CORRELATING COGITATIONS PT 2

Of all the concepts I correlated in Part 1, I have not previously shown reasons to bring together William James' two forms of knowledge (even when seen purely through the lens of my literary formulations) with Kant's two forms of sublimity, which I altered more extensively to meld with literary considerations. So what if any links can be found between James and Kant?

Everything I wrote about the Kantian sublimities derives from his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and in his first chapter, long before he broaches the subject of sublimity, Kant announces that he will discuss two sets of concepts:

Now there are only two kinds of concepts, and these admit as many distinct principles of the possibility of their objects, viz. natural concepts and the concept of freedom... Thus Philosophy is correctly divided into two parts, quite distinct in their principles; the theoretical part or Natural Philosophy, and the practical part or Moral Philosophy (for that is the name given to the practical legislation of Reason in accordance with the concept of freedom). 

When Kant set forth his project in 1790, I assume that he took some influence from previous philosophers in one way or another, and I similarly assume that most of the great philosophers who followed Kant were at least aware of this assertion. I do not know if Schopenhauer, reputed to have been a major interpreter of Kant, had this theme statement from JUDGMENT in mind when he distinguished between "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge," or whether James or anyone else who discoursed on "knowledge-by-acquaintance" and "knowledge-about" and their congeners. Those matters of philosophical history don't matter; only the fact that all of Kant's JUDGMENT meditations spring from his division between natural concepts and moral concepts. In my mind the literary aspects of "knowledge-by-acquaintance" translate as the lateral meaning of any text, which is the unmediated, literal account of what happens in the narrative, while the aspects of "knowledge-about" translate as the text's vertical meaning, which is mediated by the interpretations made by the characters in the narrative, the author's observations independent of the characters, and the responses of the audience.

So even though Kant has a specific orientation in his "moral philosophy" toward his particular concept of "freedom"-- which I believe he considers essentially "a priori," as against the "a posteriori" concepts of nature-- his system is roughly in line with the later terms for the two forms of knowledge as advanced by James, Grote and others.

Now, Kant's uses examples taken from nature to explicate his twin concepts of sublimity. Here's Kant on what he terms "the mathematical-sublime:"

Examples of the mathematically Sublime of nature in mere intuition are all the cases in which we are given, not so much a larger numerical concept as a large unit for the measure of the Imagination (for shortening the numerical series). A tree, [the height of] which we estimate with reference to the height of a man, at all events gives a standard for a mountain; and if this were a mile high, it would serve as unit for the number expressive of the earth’s diameter, so that the latter might be made intuitible. The earth’s diameter [would supply a unit] for the known planetary system; this again for the Milky Way; and the immeasurable number of milky way systems called nebulae,—which presumably constitute a system of the same kind among themselves—lets us expect no bounds here. Now the Sublime in the aesthetical judging of an immeasurable whole like this lies not so much in the greatness of the number [of units], as in the fact that in our progress we ever arrive at yet greater units.

And here's some of his examples of "the dynamic-sublime:" 

Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.

Probably Kant would consider all of hie examples to be "natural concepts." However, the examples of the dynamic-sublime have to do with discrete physical phenomena, which are things of which we know "by acquaintance." The perception of seemingly infinite phenomena, though, are mediated in MY opinion through the knowledge-faculty termed "knowledge-about," because the infinite-seeming phenomena come into conflict with the human desire to suss out proportions in an analytical manner.

The chances that some Kant scholar will dispute my interpretation of the "mathematical-sublime" are the opposite of infinite-- "infinitesimal." But such objections would not matter, because in this essay I translated Kant's formulation into one dealing exclusively with literary experiences of a different form of "infinity:"

it has occured to me that in literature, there are ways to express "infinity" that are not ineluctably entangled with the idea of might, and which will prove consequential for my attempt to formulate the foundations of the three worlds of artistic phenomenality.  This kind of "infinity" may have some "overwhelming" characteristics, but it is not really related to "might" as such.

It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.
 

