is an empirical-theoretical formulation, so I need to put some distance between my phenomenology and this empirical reading of affectivity. 

More in Part 2.

SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS, PART 2

Picking up right where I left off:

The insubstantiality of shadows in Plato is his metaphor for the fundamental unreality of the phenomenal world.

For Charles Reece their insubstantiality is the metaphor for the unreality of commodified art.

In real life, however, though shadows are insubstantial, they are not unreal, any more than they correlate only with the bodies whose images they replicate.

In real life, there are no shadows without bodies to cast them--

And there are also no shadows if there is no light. Darkness, yes, but not shadows as such.

What Plato's cave-prisoners see when they behold a shadow is the result of these two real-world phenomena, as it is for anyone else. Plato represents the light's presence as a given, but of course it is not. Every shadow ever formed of the phenomenal world is the result of the interaction between a thing we can see, which blocks the passage of light, and an event we cannot see: the deflection of perhaps millions of light-particles rebounding from the seen thing, thus creating the rough outline of the seen thing.

The shadow thus is what I choose to call an indirect indicator of both the seen thing and the light being blocked by the seen thing.

Does this neglect of a second correlate for shadow-phenomena affect Plato's argument? Not really. From my brief research of the subject it seems Plato had a theory of the visual not entirely removed from ours, though of course he would not been responsible for associating the phenomenon of light with anything like Democritus' particles.

Charles Reece, however, knows of the association, and so he unquestionably knows that any shadow is the product of both light and a body blocking the light. So, whether he would call a shadow an "indirect indicator" or not, he knows that a shadow isn't technically "unreal." He would be on solid ground if he claimed that it was only a poetic metaphor, that he *feels* that commodified artforms are unreal. But given that he's locating the etiology of these artforms as stemming from a "socio-epistemlogical" phenomenon of material "market forces," poetry doesn't solve the problem.

I said earlier that I would rewrite Charles' rewriting, and for that I'll draw on my essay GATE OF THE GODS 4, where I quoted Richard Slotkin's quotation of J.L. Henderson:

"..Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension [of archetypal myths] as a conflict between "Moira" and "Themis"-- between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility"

For Plato and Reece, the things they compare with shadows-- a range of phenomena, a range of artworks-- are rated as insubstantial reflections of something with substance. The irony of the comparison in Reece's case is that one of the two factors necessary for a shadow-- that of light's operations at the particle level-- is itself invisible and insubstantial to common human perception.

I suggest, going along Jungian lines, that what he calls "commodified art," and what I call simply "popular art," only appears as insubstantial as a shadow from the standpoint of "rational ideas," of "Themis." The truth is that for humanity there would be no "rational ideas" without the world of "dream and impulse," the world of Moira, no more easily tracked than the naked eye can track the rebounding of light particles, or, for that matter, see the hurricane wind that bends or breaks the tree.

I suppose I can see some of the appeal of an ideology like that of Marx and his kindred. Marxism gives one the structure that all "rational ideas" seem to impart, but doesn't seem to be dependent on metaempirical entities or principles.

Unfortunately, just as Plato's rational principles undermined his intutions of art, the same applies to Marxism, metaempirical entities or no.

And both, in thinking they have triumphed over shadows, simply become lost in a self-referential fog.

SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS, PART 1

"...nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole."-- Marcus Aurelius.

"Nothing unreal exists."-- Mister Spock (among others).

As I've always considered the term "realistic literature" to be an oxymoron, I've naturally taken exception to Charles Reece's overly-simple opposition of the real and the image. I critiqued that GHOST WORLD essay here, and now here's the next (and probably last) sentence from the essay with which I'll concern myself.

"There are plenty who’ve given up the fight, claiming that the shadows on Plato’s cave are reality."

In this sentence Reece rewrites Plato's famous "cave metaphor" in order to illustrate the condundrum of anyone finding "real" meaning in a commodified and hence "unreal" world, and how this paradox leads GHOST WORLD's central characters to affect a pose of ironic detachment. It's unclear from the essay as to whether Reece is criticizing Dan Clowes' characters for purportedly giving up the fight to know Reality from Unreality, but I'm less interested in his interpretation of Clowes than in his rewriting of Plato for the purpose of Marxist dialectics.

There's a certain irony (though not a hypocrisy) in Reece rewriting Plato, particularly part of a Platonic dialogue focused on demonstrating the logically-deduced existence of Archetypal Forms. Whatever Reece's take on Plato generally, his postings on that infamous messboard GoneDowntheTubes.com make clear that he rejects Plato's concept of the Forms, such as this post, where he explicitly claims that the early structuralists "solved Plato's problem" by translating hypothetical metaphysical structures into structures within a "socio-epistemological realm." In short, Charlie don't play those Plato Forms.

