EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

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

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

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

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

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

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

But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM

As a prequel to a longer formulation, I’m recapitulating my “quantum literary theory” with some refinements.

The foundation of the theory remains indebted to Gloomy Schopenhauer’s concept of The Will. In SEVENWAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I adapted his theory to literary purposes by asserting that even if we can’t verify the idea of a Will that permeates human existence, it’s axiomatic that authorial Will permeates all narrative phenomena.

A secondary foundation is derived from Jung’s theory of four psychological functions through which all human subjects perceive the world, though Jung makes clear that not every individual will draw upon the functions to the same degree. From Jung’s functions I have extrapolated four potentialities that human beings use in creating any sort of narrative, be it fictional or non-fictional.

My four potentialities are the kinetic, the dramatic, the didactic and the mythopoeic, and in keeping with the meaning “potentiality” is said to carry in quantum physics, all four are modes through which the human subject organizes information.

Units of information are what I call “quanta,” named for the building-blocks of matter, i.e., both atomic and subatomic particles. But in the narratological world, the “energies” of each quantum are representations drawn both from human experience and from human imagination (which may not be entirely dependent upon experience). All quanta are generalized rather than particularized representations, loosely after the fashion of Plato’s Forms. No author makes a representation of a particular lion from a particular time and place; a quantum representing a lion communicates only “lion-ness.” A similar dynamic governs representations of action. A quantum that communicates “falling” cannot assess quantifiable distance, but only rough approximations, so that a quantum representation can only communicate falling either a short distance or a great distance.

Now for something moderately different: just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Whatever the word “trope” meant in ancient Greece, today it has assumed the idea of a standardized scenario, usually applied to fiction, though it’s not without relevance to non-fiction. The statement “the lion is the king of beasts” combines a quantum derived from physical experience, the creature we call a “lion,” with a second quantum, an imagined status of kingship imputed to the creature. To continue the parallel with the action of falling, a fall from a great distance often suggests danger while a fall from a short distance does not. This often translates into such tropes as “man and woman fall in love,” representing a non-perilous and even “fortunate” fall, as well as “angels falling from heaven,” which represents catastrophe if not literal physical harm.

My title for this essay plays upon the title of an Ian Fleming James Bond short story, and while many of my puns are just toss-offs, there’s a little more method to my punny madness here. I chose to reference “solipsism” not as an actual defense of that philosophical position—that one can only be certain of one’s own mental existence—but because the making of a narrative can be seen as an elaboration of one’s own mental universe. Non-fictional narratives are, at least in theory, all about relating a series of experiential facts, though arguably the most popular non-fictional discourses are those that impose a desirable interpretation on said facts. But as I’ve previously argued, fiction is less about reporting “truths” than formulating “half-truths:” narratives in which it’s obvious that the author has arranged all elements in the story to achieve certain effects. Even where a fiction-author fails to achieve those effects, an experienced reader can often intuit more or less what sort of “universe” the author sought to create.

Though some tropes may be roughly composed of the same quanta, they can have vastly different effects because authors will inevitably choose to focus more on one potentiality than another. For instance, the trope “the lion is the king of beasts” can take such many differing forms.

A KINETIC utilization of the trope appears with respect to the Gardner Fox villain “Lion-Mane,” a human who becomes transformed into a lion-humanoid in order to challenge Hawkman and Hawkgirl, with the overall scheme of achieving dominance over all the denizens of Planet Earth.

A DRAMATIC utilization appears in the imitation “Tarzan” novel KING OF THE JUNGLE and its cinematic adaptation, insofar as Kaspa, a foundling human, is adopted by a pride of jungle-dwelling lions, with the result that he becomes their “king” and uses both his animal-like skills and his human intelligence to save his fellow beasts.

A DIDACTIC utilization appears in Roland Barthes’ philosophical tome MYTHOLOGIES, in which Barthes attempts to prove that the very idea of imputing kingliness to the animal we call a “lion” is an indulgence in what he terms (with scant justification) mythological thinking.

A MYTHOPOEIC utilization appears in C.S. Lewis’s THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, wherein the kingliness of the lion is given religious connotations, so that Lord Aslan symbolizes both the power and lordliness of Lewis’s concept of Jesus Christ.

Having established the interactions of will, quantum representations, and tropes, I’ll next proceed to more involved meditations upon two particular tropes of significance to my project.

THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT

 

In my essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALLSET YOU FREE, I noted one of the vital distinctions between philosophy and literature: that philosophy attempts to suss out truth from falsehood, while literature’s primary function is to promote fictions that have an ambiguous relationship to “truth,” whatever a given artist’s personal convictions may be. For instance, Dave Sim may believe explicitly in the revelations of the “Peoples of the Book,” but he’s still encoding those beliefs within the context of the fiction called CEREBUS.

Numerous philosophers have come up with metaphors for the search for truth, but in my personal opinion no one has ever topped Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave," summarized thusly:

Plato tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

It tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

The dominant interpretation of the allegory is that the chained people in the cave, able to perceive only shadows of the reality beyond the cave, symbolize human confinement to the input of their physical senses. According to the idealism of Plato (sometimes given the chimerical name of “Realism”), the World of Forms is the actual Truth Beyond the Cave, and presumably the individual who escapes the cave, and tries to convey that insight to his chained fellows, symbolizes the dilemma of the Platonic philosopher.

