SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 1

I style this essay "again" because it's not a "Part 2" to the original SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, which was simply a review of a non-fiction book based in bad pseudo-feminist ideology. It recently occurred to me that the same phrase would apply much better to the cultural "blues" that come about as a result of real and perceived issues stemming from sexual dimorphism. If anything, this post might be a loose sequel to the following statements from SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2.                                                                                    

   

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation.                                                     

Now, the purpose of the SACRED AND PROFANE series was to explore male and female archetypes rather than the sociological stresses of culture, but I'm still seeking to build on the dissonance created between the sexes when one of the two incarnates "will" and the other "willingness." At least this Nietzschean metaphor applies to all species in which the male is bigger and the female smaller, thus excluding outliers like the black widow spider and the blue whale. To be more specific, though, only human females, with their control of the estrus cycle, can be deemed "masters of sex" as all the big male creatures are "masters of violence." These metaphors for evolutionary abundance are, I admit, not in line with the dominant evolutionary dogma. As I am a Gene myself, I do not approve of Richard Dawkins' theory of a bunch of selfish genes that just want to keep making copies of themselves. I much prefer the Stuart Kauffman concept of coevolution.                                                 

   "...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world."-- Stuart Kauffman, INVESTIGATIONS, p. 150.                                                                                                                                                            Kauffman here is speaking only of evolutionary alterations at the cellular level, and so I do not know if he endorsed the notion I'm loosely stumping for here: that fully formed organisms might "prehend" the need to change to suit a particular physical challenge. The relevant challenge here would be the response of both males and females to females' diminishing outward signs of the estrus cycle, which in turn came about once human females needed to bond males to them for the purpose of nursing children, which in turn became more neotenous than many mammalian offspring in reaction to bipedal evolution. Males' greater propensity for body mass might have been genetically encoded by their anthropoid precursors, but said propensity may also have been reinforced once males were more regularly competing with one another for sexual opportunities.

And that's enough on sexual dimorphism theory. Part 2 gets into the "Blues" part.                                                                                             

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 2

 Since absolutely no one asked for it, that means it's time for one of my "geometrical approximations" of an abstract principle. First off, here's what the lateral line of meaning looks like, the simple progression from stimulus to response, or, in Aristotelian terms, from complication to resolution.                                                                                                        

This progression also stands in for the mental activities of every non-human species, from amoebae to dolphins and chimps, which may have some inchoate potential for "higher," vertical mentation, but not anything comparable to the human level. I take the position that even the most incoherent human narrative represents an attempt to emulate more coherent narratives. Thus the progression of the lateral meaning is always static, since it's just about "what things happened," as I outlined in WHAT VS. HOW. However, the vertical meaning can vary greatly, depending thoroughly on how the author articulates the abstract values found in "correlations and cogitations." So the baseline for all human narrative mentation, at the level I've sometimes designated as "poor" in terms of complexity, looks like this:                                                                                 

  So the baseline for human mentation must progress both laterally and vertically, no matter how limited the "peaks and valleys." The up-and-down movement is not intended to represent increasing or decreasing amplitude, just a progression opposed to that of the lateral line. Next up is what I have termed "fair."                                       

 Here the peaks and valleys become more pronounced, indicating a greater concrescence of either the correlations, the cogitations, or both together. While the "good-to-superior" level I've articulated implicitly carries some variation between those two states, here's my third and last geometric approximation for that highest level of concrescence.                                                                                                     

STIMULATING RESPONSES

 Possibly my dissatisfaction with Whitehead's take on symbolism in the two previous posts led me to a formulation on symbolism owing much to Ernst Cassirer, though not only to him.                                       

In the second chapter of AN ESSAY ON MAN, Cassirer attempts to place the human creation of symbolism within the general context of animal biology: "Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven... Man has... discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link we may describe as the symbolic system." I've covered in diverse other posts how Cassirer distinguished human use of symbolic abstractions into those of "mythical thinking" and "discursive/dialectical thinking."                                                                    

Parenthetically, I'll note that in I.A. Richards' 1936 PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, reviewed here, he also put forth a similar proposition regarding the origin of organic creatures' ability to "sort," using an amoeba-like creature as his baseline. But Cassirer's model is more constitutive, having some bearing on my theory of the four potentialities, which started with Jung's four functions but diverged from the Swiss psychologist as to what function belonged where. For me, the receptor system lines up with the kinetic potentiality, and the effector with the dramatic potentiality- which means that the "lateral meaning" associated with both is available to many if not all organic creatures. "Vertical meaning," however, is born from the human ability to form complex abstractions, and any parallels that might be found in non-human animals are very limited in nature.                                                                                                                       

 On a somewhat newer tack, it's recently occurred to me that Aristotle's famous definition of narrative from the Poetics bears strong comparison with Cassirer's base level of "stimulus-and-response" for all organic life-forms. Despite his biological acumen, the philosopher chose what I consider a rather unwieldy metaphor for said narrative: 'Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")' Aristotle like Plato used the word "dianoia" for a narrative's "thought" or "theme," but so far as I know no Greek thinker ever elaborated a theory of the mythopoeic elements of narrative that even touches upon the dimensions of Cassirer's schema-- though I believe Frye argued that the Roman-era author "Pseudo-Longinus" might have offered a counter-agent to Aristotle's emphasis upon discursive thought. More on these matters later, possibly.                                                                    