The reason this rewriting *isn't* a hypocrisy is simple: every philosopher good or bad rewrites his forbears, and Plato himself was no exception to that rule. However, that rule means Reece's rewrite is equally open to further re-inscription, to wit:

Shadows-- though perfectly workable as a metaphor for "illusion" in poetry-- make a poor metaphor when used in concert with that bloated mass of preconceptions known as Marxist dialectic. According to Stoics like Marcus Aurelius (and possibly Mister Spock as well), one should be open to examining "methodicially and truly" every object one meets in reality, even that which may seem to be an insubstantial phenomenon, like a shadow.

For the fact of the matter comes down to this: shadows exist, and therefore are not unreal.

Certainly one can *feel* that shadows are unreal (within the context of poetry) because shadows are liminal phenomena that have not one but two correlates in the world of consensual experience: one correlate that is easily seen and one that is not. I'll address the one that is not easily seen after analyzing how Reece, following Plato, sticks to a one-correlate system.

In THE REPUBLIC Plato's cave-shadows-- created when creatures or objects pass in front of a fire outside the sightlines of some chained-up prisoners-- have but one correlate: those selfsame creatures or objects. In Plato's schema these shadows align with the ordinary consensual phenomena which all humans experience, while the objects/creatures that create the shadows are a deeper reality behind that apparent reality. That "deeper reality" comes down to Plato's theory of Archetypal Forms.

How does Charles Reece rewrite this metaphor to support his earlier notion that modern society has become a "Society of the Spectacle?" First off, Reece's essay is not concerned with philosophy or phenomenology, but with art. But what kinds of art? Well, "commodified art" is the only kind about which Reece theorizes in this essay, and he directly compares its works to "the shadows on Plato's cave." Again, it's a short essay, so there's not going to be any attempt to define whatever art is contrary to the commodified kind, though the existence of such non-commodified art is certainly implied. Still, even in the absence of such a definition, I feel justified in assuming a parallel:

For Plato, the shadows are the apparently real "things" with which all humans live, and the bodies that cast the shadows are the Archetypal Forms behind those things.

For Reece, the shadows are the insubstantial artworks that support "mass culture," and the bodies that cast the shadows are what Adorno calls "serious art."

More on shadows and the second correlate in Part 2.

CASSIRER VS. THE GREAT DIVIDE

In "Mythicity Threat or Menace" I cited the following quotation from Eric Gould, the fellow who came up with the term "mythicity:"

"The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language."

Clearly for Gould, language and linguistic narratives (like myths) are mediating forces that can strive to capture the nature of reality, but they will be always be limited by the nature of the interpreter who makes the language. Here Gould is very Kantian, keeping the unknowable noumenon strictly apart from the phenomenal reality in which we all participate.

However, Cassirer-- something of a re-interpreter of Kant-- offers another perspective. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summarizing some of the points from Cassirer's LOGIC OF THE CULTURAL SCIENCES, says:

'whereas the natural sciences take their evidential base from the sphere of thing perception, the cultural sciences take theirs from the sphere of expressive perception, and, more specifically, from the fundamental experience of other human beings as fellow selves sharing a common intersubjective world of “cultural meanings.”'

And later:

"In the end, it is only such a never to be fully completed process of historical-philosophical interpretation of symbolic meanings that confers objectivity on both the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften — and thereby reunites the two distinct sides of Kant's original synthesis."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/

Whether or not Cassirer successfully grounds this "objectivity" in LOGIC (which is one of his few works I've not read) I can't say for certain. But I expect that even his attempt to do so, buttressed by his concept of "symbolic forms," will prove more interesting to me in seeking a ground for mythicity than does Eric Gould's self-imposed limitations.

More on this later, probably when I get round to talking more about JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF COMPLEXITY

As mentioned earlier, I recently read a collection of two long Husserl essays, but I tend to think Husserl's hyper-rational approach to phenomenology is not quite what I'm looking for. However, having recently encountered Roger Brooke's 1991 study JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY, I'm more optimistic about seeing the subject matter of Jung (and, by extension, his sort-of follower Joseph Campbell) reified through the Heideggerian take on phenomenology.

In his opening chapter Brooke cites several rationales for trying to view Jung-- who called himself a phenomenologist at one point, however accurately-- through the lens of the phenomenalist philosophy. The one that most impresses me is where Brooke stresses the need for "an anthropology according to which the adequacy or relevance of Jung's various metaphors can be measured. To say that all knowledge is perspectival or structured through an imaginative vision of the world is not to say that one metaphor is just as good as another. But if some metaphors are better than others, which seems obvious, then the basis on which such judgments are made needs to be clarified."

"Mythicity" is of course my own take on sussing out the reasons why some metaphors (which is also to say symbols, since metaphor is impossible without a symbolic process), so I'm intrigued to see how Brooke will approach the problem of this "anthropology." I tend to favor Campbell's four functions, which will certainly be far outside Brooke's concerns, but it's at least worth noting that Heideggerian phenomenology is reputed, far more than Husserlian, for its emphasis on the meaning of "being embodied in the world." Arguably Campbell does something like this when he avoids allegory, so time will tell whether or not Brooke touches on any of the same points...