In addition of my deeming this the best of the “truth-seeking” metaphors, I would hazard that this may be the best known metaphor in philosophy as a whole, given that it furnishes the reader with all the basic challenges of epistemology. Further, the Cave-Allegory may be seen as consequential for the two major branches of metaphenomenal fiction: what we call “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

There have been dozens of involved histories of both “super-genres,” but I’m most concerned with the ways in which both categories developed in the late 1800s. Despite many significant precursors, the two super-genres receive their greatest codification in this period, when Jules Verne and H.G. Wells defined science fiction and William Morris defined the alternate-world fantasy. (To be sure, horror fiction undergoes a similar codification in this period, but many works in this genre make so much use of either “fantasy motifs” or “science fiction motifs” that I can’t think of horror as being entirely separable from the other two.)

Plato’s allegory in itself evokes both images of freedom and restraint; of human beings bound by their physical circumstances but nonetheless capable of obtaining some degree of freedom. Readers of this blog will be familiar with my assertion that human existence is characterized by both “affective freedom” and “cognitive restraint.” We can imagine nearly anything, despite being restrained by all the demands of physicality, winsomely styled as the “Four F’s:” food (edible matter), flax (clothing), flags (shelter) and frig (continuance of the species). As I wrote previously, the imagination may or may not lead to useful inventions that enhance the physical quality of life, but it should always be seen as instrumental to all mental formulations.

Now, fantasy and science fiction pursue distinct epistemological patterns, each in tune with the dominant matrix in which they exist. In science fictional worlds, all wonders are predicated on extensions of scientific principles, while in fantasy, they arise from the concept of magic, which may range from traditional “faerie” spellcraft to organized notions of thaumaturgy. Within all of these worlds, the main characters are generally in the position of the man freed from the chains of his fellows and propelled into a greater cosmos.

In fantasy, a common trope is to show a youth who lives in a bucolic existence, and who finds himself drawn into events of cosmic importance, often involving the combat of good and bad wizards and/or deities. Morris uses a rough variation of this trope in his four fantasy-novels, particularly in THE SUNDERINGFLOOD, though he isn’t as successful in giving his protagonist a grounding in the magical principles governing the world. Morris’s spiritual disciple Tolkien is of course famous for having hurled protagonists Bilbo and Frodo into the greater world of sorcery, walking trees and enchanted rings. The bucolic world of the Shire, from which both hobbits hail, does not as a whole wish to be tainted with all of these momentous and enigmatic presences, but its inhabitants are not really able to reject the magical cosmos in a manner comparable to the chained people in the Cave. The very idea of magic, as a force that transcends the limits of time and space, stands aligned with the concept of affective freedom.

In contrast, the epistemology of the Cave has a more ambivalent function in science fiction. For all the differences between Verne and Wells, they have in common the fact that many of their scientific seekers—the ones who part company with the world of ordinary reality—meet catastrophic fates, explicit with respect to Captain Nemo, implicit with respect to the Time Traveler. Thus, science fiction can be somewhat aligned with the concept of cognitive restraint, and not only because the forces of science—even those of made-up, “impossible” science—are supposed to cohere with the limits of time and space.

At the same time, science fiction shows a greater emphasis upon following the destiny of the society than that of the individual. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks are bound by the chains of a chimerical evolution much as are Plato’s cavepeople, and they are doomed never to escape, existing to illustrate to the protagonist the futility of life. Yet many of Wells’ disciples altered the Platonic paradigm in order to promote a triumphalism of science. It would probably be difficult to find a science fiction author who advocated “truth” in a Platonic World of Forms, but there are hundreds who see capital-S “Science” as such a truth. Science fiction is riddled with protagonists who live in some constricted society, whose people know nothing of scientific principles, but who break free and bring the Good News of Science to convert disbelievers. Such cosmic conversions underlie the enduring appeal of a series like Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy, where the advocates of a logical means of “reading history” are proven to have superior insight over all competitors.

Not a few advocates of science fiction have shown themselves to be hostile to the representations of fantasy, confounding the fictional premises of fantasy-stories with resentment of real-world religion and/or superstition. In so doing, they validate only those products of the imagination which seem to champion real-world science—even though, in point of fact, constructs like Niven’s “Ringworld” and Blish’s “Cities in Space” are not likelier to come into being than elves and orcs. It’s a shame that science fiction enthusiasts have made this conflation, for the activity of trying to fit the human imagination into a box is not only fatuous, but futile beyond anyone’s attempt to—imagine.

NIETZSCHE AND THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 3

In Part 2 I drew comparisons between H.G. Wells-- at least as he was when he wrote THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME in 1933-- and that modern species of ultraliberal that I've called "Neopuritans." One thing I neglected to mention, though, is that Wells himself uses the term "Puritan" in an approving manner in order to characterize his ideal world-state:

The Air Dictatorship is also called by some historians the Puritan Tyranny. We may perhaps give a section to it from this point of view.

"Puritan" is a misused word. Originally invented to convey a merely doctrinal meticulousness among those Protestants who "protested" against the Roman version of Catholicism, it came to be associated with a severely self- disciplined and disciplinary life, a life in which the fear of indolence and moral laxity was the dominant force. At its best it embodied an honourable realization: "I shall do nothing worth while and nothing worth while will be done unless I pull myself together and stiffen up my conduct." If the new Air Dictatorship was schooling the world with considerable austerity, it was certainly schooling itself much more so.

I don't know if "Puritan" carried the same negative value for 1933 English-speaking audiences as it generally does for many if not all such audiences today. It may be that Wells thought that the term's associations with austerity-- and with the process of rejecting the corrupt hierarchy of "the Roman version" of the Catholic Church--  would resonate with his readers, to whom he hoped to justify any and all measures in order to defeat all the evils of the world-- capitalism, nationalism, religion. Modern Neopuritans will not usually go quite as far as Wells in desiring to see humanity purged of everything that suggests contrariness, but they too define the world, as Wells did, in terms of finding security and placating fears.