 The "infinity" of which Yeats speaks here-- like the "richness and profusion of images" I found in Edmund Burke-- suggests another form of the sublime with a different nature than the "dynamically sublime."  It is one that overwhelms in a manner roughly analogous to the "mathematically sublime," but the "magnitude" is one that stems not from physical size, but from the magnitude of how many conceivable connections can be made within a given phenomenality.

Hence the name I coin for this exclusively artistic property--

The COMBINATORY-sublime.

In 2013 I had not extrapolated the four potentialities from Jung's four functions; that took place the next year, in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR. Thus my word "connections" is vague at best. Still, the context, that of Yeats' "infinity of truths," aligns far more with the "knowledge-about" epistemologies characteristic of mythic narrative than with "knowledge-by-acquaintance." 

Or so it seems to me now, eleven years later. If I come across any posts of the combinatory-sublime that seem to contradict this current formulation, I reject them in advance, just for the satisfaction of having a sense of symmetry in my system.          

          

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3

 In January I wrote two essays under the heading DUELING DUALITIES, here and here, regarding how William James' "two forms of knowledge" probably influenced Carl Jung's four functions. The first essay is also one of those incidents where I used the words "ontology" and "epistemology" a bit incorrectly. I corrected that oversight in May of this year with A TALE OF TWO COSMS, substituting the terms "ontocosm" as "the totality of lateral values" in a work and "epicosm" as "the totality of vertical values." 

In TALE, I gave an example of two classic comics-serials in which one showed a stronger epicosm than an ontocosm, and vice versa:

Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm.  

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age (particularly Stan Lee's red-headed stepchild, the Pym of a Thousand Names). In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them. This may be because, IMO, The Inhumans were primarily Jack Kirby's concept, and Stan Lee never really "got" them. So, taking in the totality of lateral elements-- which are, I should reiterate, the elements through which readers most directly relate to the characters' exploits-- the FF-ontocosm is weaker than that of SPIDER-MAN. These factors may also relate to the reasons why SPIDER-MAN quickly overtook FANTASTIC FOUR as the flagship of the Marvel line, while the FF often struggled to remain relevant in the decades following the Silver Age.  

Possibly because Lee and Ditko were so focused upon melodramatic exigencies, though, there wasn't much room to focus on dialectical and mythopoeic values. Ditko's villains are "marvels" of costume design, but they don't arouse many abstract associations in comparison to Galactus, the Puppet Master, The Red Ghost, Klaw and Doctor Doom. This contrast raises the possibility that, to borrow from another set of Jamesian terms, SPIDER-MAN was focused more on "the perceptual" while FANTASTIC FOUR was focused more on "the conceptual."  More on these matters later, perhaps.         

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART I

 Though I'll probably never gain a thorough knowledge of the Whitehead philosophy due to all my other irons in the Fire of My Philosophy, I did decide to invest some time in a slim book (88 pages) of lectures the author gave at the University of Virginia in 1927. This time, since it is so short, I'm not going to do a summary review as I did with his 1925 SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD. Here I'll just confine myself to some quick notes as I go along.

In his first lecture, Whitehead chooses to discuss the process of human symbol-making in two phases, "Presentational Immediacy" and "Causal Efficacy." I won't explore either of these concepts at this time. Here my only interest is in noting the similarity of the first term to Susanne Langer's dyad of "presentational" and "discursive" methods of symbolization as expressed in her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Since I've recently learned that Langer took some degree of influence from the earlier work of Whitehead, she may have borrowed one of her terms from him. Of course, when I first started writing about the Langer dyad on this blog, I confess I did not realize that her two terms in essence recapitulated a similar dyad in the late 1800s work of William James, that of "acquaintance" and "description," as I discussed in more detail here.  

My only other gleaning from the first lecture is that though I was puzzled by Whitehead's jargonistic term "event" in PROCESS AND REALITY, the first lecture makes his concept clearer, though he does not use that term. Here he states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A."     

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

OO, THOSE AWFUL ONTOLOGIES

My title references an essay by snob-critic Edmund Wilson, who sneered at THE LORD OF THE RINGS with a snotty essay, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs." I say, if you're going to steal, steal from elitists; that way, you're just stealing from cheats.

