(Due to the end of term, I am running on a bit of a delayed schedule here, so this is a day late.)
I have been going back and forth about what to do for the next Fortnightly Book. I'll have a fair amount of time, but I'm also coming off a grueling end of summer term, so it makes sense to do either a re-read or something relatively easy. After some thought, I've decided to do Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which I haven't read for a bit.
P&P was Austen's second published novel, after Sense and Sensibility, and was originally published not under Austen's own name, but under the byline, "by the Author of Sense and Sensibility." The working title seems to have been First Impressions, and, if so, it failed to get a publisher in the late 1790s. Austen went back to it in 1811 to revise it, and this is usually thought to have involved changing it from an epistolary novel to its current form, but we don't know exactly what was involved in the revisions, since we lack the original. The reason for the title which became famous was probably just to have a distinctive parallel to the title of Sense and Sensibility, but could also be due to a passage in the last chapter of Fanny Burney's Cecilia, with which Austen was certainly well acquainted:
“The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE....Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination....
...Thus the same passions, taking but different directions, do mischief and cure it alternately...."
Austen, who wasn't expecting a resounding success, sold the copyright outright to avoid taking on any risk (in publishing Sense and Sensibility she had indemnified the publisher from any loss); her total payment for what would become the greatest novel in the English language was £110. (The publisher made at least four times that on the first two editions alone.)
Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Romans 12:9-15; Luke 1:46-55
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
giving goodness to those who seek His ways,
for He has mercy upon all nations
from generation to generation.
From Mary the Sun of justice has dawned:
He has showered His Mother with graces,
filling us with spiritual praises,
on this her feast of exaltation.
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
and blessed is His Mother for all ages,
fountain of blessings, holy treasure-ship,
pure Mother of God and leaven of life,
sanctified censer and fragrant rose,
vessel of the forgiving ember,
shining temple of the Holy Spirit,
bridal chamber of the heavenly King.
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
so that You, O Mary, may pray for us:
beseech the Lord who has appeared from you
for pardon for sins, peace for our churches,
contemplation for our monasteries,
strength for the aged and wisdom for the young,
good education for all our children,
O fair Mother of the salvific Word.
Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.
Summary: Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello are four young friends enjoying the artistic life of Rome. Miriam and Hilda are painters; Miriam does original pieces while Hilda paints copies of the great works of Rome. Kenyon is a sculptor in charge of a workshop. And Donatello is an Italian, the Count of Monte Beni; the book opens with the other three noting the remarkable resemblance of Donatello to the Faun of Praxiteles, and teasing him about whether he has a faun's ears under his curls:
Of the four, Kenyon is attracted to Hilda and Donatello to Miriam. In both cases, however, there is some distance -- Hilda is wholly devoted to her virginal life of art, studying the Great Masters, and Miriam, with her carefully hidden past, is reserved and fends off attentions with biting wit and sarcasm. But Miriam has some unknown connection with a stranger who shadows her and whose image haunts her painting, and the lives of the four friends will change fatefully when Donatello, jealous and protective, throws the man off a cliff to his death. The guilt of Donatello, and of Miriam who may have incited the deed with a glance, will hang heavily over them from this point.
Besides the Marble Faun itself, a work that repeatedly shows up in the story is this one, which Hilda has recently copied:
In Hawthorne's time it would have been known as The Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni, and it was one of the most famous paintings in the world, a continual fascination to artists of the Romantic movement. Beatrice Cenci was raped by her father, and with her mother and brothers plotted to assassinate him. They tried to poison him, but when this failed, they bludgeoned him to death and threw him off the balcony in the hope that it would look like an accident. The plot was uncovered, however, and Beatrice Cenci was executed at the age of 22. According to the legend, the portrait was painted the day before her execution. The tale became (and still to some extent is) famous, and the calm, ambiguous, possibly innocent expression of a figure who was both victim of awful crime and perpetrator of violent murder played a significant role in the painting's fame, and Hawthorne in his Italian notebooks reflected on the hard-to-define fascination of the work, wondering if it would exert the same fascination on someone who did not know the story behind it. (A worthwhile question, given that now it is widely thought that the painting is neither by Guido Reni nor of Beatrice Cenci.) The entire story of The Marble Faun is a layering of ambiguities in the same way. Miriam is an ambiguous figure much as Beatrice was -- in some sense murderess yet in some sense innocent. And yet it is Hilda who was fascinated by the painting and was able to copy it with faithfulness.