I don't know what if any response Wells may have made to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. But given that he posits a World State so well-managed that it can, as I mentioned before, change the nature of the human animal so as to "evolve" away from combativeness, I feel sure that Wells never "got" Nietzsche's assertion that the "will to power" pervaded even the most non-combative situations:


From THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, "On Self-Overcoming" (trans. Thomas Common):




WILL to Truth" do you call it, you wisest ones, that which impels you and makes you ardent?
Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus do I call your will!
All being would you make thinkable: for you doubt with good reason whether it be already thinkable.
But it shall accommodate and bend itself to you! So wills your will. Smooth shall it become and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.
That is your entire will, you wisest ones, as a Will to Power; and even when you speak of good and evil, and of estimates of value.


Then, toward the end of the section:




Thus did Life once teach me: and thereby, you wisest ones, do I solve you the riddle of your hearts.
I say to you: good and evil which would be everlasting- it does not exist! Of its own accord must it ever overcome itself anew.


With your values and formulae of good and evil, you exercise power, you valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.
But a stronger power grows out of your values, and a new overcoming: by it breaks egg and egg-shell.
And he who has to be a creator in good and evil- verily, he has first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces.
Thus does the greatest evil pertain to the greatest good: that, however, is the creating good.-
Let us speak thereof, you wisest ones, even though it be bad. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.
And let everything break up which- can break up by our truths! Many a house is still to be built!-


________


Nietzsche is probably saying a great many things here, but the one most apposite to Wells and his Nanny-World-State is that even though the "wisest ones" like to think that they're serving an abstract morality with their "values and formulae of good and evil," in truth they're just as in love with the exercise of power-- their "secret love"-- as are outright tyrants.


Nowhere does Wells show the would-be tyrant's love of absolutism than in Section 4 of Book Five, when he indulges in a rant about the supposed virtues and vices of the England in which he himself lived:

The contrast between present conditions and conditions seventy years ago is paralleled in history by the contrast between English social life in 1855 and 1925. There also we have a phase of extreme restraint and decorum giving way to one of remarkable freedom. We can trace every phase. Every phase is amply documented. There are not the slightest grounds for supposing that the earlier period was one of intense nervous strain and misery. There was a general absence of vivid excitation, and the sexual life flowed along in an orderly fashion. It did not get into politics or the control of businesses. It appears in plays and novels like a tame animal which is not to be made too much of. It goes out of the room whenever necessary.

One wonders if Wells was aware that one of the "remarkable freedoms" of Victorian England was its proliferation of extremely well-concealed pornography.  However, to hear Wells tell it, this was more or less an invention of 20th-century England:

By comparison England in 1920 was out for everything it could do sexually. It did everything and boasted about it and incited the young. As the gravity of economic and political problems increased and the structural unsoundness of the world became more manifest, sexual preoccupations seem to have afforded a sort of refuge from the mental strain demanded by the struggle. People distracted themselves from the immense demands of the situation by making a great noise about the intensifications and aberrations of the personal life. There was a real propaganda of drugs and homosexuality among the clever young. Literature, always so responsive to its audience, stood on its head and displayed its private parts. It produced a vast amount of solemn pornography, facetious pornography, sadistic incitement, re-sexualized religiosity and verbal gibbering in which the rich effectiveness of obscene words was abundantly exploited. It is all available for the reader to-day who cares to examine it. He will find it neither shocking, disgusting, exciting or interesting. He will find it comically pretentious and pitifully silly.

As noted earlier, I didn't give SHAPES an exhaustive reading, but from what I could see, at no point in the book did Wells identify what authors he deemed to be responsible for literature "displaying its private parts."  The passage above shows an extreme Puritanical outlook unmediated by logic or personal taste-- in tone very like the rants of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman. Yet, for all the flaws of those worthies, at least they cited a lot of particular works that frosted their respective butts. No specific accusation, no matter how unjust, can be as egregious as a blanket condemnation like Wells'.


It's been remarked that Wells' world-state is just another version of Plato's Republic, except for the fact that Plato's city was never supposed to encompass the whole world. Plato too believed in the suppression of "inconvenient truths" for the betterment of the greater good, and Nietzsche may have had him in mind when he spoke this particular aphorism:


To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.

FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PT. 1

If there was any current event that better described my statement that ""the wrong choice always has the potential to be the right choice in another set of circumstances," it would be the events surrounding the 8-9-14 shooting of petty thief Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

Note that I describe Brown as a "petty thief." On an ultra-conservative blog, this would be a patent attempt to slant the discourse by characterizing Brown as a "thief" and Wilson as an "officer." On *this* blog, the term "officer" doesn't immediately connote greater respect, though only attentive readers will be able to follow my reasoning on this matter.

Within the past few days, the Department of Justice has released its findings with regard to the shooting of Brown by Wilson, in which Wilson was essentially exculpated. But, as if to cushion the blow, the DOJ also released a damning investigation of repeated racist practices by the Ferguson Police Department, which included a tendency to flagrantly cite black Ferguson residents for minor offenses.  Economic motives for this practice have been cited, given that black residents generally enjoy a lower income and would thus be less likely to fight citations in court. Of particular relevance to the Brown shooting is the practice of issuing a disproportionate number of citations for the petty offense of jaywalking. 