My most sustained thoughts on the subject of "ontology" came about from my relatively recent attempts to suss out the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Even before finishing his most famous philosophical book, PROCESS AND REALITY, I wrote this essay to draw comparisons between his system and mine, based on a perceived conflict between his ontology and my epistemology. In response to Whitehead's statement that his philosophy concerned "the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world," I wrote: 

It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

I later referred to all such "data" as half-truths, because that's how "truth" operates in fiction. But in more recent months, I began to consider, in the essay A NOSE FOR GNOSIS, that Whitehead's concept of an "ontology of subjective data" might parallel my concept of an "an ontology of fiction," by which I mean everything that *literally* takes place within a fictional discourse."

...I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description."

A new wrinkle I'll now add on top of these previous observations is the following:

Since fictional ontology, whether one defines it as "literal content" or as "pre-epistemic prehensions," is comparable to "knowledge-by-acquaintance" rather than "knowledge-by-description," all judgments based on taste spring from a subject's response to a fictional work's ontology.

In 2012's THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, I defined the function of taste thusly: 

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  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.

I still maintain that taste is not a matter of abstract justifications, though one can amuse oneself by debating the logical propositions that others use to justify the superiority of their tastes. Taste relates to the audience's identification with the travails, deserved or not, of fictional characters, and that means identifying with a work's internal ontology. 

The aforementioned Gary Groth, for instance, has often ridiculed the genre of superheroes with a variety of intellectual justifications. His few comments on his early comics-fandom have painted a picture of his younger self as simply ignorant of literary principles. But there's no reason to take Groth's word for his self-evaluation: that he formerly had the propensity to identify with fictional superheroes but then recognized their absurdity for intellectual reasons. A lot of readers fall out of love with a lot of genres that they may love intensely for a time, only to tire of them and chase after some other passion. Ontological identification arises from the reader's perception that the ontology reflects something he or she would like to see play out, regardless as to whether the fictional scenario reflects something the reader would like to see transpire in reality.

Now, if I am correct that reader-taste stems from identification with a work's ontology, how does that influence the same reader's ability to suss out a work's epistemology? My answer is that the reader's non-intellectual tastes can indeed influence whether or not one appreciates the epistemology that can be used to justify the ontology. Even without reading Edmund Wilson's famous anti-Tolkien essay, the title alone tells one that Wilson cannot countenance the basic appeal of villains who repel the reader on the basis of their ugliness and their violence. I'm sure Wilson had all sorts of intellectual justifications for that position, but I don't think that his judgments of taste, any more than those of Groth, stem from intellect, but from an ability, or lack of ability, to identify with the basic-- one might say "pre-epistemic"-- propositions of an ontological scenario. And if one can't grok the "knowledge by acquaintance," one is unlikely to find any validity in the "knowledge by description" used to justify the abstract principles aligning with the pure events of the story.

A NOSE FOR GNOSIS

What a difference a year makes.

It was in May 2019 that I first began referencing the four functions of Joseph Campbell's system as "epistemological patterns"-- which, as far as I know, he did not-- in the essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE. Of those functions I wrote:

For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Yet, in August 2018, I didn't see any connection between my system and epistemology in the FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE series:

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs could display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters...

In subsequent essays I noted that most if not all of my previous essays had indeed been epistemological in nature, but it was, as the HALF-TRUTH essay specifies, an epistemology of "half-truths," which is not the type of knowledge with which philosophers like James and Russell were concerned. 

FOUNT also specified that I deemed merely "functional" aspects of narrative fiction to be aligned to the perceptual form of knowledge, "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while the "super-functional" aspects were aligned to the conceptual form, "knowledge-by-description." I might, at some point, see whether or not my "lateral values" line up with "acquaintance" and "vertical values" with "description." But instead I'll segue to a subject I've neglected far more than epistemology: ontology.

The two philosophical terms were formulated by different thinkers at different times, but in modern times they've become joined at the hip, as in this basic statement online:

ontology asks what exists, and epistemology asks how we can know about the existence of such a thing.