The symbolic complexity of this work is extraordinary. The tale is told as a reenactment of the Fall of Man, with the four friends in the garden of innocent youth are cast out by complicity in a terrible crime. Each of the four friends expresses most fully one of the elements of human personality. Donatello is continually associated with passion, the natural participation in the world. Miriam, on the other hand, expresses imagination, continually haunted by other possibilities. Miriam and Donatello, of course, have the most serious involvement in the actual crime, but there is an odd innocence to them both even in the commission -- Donatello is too natural and primal and passionate a creature fully to understand what he has done, and Miriam's role was inciting the murder with a transient pleading glance to Donatello, a very detached way of causing a human death. And although Donatello and Miriam are both directly involved, Hilda, too, is caught up by it, for she witnesses the act. Nor is this a mere witnessing. Hilda expresses sympathetic aspiration; it is her intense sympathy with what she sees that makes it possible for her to accomplish her ingenious copies. And she sees the murder as if it were a painting, through the frame of a doorway; it is not something merely seen, it is something that enters her, disrupting her entirely. The imagination, by a glance, incites the passions to do wrong, and moral sentiment, witnessing, is tangled up in the deed: it could almost be an allegory for how sin is really committed. Kenyon might seem to escape the doom, since he only becomes aware of the cause of the darkness cast over the friendship relatively late, and is the least disrupted by it, but I think even this is not quite so. Kenyon as a sculptor deals with the embodiment of ideas in unchanging marble; he spends almost the entire work turning works of art into allegories. Dealing with eternal verities, it is not surprising that Kenyon in his intellectuality shows the least obvious signs of disruption, but there are signs that even he is not free of it. When he suggests to Hilda that perhaps the sin was allowed by Providence for good, she reacts with horror at the thought. I'm not convinced that we should take this as solely telling us about Hilda herself, with her high moral sympathies. Rather, this is exactly how intellect is shadowed by wrongdoing: it writes it down as felix culpa in some abstract scheme of things. This makes sense in its own terms, but Hilda is right that there is in it a lack of any sense of the awfulness of evil. Donatello and Hilda, passion and moral sympathy, directly participate in the world (and notably have symbolic links in several ways, with, for instance Donatello living in a Tower with owls and Hilda in a Tower with doves; Miriam and Kenyon, imagination and intellect, are distanced from it, with Miriam haunted by a past that shows up perpetually in her imaginings and by dark possibilities of what could be, and Kenyon constantly placing things in a framework of ideas. In innocence, they work together; but in wrongdoing they are split apart, trying to navigate the shadows in their own, very limited terms. And their responses to it are different, as well; Donatello and Miriam are haunted by guilt of involvement, each in their own way, while Kenyon and Hilda struggle to deal with the very fact of the wrongdoing itself.
Or one could see the four as each expressing some aspect of art, and this is not necessarily exclusive of the first interpretation. In Donatello, we see the primal impulse of art, participation in the world around us; in Miriam with her reserve and distance from the world around her, the imagination of other possibilities; in Hilda, moral sympathy; in Kenyon with his allegories, intellectual ideation. All art expresses all four, albeit in different mixes. But artistic endeavor also exists in a fallen world; the complicity of art in sin, and the sorrow with which one must struggle as a result, throws everything off balance. But, of course, our response to art works much the same way, and this allegorization, while certainly drawing out things in the work that are there, is also an over-Kenyonized reading on its own. One may also participate in the Romance of the tale, which is about four friends rather than abstract concepts, or be intrigued in imagination with the ambiguities of it, or sympathize with its moral ideals and guilts, and in some Eden of reading we would do all four, and all four well; but we, alas, poor fallen readers, have tilting structures that almost guarantee that some of the richness of the work will elude our reading.