Prior to their encounter with Wilson, Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson had visited a local convenience store. Brown had openly pilfered a carton of cigarillos and had pushed the store clerk out of his way; Johnson admitted this in his testimony while noting that he played no part in the petty theft. Later the two of them were walking in the middle of the street when Officer Wilson noticed them from his patrol car. The testimonies of Wilson and Johnson differ in particulars, but they agree that Wilson drove up to the two men, told them to get out of the street and walk on the sidewalk, after which Wilson started to drive on. The testimonies agree that he then backed up and blocked them. Wilson said that he did so because he had earlier been informed of the convenience-store theft and that he belatedly suspected Brown as the possible culprit. There followed the altercation between Brown and Wilson, which ended in Brown's death.

Dorian Johnson did not participate in the altercation, but his testimony was a key factor in creating the Ferguson protests. Johnson's testimony, however, is riddled with inconsistencies, as has been amply covered in Paul Cassell's 12-2-14 report for the Washington Post.  The Department of Justice did not validate any of Johnson's testimony, in particular finding fault with his claim that Wilson had shot Brown while the latter was trying to surrender. This image, of a black man trying to surrender and being mercilessly shot down by a white cop, may well be the defining image of domestic American news in 2014-- and it will remain so, even though it appears to be a complete and utter lie.

However, to say that Johnson lied also does not slant the discourse. It also matters to ask, "Why did he lie," and "What were the effects of the lie?"

Plato is famous for asserting that the ideal society could only be protected via the Noble Lie. Kant, on the other hand, famously claimed that to be a moral person no one should ever tell a lie for any reason, even to keep a murderer from his victim-- though I've seen at least one defense  asserting that Kant did not mean this as a general prescription for living.

If indeed Johnson lied, I don't care about his immediate personal reasons for so doing. I only care that he could have done so as a reaction to being a black man who saw his people being terrorized and/or exploited on a regular basis. It's unlikely that Johnson could have foreseen the country-wide firestorm that erupted as a result of his testimony, so he wasn't precisely telling a "noble revolutionary's lie," like the claim that Marie Antoinette responded to the wails of starving French citizens by saying, "Let them eat cake." Still, the result of the Johnson lie has been to throw a spotlight upon the malfeasance of the Ferguson Police Department. Many have claimed that the Ferguson corruption is systemic throughout the United States, but as yet this claim remains in the realm of rhetoric.

One interesting side-effect on the DOJ's report on Ferguson's corruption is that it may be seen as further exculpating Darren Wilson. If as the report suggests it was common practice for Ferguson officers to issue citations to black citizens for petty offenses like jaywalking-- a practice rooted both in racism and in economics-- then it's interesting that the testimonies of both Wilson and Johnson agree that the officer did not do anything more than verbally tell the two black men to get back on the sidewalk, as opposed to using the incident as an excuse to cite them.

Does that mean that during Wilson's career, he never wrote a gratuitous citation, whether to a black citizen or any other citizen? It does not. However, it does mean, at the very least, that he gave those two black men a break on the offense of jaywalking, thus going against the SOP of the Ferguson cops, and that he only stopped them when he suspected them of a more serious crime. Wilson may not have intended to be especially liberal; maybe he had other things on his mind, such as the news of the convenience-store robbery. But his actions on that particular date tend to contradict the imputations of a deeply ingrained racism that have dogged the officer's tracks since that day in August. I'll also note that if Wilson had a history of racist behavior, this would have come out in the investigations of the Grand Jury and the DOJ, which did take place with the investigation of the officer involved in Eric Garner's death.

If a probable lie that succeeds in exposing widespread corruption is not an example of a wrong choice being a right choice from a wider perspective, I don't know what would be-- though I could well understand it if Darren Wilson found that particular choice a measured one.

QUICK HEGEL THOUGHTS

Prior to writing Part 2 of my ETHIC, I reviewed the "Lordship and Bondage" chapter of Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT (trans, A.V. Miller).  I read the entire work years ago, made many copious notes in the margins, but have almost never found myself going back to check out isolated passages of the work, as I frequently do with the major works of Kant and Schopenhauer.

I've tried to analyze, as best I can, why Hegel does not compel me.  I'll freely admit that Hegel's main objective, to show how "Spirit" evolves from the *telos* of History as a whole, does not resonate with me.  In addition, I don't find that Hegel justifies his propositions as thoroughly as do Kant and Schopenhauer. Instead he resorts to stating his propositions as self-evident truths, rather than attempting to prove them.  And finally, he's way too abstract for me.  In this essay I critiqued Jung slightly for having insisted on "superordinate concepts," but he's a piker next to George W.F.

What appeals to me about the Kojeve and Fukuyama readings of Hegel-- and what makes me find in them a greater relevance to the way concepts such as "power" and "validation" work out in art-- is that they seem far more grounded in the ways in which actual humans negotiate their quests for meaning.  Marx, much though I loathe his interpretation, did the same when he made Hegel's concept of alienation central to his philosophy:

...although the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self.  Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.

And about a page later, we get the germ of Marx's "alienated labor" idea:

Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own... Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence.

The lord, even though he has successfully subjugated the bondsman, forcing the latter to perform labor under the threat of death, is actually in a metaphysically inferior position: his fear "remains at the formal stage" only.  Which probably came as a horrible comedown for Richie Rich, to realize how inferior he was to butler Cadbury.

What I find more interesting than Hegel's pratings-- particularly about the effects of the "fear of death" on "being-for-self"-- is the Hegel-derived idea that the positions of both the "lord" and the "bondsman" give rise to different species of validation, which Fukuyama terms *megalothymia* and *isothymia.*  Fukuyama arguably owes more to Nietzsche than to Hegel, given that Nietzsche is best known for having repeatedly pushed a philosophy that celebrated lordship over servility.  Fukuyama attempts, however successfully, to show the appeal of the affects of both mental attitudes, and this proves useful for understanding how the same validations appear in art and literature.