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART II

 I've now finished the last two chapters of Whitehead's SYMBOLISM lectures, and as it happens, all the best stuff is in the first chapter.                                                                                                                                                           Given that Whitehead only focuses on his particular take regarding symbolism in the last (and shortest) chapter, the title is a little misleading. And when I checked the index for his synoptic work PROCESS AND REALITY, which he began in 1929, I saw that Whitehead only had a few pages devoted to the topic of symbols as such. Given the brevity of this 88-page book, I wasn't expecting anything as comprehensive as Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY or Cassirer's MYTHICAL THOUGHT. But that final chapter doesn't do anything but talk a little about symbolism as one of the abstractions necessary to human culture. In fact, he sums up his opinion of its importance most adroitly in a sentence from PROCESS: "Symbolism is essential for the higher grades of life, and the errors of symbolism can never be wholly avoided." I don't think Whitehead succeeds in establishing a standard as to what constitutes "error" in symbolism, though.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The real concerns of his book manifest in the second chapter; that of advancing his concept of the relatedness of all aspects of reality to one another, rather than trying to see particular aspects in isolation, which he attributes to both the empiricist tradition of Hume and the idealist tradition of Kant. In the second chapter he says, "This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume's naive presupposition of 'simple occurrence' for the mere data... I directly deny this doctrine of 'simple occurrence'... Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it." To sum up, the principal strength of SYMBOLISM is that it offers a very concise summation of some of Whitehead's concepts, which I confessed that I found hard to follow in the more ambitious PROCESS.                   

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."     

THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.   

PERSPECTIVISM PERMUTATIONS

 Once again, I'm structuring a post here so that I can also use it as a response on a forum-thread. All the readers of this blog need to know is that the forum-thread involves discourse on the subjects of atheism and agnosticism.  As I am an agnostic, I reject the certitudes of both theists and atheists as to whether gods do or don't exist, but one comment on the thread, with respect to Christian morals with respect to slavery, raised some interesting questions that bring me back to Nietzschean perspectivism.                                                                                                                                 _________________                                                                                                                                                                                           "Slavery would likely be inherently immoral from [Jesus'] point of view. Like thousands of isolated moral conundrums, there is no record of him responding to slavery one way or another. But he did have a take on how to love. Slavery would be in contrast to that principle."

                                                                                                                            I would tend to speak of things like "pro-slavery sentiments" and "anti-slavery sentiments" alike as being intersubjective rather than objective, but your argument as a Christian is far more interesting than the rote dogma of the atheists here, and so deserves a longer response.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         The dominant atheist response here to the question of morality has been to claim that it's purely determined by social factors. This claim is made according to atheist beliefs about the absence of any overriding human nature that simply takes different permutations in different societies. Now, though I have argued (and still argue) that atheists cannot be sure that nothing like gods or spirits existed for early man, I also have not dismissed the equal possibility that such gods and spirits did not exist except as poetic metaphors. But for this post, I will hew to the latter possibility: looking at the human custom of slavery as if its attendant morality was independent of any divine input. This is also possible to me because I am a perspectivist as well as an agnostic: I seek to understand how perspective affects morals.                                                                                                                      Jesus' most famous statement of "love" in relation to human bondage would be, to my mind, "Do as you would done by." This speaks to an innate human need: the need for cooperation in activities that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved: cooperation between families, tribe-members, nations. However, the human need for cooperation may be partly if not wholly predicated on competition as well: families gather together to keep away intruders, nations sign peace treaties to repel common enemies, and so on. There are legitimate areas of human endeavor to which the ethic of cooperation does not unilaterally apply. A merchant who never "bought cheap in order to sell dear" would embody the lovingkindness expected by Jesus's admonition. However, he might also find himself going out of business and being unable to feed his family. So in my terms both ethics, of cooperation and competition, are intersubjective in that they apply across the whole of human cultures, rather than each culture being determined by local standards.                                                                                                                                                                                                                From this formulation it follows that slavery, too, would be judged by these two competing ethics. Prior to the Old Testament, recorded history doesn't preserve a lot of moral commentary on slavery (though there's no reason to assume that there was none). We know from Exodus that Jews didn't like being slaves (even of the economic variety) in Egypt, because their slavery is depicted as being bad. Yet the Jews of the Nation of Israel kept slaves, as we know from Leviticus. How did those archaic Jews justify slavery? We don't know this in any precise sense. We do know that the custom of Jubilee encouraged slaveowners to emancipate slaves under just the right circumstances, though. This suggests that archaic Hebrews were aware that slaves of other nations didn't like being slaves in Israel any more than the Jews had liked it in Egypt. Leviticus 25:44 even seems to be justifying the taking of foreign-born slaves over the enslavement of one's fellow Jews, though we can't be certain what the actual practices were like in such a distant period.                                                                                                                                                          To wind up somewhat, if we could ask a tribesman of early humanity why his tribe took slaves, he would probably answer with some version of an ethic born out of competition: "They did it to us first," or "If we don't have some of their people held captive, the enemy tribe may try to wipe us out." At the same time, the ethic of cooperation would have co-existed. It was probably easier for two tribes, even if they disliked each other, to use tradecraft to facilitate exogamous unions rather than by going to war every time one's tribe had a bridal shortage. These contending aspects of human nature are reflected in the mythopoeic conceptions of the philosopher Empedocles, who wrote:                                                                                                                                                                                        "The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed."

Perhaps more pertinently, he also wrote: "Each man believes only his own experience."