Since I began examining Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy for possible application to my literary hermeneutics, as in essays like MIGHT AND MYTH, I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description." So far, as I observed in MIGHT AND MYTH, I've confined these alignments to sussing out what it means that the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR had more concrescence within the mythopoeic potentiality than the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, though to be sure, that era of SPIDER-MAN is more concrescent with respect ot the dramatic potentiality.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked. 

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

ADDENDUM: I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 2

At the end of Part 2, I said:

It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

The "acquaintance/description" duality appeared in the works of two philosophers I've often quoted, Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. In Cassirer's LANGUAGE, he says:

Like thought, language must pass from the known to the unknown, from what is perceived by the senses to what merely thought...

While Langer's dichotomy of "the discursive" and "the presentational" has often influenced my own examination of symbolism. In this quote, Langer aligns her concept of presentational symbolism with the immediacy of sense-impression:

  "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-experience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

I discussed Langer's two forms of symbolism first in RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT PT. 3,  where I associated "presentational symbolism" with fantasies without an appeal of logic, while I associated "discursive symbolism" with fantasies governed by logical rules about what can or cannot happen. However, obviously the two constantly intertwine, not only in fantasy-literature but in all art, myth, and in human language itself. Prior to Kant, most European philosophers subscribed to what Cassirer called "the copy-theory of language," in which it was assumed that reason and logic guided the evolution of language. Toward the end of LANGUAGE, however, Cassirer naturally argues that the formation of language is as much aesthetic as logical.

...it lies in the very nature of language that each of these syntheses is not governed exclusively by theoretical but by imaginative factors as well, and that consequently, much of linguistic "concept formation" seems to be less of logical comparison and combination that of the linguistic fantasy... In so far as we can gain insight into them, the factors which guide language in its classifications seem closely related to primitive mythical concepts and classification"-- LANGUAGE, p. 297. 

So Cassirer offers a view of the interactions of what Langer calls 'the discursive" and "the presentational," though I would say that he does not explore  such interactions in depth, any more than does Langer. I believe that I've come up with an interesting take on the matter, courtesy of Jung's theory of archetypes.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Doyle character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. 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.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

WHITE NOISE

I've posted a short review of Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS here, noting one of the more interesting philosophical observations:

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing.  But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

Perhaps because Robinson's characters exist in an era far removed from the twentieth century, they don't discuss in detail the archaic origin of their philosophical ideas. Indeed, Robinson has a little bit of fun with the idea of attribution, implying that over time scholars may simply get things wrong, as when one character calls modern literary critic Harold Bloom an "alchemist." However, Dent Ios's dual forms of knowledge may have been borrowed from a similar dualism propounded by Bertrand Russell in 1910: "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." That said, Russell's duality seems to have been preceded, according to this Wikipedia entry, by similar formulations by at least three other philosophers: John Grote, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James. I have no idea what if any indebtedness Russell might have to these predecessors, but James apparently reproduces Grote's categories exactly in James's 1890 book THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Now, most of these philosophers seem to be talking about how humans organize knowledge according to what James calls "perceptual" and "conceptual" knowledge. The characters of MEMORY, however, are not concerned with the way language encodes perceptions, but with the way that music, the least "linguistic" of the arts, does so. On the next page following Dent Ios's assertion, he adds that, "Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static." This seems like an odd thing to say right after he's claimed that discursive knowledge is as important as that of acquaintance. The second statement seems to privilege the dynamism of the direct sense-experience, and to downgrade the "static" qualities of what Grote and James call "knowledge-about." In the 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer categorically downgrades music as against the more "assertive" arts:

 "[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

I would tend to agree with Langer more than with Robinson's characters. For exanople, although I agree that discursive knowledge is *primarily* linear, I don't think it is necessarily "static." Great philosophers-- and critics-- always combine the linear/horizontal logic of the discursive process with what I have called "vertical meaning." Such meaning is put forth roughly along the same lines that Levi-Strauss imagines myths being a combination of "harmonic" and "melodic" elements. Plato's TIMAEUS, in seeking to describe the perfect society already envisaged in THE REPUBLIC, does not depend purely on linear logic but finesses that logic with a mythic image from outside the immediate argument: the image of the city Atlantis, whose extinction signals a counter-example to the "perfect society" once represented by its contemporary opponent Athens.