As I will show in Part 2 of THE ETHIC, I'm far more preoccupied with the nature of freedom than that of "being-for-self." 

THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE, PART 1

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

 

Spock: There is no logic in Gav's murder.

Shras: Perhaps you should forget logic and devote yourself to motivations of passion or gain; those are reasons for murder.-- STAR TREK, "Journey to Babel," 1967.

Spock never comments on the advice given him by Shras. but he could presumably refute the Andorian's terms.  While the term "passion" can embrace a variety of emotions, including murderous ones, the motive of committing violence-- what Hobbes calls "quarrel"-- for the purpose of gain can be pursued with the coldest of cold logic conceivable.  And as the plot shakes out in the TREK episode, "gain" is indeed the motive behind Gav's murder and various other acts of sabotage.

But what of passion?  Is passion just one thing that one should see as ineluctably opposed to cold logic, as writer D.C. Fontana suggests?  Admittedly Fontana was not propounding this notion as philosophy, merely as a notion to round out an exciting melodrama, but the question comes up in other venues as well.  So the question becomes, is it feasible that the word "passion" subsumes a variety of mental activities, two of which could in theory subsume two of the "principal causes of quarrel" Hobbes cites, "safety" and "glory?"

As it happens, the question of the various meanings of the word "passion" has come up on this blog before, quite apart from any associations with a popular teleseries currently held in simple-minded contempt by the Bloody Comic Book Elitists. In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PART 1 I devoted considerable space to refuting Noah Berlatsky's conflation of aesthetics and desire.

I don't think "desire" (which Noah defines as inherently erotic) is at the heart of human experience. I think that desire is but one interdependent chamber of a three-chambered heart that Socrates chose to call "the tripartite soul," with the other two parts being nous (intellect) and thymos (passion).

But I hear some wonder whether or not "desire" and "passion" aren't the same thing...
 

There follows a citation of a passage from Plato's REPUBLIC, which I confess I've seen cited in both Francis Fukuyama and James Twitchell, albeit to different ends.  Having noted how Socrates demonstrates the existence of a "passion" that is not goal-oriented, I continued:

Thus Socrates demonstrates that what we translate as *passion* (though the most accurate translation seems to be "spiritedness," as the root word for thymos comes from "breath"), is not identical to desire since it can oppose desire. I can think of examples in which *passion* might side with desire against intellect, but that doesn't undermine Socrates' distinction, for in both cases thymos is still a separable concept. Further, this *spiritedness* has a lot to do not with just satisfying one's temporary appetite to have something, be it food or money or sex, but to have esteem for oneself regarding one's own personal self-control. Socrates' example applies to one's internal esteem but it obviously has a wealth of applications with respect to gaining the esteem of others in more social situations.

So in this argument I've defined "desire" as both covalent with Plato's "eros" and with all goal-oriented affects, while "passion" is covalent with Plato's "thymos" and with affects that are more abstract in their satisfaction, whether they take the form of a subject establishing one's "reputation" (Hobbes) or identifying with a host of fictional characters (my own contra-Berlatsky take on aesthetics). 

I won't explore aesthetics or character identification in this essay-series; the interested readers (?) will have to assume that both can be subsumed by what I now call "abstract goal-affects," which quite naturally contrast with "concrete goal-affects."

In his time Hobbes was certainly aware of Plato, so it's not impossible that his "three principal causes of quarrel" owes some debt to Plato's concept of the tripartite soul.  But whereas Hobbes makes no distinction between his three causes, the aforementioned Fukuyama asserts that Plato's faculty of *thymos*-- more than a little comparable to the cause Hobbes calls "reputation"-- is distinct from eros/desire in that *thymos* was properly a "desire for a desire," that is, to be seen as a person of esteem in a given community.  In my terms this makes *thymos* an "abstract goal-affect." 

Eros/desire is without question within the sphere of "concrete goal-affects," whether one wishes to "gain" one's goals with passionate emotion or cold logic/reason.  For Plato nous/reason would have been the highest faculty of the soul, set to control the others, but the closest parallel it has in Hobbes' formulation is what Hobbes calls "diffidence" or "safety," which to the extent that it's a desire is principally a desire for self-preservation, for rational homeostasis.

Extrapolating from Fukuyama's reading of both Plato and Hegel, I would say that the first two quarrel-causes in Hobbes fall under my heading of "concrete goal-affects."  In fiction as in reality, violence is most often-- though not always-- motivated by the prospect of "gain."  This in turn prompts violence perpetrated in the name of those victimized to protect their "safety."

However, outside this circle of "attack-and-defense," there is a much rarer species of quarrel-motivation, whose goals are as abstract as any goals can be.  I will deal more fully with these motivations, at least in terms of fictional narrative, in Part 2.

WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 1

"There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed."-- Paul Atreides describing his own transformation in Frank Herbert's DUNE.

"The more developed Idea resulting from this victory over several lower Ideas or objectifications of will, gains an entirely new character by taking up into itself from every Idea over which it has prevailed a strengthened analogy. The will objectifies itself in a new, more distinct way. It originally appears in generatio aequivoca; afterwards in assimilation to the given germ, organic moisture, plant, animal, man. Thus from the strife of lower phenomena the higher arise, swallowing them all up, but yet realising in the higher grade the tendency of all the lower."-- Schopenhauer, Book 1, part 27, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

The above quotes both deal with concepts of transformation.  Herbert's fictional protagonist describes a mental shift from one set of gender-oriented priorities to another; a shift brought after he imbibes the vision-inducing Water of Life. Schopenhauer's philosophical observation is far more abstract.  He takes Plato's Ideas, which were both essential and eternal by nature, and gives them a post-Kantian spin, in which the Ideas can assume different "grades" of relative perfection, all of which are objectifications of the true "thing-in-itself," the Universal Will. 

It will be noted that the Schopenhauer quote, unlike the Herbert quote, contains no reference to concepts of gender.  However, the "gloomy philosopher" had some definite thoughts on the subject; thoughts that make comicdom's Dave Sim sound like Betty Friedan by comparison.

From the essay "On Women:"

Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice . This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth, and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her defence and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the power which Nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical strength and reason, has been bestowed upon women in this form.

I'm not inherently opposed to the notion that genders may be characterized according to what one observes to be statistically-dominant virtues or vices.  The usual mush-headed responses to such characterizations-- "We're all individuals," "If you label me, you negate me"-- get no hearing in my court.  But I think that even though at times Schopenhauer's characterizations may ring a bell of familiarity, on the whole said characterizations carry less explanatory value than the observations of the 20th-century author of DUNE.  In addition, as presented here Schopenhauer's animadversions on the female sex are something of a betrayal of his post-Kantian project.

As I elaborated here, no post-Kantian project is viable unless it stresses the dual influence of natural and cultural influences.  Schopenhauer, anticipating Freud, chooses to define women in terms of lack: women have "cunning" because they lack "physical strength and reason."  The first is an aspect of demonstrable natural law.  The second lack, if it exists, can only be demonstrated through manifestations within humankind's cultural cosmos, through a rigorous philosophical definiton of what reason is.  Doubtless Schopenhauer felt he defined reason in other writings, but since he does not do so in respect to its purported differences between men and women, the assertion remains baseless.  Most of what Schopenhauer "proves" about woman's natural inferiority is based in his proto-evolutionary meditations on natural law (ON WOMEN was published eight years before ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, incidentally).  I suggest that natural law, both in Schopenhauer's time and our own, is about as much use in understanding culture as a hammer is for turning on a light-switch.  This type of reductionism is unworthy of one of philosophy's paramount thinkers.

Further, by characterizing female nature as something as unchanging as one of Plato's Ideas, Schopenhauer betrays his concept of "grades" of ideation.  Throughout "On Women" there is no sense that any woman's nature can be altered or subsumed by more "perfect" Ideas.  By contrast, both Plato and Dave Sim allowed that some women were capable of raising themselves to a level of masculine competence and insight. One need not agree with those worthies on their definitions of same; it's enough to note that they, unlike Schopenhauer, recognized that such a transformation was possible.  Frank Herbert's fictional meditations support this concept of transformation as well, though one must note that they are philosophical observations that grow out of a fictional structure.

It's just as possible for a mush-head to be insulted by Herbert's gender-characterizations as by Schopenhauer's: to be so obsessed with a purported individuality that one cannot recognize the broad mythic truth of Herbert's yang-like "ancient force that takes" and yin-like "ancient force that gives."  But even without the sort of visionary transformation brought about by the Water of Life, Herbert's narrative tapestry is broad enough to depict any number of cultural transformations.  Thus a male character like Liet-Kynes can function primarily as a nurturant force, attempting to bestow fecundity upon the desert-planet Arrakis.  Similarly, his daughter Chani becomes (unlike the majority of Fremen women) a skilled fighter, and in one chapter she kills one of Paul Atreides' challengers to spare Paul the trouble.

Yet despite all the personal prejudices that tainted Schopenhauer's view of the Fair Sex, his concept of the Will and gradations of ideation remain vital, and can be fruitfully applied to notions of gender transformation even though the philosopher would have certainly disapproved of such applications.  In 2-13-09 I wrote:

What is the cultural significance of action-heroines?

It's not that they make female readers feel more empowered, though there's not anything wrong with that.

It's not that they make male readers either more empathetic or more horny, though there's nothing wrong with either of those.

It's simply this:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

I let this particular field of investigation lie fallow for over two years, partly because I knew that re-reading Schopenhauer would take a fair amount of labor.  It's fortuitous that when the topic came to my attention once more, it was right at a time I'd just finished re-reading DUNE, which glosses certain aspects of Schopenhauer's beliefs just as I found they did for the writings of Paglia in this essay.

In the next installment of WHAT WOMEN WILL, I'll explore a little more as to the archetypal associations that arise when the woman is "Taker" rather than "Giver."

HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY!

Socrates: How about sounds and colours: in the first place you would admit that they both exist?
Theaetetus: Yes.

Socrates: And that either of them is different from the other, and the same with itself?

Theaetetus: Certainly.

Socrates: And that both are two and each of them one?

Theaetetus: Yes.


No matter how much time I've frittered away on message boards, I'm always pleased when I come across something so wonderfully absurd that I have to write an essay to refute it.

Take this CBR thread, which begins by asking the question as to what posters would say if God revealed himself to them.

Probably to no one's surprise, the thread doesn't particularly stick with that topic. My participation in it has thus far been minimal. However, at one point I made a simple objection when one poster equated "truth" with "scientific fact."

Since this isn't the case even for the most naive of naive positivists-- who must deduce their philosophical truths logically, rather than observing them in nature-- I stressed the need for a distinction. Thus I harvested this delightfully absurd response from one of my sometime opponents:

A child in his imagination may truly say "I'm Daredevil", but he'd be ill-advised to go jumping off tall buildings.

That's why I keep going back to comics-messboards. Where else can you find someone attempting, however indirectly and incorrectly, to establish Aristotle's "law of identity" (possibly derived from the doctrines of his mentor Plato; see above) with a comic-book character?

The obvious problem is as follows:

Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this:

Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."

Nor, even by the assumptions of positivism, does that act of identification cease to be real within what the poster chooses to call "the imagination," unless of course the matrices of memory cease to preserve even the imperfect record of the experience.

Now, the phenomenology changes somewhat when dealing with fictionalized versions of historical figures, no matter how greatly they may have been altered from their original forms. It's not possible to invoke the law of identification to say, "I am Spartacus," because one always knows (or assumes) that there was some real Spartacus way back when. Similar problems pertain even to deific figures who have no ties to recorded history but whose adherents assert that (for instance) Great Shiva has existed since the dawn of time.

The salient point, though, is that one need not attempt to "jump off tall buildings" to prove one's identity with Daredevil: the identity exists through the act of identification.

Fortunately for all those readers who don't like Daredevil, their antipathy keeps them from sharing his identity-- which I am sure would please them as much as I am pleased not to share any identity with David Boring.

ALTERING STATES

Cassirer's last major work was The Myth of the State. The book was published posthumously in 1946 after Cassirer's sudden death. Cassirer argues that the idea of a totalitarian state evolved from ideas advanced by Plato, Dante, Machiavelli, Gobineau, Carlyle and Hegel. He concludes that the Fascist regimes of the 20th century were symbolised by a myth of destiny and the promotion of irrationality."-- from the anonymous Wikipedia entry on Ernst Cassirer.

I've used Wikipedia as much as anyone else for quick reference but whenever I see a short writeup on a complex subject (such as neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer) my alarm bells go off. But no bells rang for a certain messboard opponent who quoted the above section of the writeup to me, as proof that Cassirer believed that Plato and the rest were responsible, however indirectly, for the rise of fascism.

To say the least, this is not an accurate reading of THE MYTH OF THE STATE. The book does attempt to portray the historical background against which the ideas of the totalitarian state arose (including not just "right-wing" forms like fascism proper but also "lefty" manifestations like "Bolshevism," as Cassirer calls it.) However, the anonymous author's word "evolved" is extremely misleading, for colloquially it implies a natural progression, when in truth Cassirer's book shows the many ways in which totalitarian states actively distorted even those philosophers from whom they directly borrowed.

In short, MYTH OF THE STATE is first and foremost a history of how said myths come into being. It should be understood that by "myth" Cassirer does not mean something false or illusory, though the ways in which men deal with myth may be misguided. According to Cassirer's system, the very attempt one makes to justify the ways of a given state can be deemed a "myth," albeit not precisely the same sort of myth one encounters in the most primitive societies.

Cassirer devotes his first four chapters to defining myth as compactly as his theme will allow, so it's to be expected that he skips over many of the nuances of myth-definition found in the 1925 book MYTHICAL THOUGHT. Probably the best definition he offers of primitive myth is that "myth is an objectification of man's social experience," but immediately after that definition he labels the constructions of Plato as myths, albeit myths that, unlike their earlier kindred, serve "the purposes of dialectical and ethical thought." Cassirer is a bit vague as to how the earlier type of myths manage to become so encoded in society as to become the Old Order that dialectical thinkers seek to overthrow, but throughout the book this is his basic theme: that the primary type of myth is the first human activity to begin leading man "far from his unconscious and instinctive life," but that afterward new and more rational forms of myth must supersede those that are based largely on "feelings."

Plato, far from being a proponent of fascism, is seen as not only one of the first philosophers to discourse on the subject of the state, but also the first to propose making a choice between "an ethical and a mythical conception of the state. In the Legal State, the state of justice, there is no room left for the conceptions of mythology, for the gods of Homer and Hesiod." Cassirer also notes that Plato is no ally to fascism:

"Justice" and the "will to power" are the opposite poles of Plato's ethical and political philosophy.

Most of the thinkers covered here are given similar readings by Cassirer. With the exception of racial theorist Gobineau, whose real contributions to fascism are obvious, Cassirer shows the thinkers involved in analyzing the nature of the state's power, not stumping for the rise of totalitarianism. The closest Cassirer ever comes to doing what the Wiki essay claims he does is within his chapter on Hegel. I can see why the anonymous writer might have misapprehended Cassirer's theme if all he read was this:

But it was the most tragic fate of Hegel that he unconsciously unchained the most irrational powers that have ever appeared in man's social and political life. No other philosophical system has done so much for the preparation of fascism and imperialism as Hegel's doctine of the state-- this "divine Idea as it exists on earth."

Sounds damning. However, Cassirer points out that Hegel also said:

The highest aim that the state can attain is that art and science are cultivated and come to a height corresponding to the spirit of the people. That is the principal end of the state-- but an end that it must not bring about as an external work but that must arise from itself.

Clearly, neither the Left nor Right versions of totalitarianism had any serious intentions of imitating Hegel's ideal of the "divine Idea." Their political myths are, Cassirer says, "artificial things fabricated by very skillful and cunning artisans." As such, no reasoning being could regard the swastika or the hammer-and-sickle as the natural evolutions from their source material, or think that Cassirer thought so.

However, the idea that the proper response to the Holocaust should be a total refusal of all myths has become itself a myth that has been advocated by others beyond anonymous Wikipedia writers, or even anti-comics pundits like Wertham and Legman. Andrew Von Hendy's MODERN CONSTRUCTION OF MYTH is an academic survey that has some fair criticisms to make of the many scholars who have written on the subject of myth, but von Hendy's chapter on Cassirer subscribes to the "refusal myth" unashamedly.

Without going into all of von Hendy's criticisms of Cassirer here, suffice to say that after the author finishes his pronouncements on Cassirer's philosophical magnum opus, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, von Hendy tells us that MYTH OF THE STATE is "the passionate palinode of a refugee from Hitler's Germany." But any retraction is purely in von Hendy's mind. At no point does Cassirer renounce his belief in the idea that mythical thought remains the foundation for all later developments of human art. philosophy and culture: at most he is more vehement about the necessity for controlling the irrational side of primal myth with its more rational kindred. At the book's conclusion, what I call primal myth-- perhaps comparable to Joseph Henderson's conception of "Moira"-- is made the literal foundation of culture, albeit in the manner that the Sumerian goddess Tiamat's slain body is made the fundament of the Sumerian cosmos.

And yet this is not Cassirer foreswearing the necessity of myth: he merely recognizes, just as he did in pre-fascist Germany, that the symbolic forms often come into conflict. In the aforementioned MYTHICAL THOUGHT, written prior to the rise of Nazi power in Germany, Cassirer again notes how a philosopher like Plato opposed mythical paradigms:

Plato as a dialectician draws the sharp dividing line that can be drawn neither by myth nor mysticism.-- p. 251.

Von Hendy's dividedness of mind is evident. In one sentence alone he praises Cassirer for his "brilliant" defense of the philosophers whom many were then attacking for advocacy of fascism, yet implies that Cassirer "exoneration" is special pleading without citing any of Cassirer's actual defenses. Given that von Hendy shows in the book a marked preference for Paul Ricoeur-- whom I personally tend to consider a second-rate Cassirer-- I suspect von Hendy was not that interested in an honest appraisal of the philosopher. Ironically, von Hendy ends his chapter by remarking on the perils of "romantic affectivity," but I submit that he, like the anonymous Wiki-writer, is guilty of an anti-romantic affectivity, which can be no less deceptive than its opposite.

ADAPTATION, ULTIMATELY

"Socrates: In like manner, I want you to tell me what part of justice is piety or holiness, that I may be able to tell Meletus not to do me injustice, or indict me for impiety, as I am now adequately instructed by you in the nature of piety or holiness, and their opposites.

Euthyphro: Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men."-- Plato's EUTHYPHRO, trans. Benjamin Jowett.

In the above section Socrates, who as he says is about to be tried for impiety in an Athens court, attemtps to get alleged religious expert Euthyprho to define impiety for him. As in most other Socratic dialogues the poor chump Euthyphro is outmatched from the first, but though he isn't able to parse his argument finely enough for Socrates' liking, in the section above he does come close to formulating a sound answer regarding the ways that "justice" can encompass both duties to the gods and duties to men. The formulation carries a significant resonance with Jesus' famous "render unto Caesar" pronouncement from Mark 12:17, even if in that dialogue it's the religious guy rather than the skeptic who wins the argument.

One of Charles Reeces' responses on the comments-thread to SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS PART 2 brought up a concept that I've always thought seemed partial and poorly conceived: that of "commodification." I asserted that I thought that I thought that what Marxists call "commodification" was better seen as a wider process I term "adaptation," by which I mean the sum total of all actions taken by artists-- or those making artistic works available to any audiences-- that in any way alter or slant the works to make them acceptable to those audiences.

Reece brings up an example of what he calls commodification, but as I told him, I found it suspect, and so won't consider it here. I think I have a substitute example with which he should logically agree, though, since it concerns an injustice done in the name of conservative interests. This example is the story of how representatives of DC Comics squelched an attempt to create the company's first black superhero in TEEN TITANS #20.

The story's told in great detail here, and of course various interviews have come out in the fan press in which no one named seems to want to take the heat for the decision to de-blackify the character of "Joshua." Here's Len Wein's summation of the controversy:



"At the last minute Carmine got gun-shy and was afraid that we wouldn't be able to sell the book in the South and that all these terrible things would happen. So he just pulled the issue and said, 'Nope, we're not going to do it.' This was less than a week before the book was supposed to ship to the printer."

Now, I don't see how any Marxist in his right mind would not consider this an act of reducing a work to what Reece calls a "homogenous substance." Whether Infantino's actions were exactly what Wein said they were is not my concern here: I wasn't there. But someone made it necessary that a character intended to be a black man was made into a Caucasian, and that person was probably motivated by fears of economic retaliation by buyers in the southern United States.

Marxist rhetoric is replete with many, many examples of such hypothetical commodification, a few as worthwhile as the one above, though most are drivel, like Theodor Adorno's ravings against Donald Duck.

However, let us flashforward to 1993, and a different medium. Much racial rhetoric has gone down the pike, and now the company of Walt Disney-- not exactly a stranger to questions of racial impropriety-- puts out a film version of Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN, directed by Stephen Sommers.

There was of course no question that the novel's major black character would be played by a black actor, one Courtney B. Vance. No replacements by a Caucasian pinch-hitter here. But how does Vance play the character?

Does he play the runaway slave Jim with the same authentic "Negro" dialect given him by author Mark Twain?

HELL NO he does not. There's not a "massa" or "whuffo" to be heard in the Sommers adaptation of the Twain novel, which is also illustrative of a different type of "adaptational" process. Just as Carmine Infantino may have feared reprisals if he published a black superhero in 1969, in 1993 Walt Disney most likely feared another sort of economic reprisals if they came out with a film with a black man talking in dialectic, no matter how accurate to the times that dialectic would have been.

So my question to Euthyphro Reece is as follows:

Is the latter example also commodification?

Or is it not a greater part of a process of adaptation to a hypothetical audience, even as service to the gods is a portion of the category of just actions?

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.