When the work was first published, readers protested the ambiguities of the ending, and so, reluctantly, Hawthorne put in an epilogue giving further information about what happened. I think his first instinct was in fact correct: the additional information, about what happened to Hilda when she disappeared, or what happened to Donatello, weakens the tale considerably. It makes an object of description what should be an object of allusion, and reduces the complexity of the work. Hawthorne's early readers had difficulty with the ambivalent character of the work itself -- it is finely balanced so that it can be read either as a realistic tale in romantic, fantastic Italy, or a fantastic tale set in real-world Italy, and rather than maintain a consistent style, it gives us now a painted scene, now a sculptured composition, now an allusion to other works, now a travelogue, now a psychological tale, now an allegory, thus increasing both the realism and the romanticism of the tale. The balance throughout the work is beautifully done; only the epilogue unbalances it, despite Hawthorne's attempt to preserve some ambiguity still.
But even with the epilogue, we never learn the answer to the key question: Is Donatello faun or man?
Favorite Passage:
A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.
(Because it's the end of term, I'm a bit delayed in getting the Fortnightly Book post done, and it turned out to be easier just to switch it with this one, which would usually be scheduled for tomorrow morning.)
Fourteenth Sunday of Pentecost 1 Thessalonians 2:1-13; Luke 10:38-42
On Crucifixion-day, the sword pierced Your side;
You were crowned with thorns and darkness crowned the earth;
Your disciples were scattered and fled in fear.
Today baptism pours forth in grace from Your side;
You crown the Church with Your immortality;
You gather Your disciples and give them hope;
You make the world radiant by resurrection.
Today is a day of victory and joy;
our Savior has sealed us with His endless light;
reward comes to the honest lovers of God.
O Craftsman of life, You have made our lives whole,
renewing our minds, long marred by corruption,
inviting us into Your kingdom's glory:
You make the world radiant by resurrection.
August, I welcome thee and all thy hours,
The sun-burnt hours, that dance about thy car,
Thy genial breezes, and refreshing showers,
Thy morning pageantry, and evening star.
Bright are thy smiles, and blithe thy votaries are,
For thou dost bring them harvests, fruits, and flowers,
Enlivening gifts, and more enlivening far,
The laughing vine to glad their clustering bowers.
Yet, August, though these various gifts be dear,
'Tis not for these I time my thankful strain;
No; but for Phyllis! (fye, why drops this tear?)
Whom thou hast sent o'er my fond heart to reign;
Oh! may she live to pleasure many a year,
Although she live to give her minstrel pain.
The phrase 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' is a fairly widespread one, but its history is very difficult to trace. You can find the principle being used here and there in reasoning, of course, but the actual phrase doesn't seem to pop up before the 1990s -- and its popularity is almost certainly due to Carl Sagan (although he got it from Martin Rees). From him it spread quickly, and it tends to come up quite often in certain fields. It's fairly easy to find in geology, medicine, and criminology, in particular. Discussion for and against also shows up a lot in apologetical circles, whether the apologetics is of Christians or of skeptics out to convince the masses -- I'm fairly sure that this is just because both of these groups have read a lot of Carl Sagan.
Both groups are mixed, but the Christians tend generally to be for it and the skeptics against it, if you're interested. Reading some of the skeptical discussions makes for hilarity, at times, because they are so often vehemently committed to the phrase encapsulating a fallacy, often calling it the fallacy of appeal to ignorance, or the argument from ignorance, because they associate it with UFOers, that they cannot believe that he endorses it, even though anyone with basic reading skills can see that he does.
A distinction is sometimes made between 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' and 'Absence of proof is not proof of absence'. This is a post-Sagan distinction (Sagan uses 'evidence' and 'proof' interchangeably when the phrase comes up), and has come about very certainly because of the spread of accounts of evidence based on interpretations of probability theory (rather than on practices of inquiry), which as generally proposed require that absence of evidence be evidence of absence. And in fact the distinction doesn't salvage anything unless one has a very specific kind of account of proof in mind; in a lot of areas what is called 'proof' just is clear preponderance of evidence, and (on the other side) it's not actually difficult to find or rig situations in which an absence of proof would indeed be a proof of absence.
There's little serious philosophical examination of the maxim, although one can find some. Elliott Sober has argued (in "Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning and firing squads") that while the Absence Maxim can be true if it just means that not looking for evidence is not evidence of evidence, it is not strictly true in general, although it is often close to true: in such cases the maxim should in strictness be 'Absence of evidence often only very weakly provides evidence of absence', but we often treat very weak evidence as if it were nonevidence. (Contrary to Michael Strevens's response (PDF), I don't think it is quite accurate to treat this as conveying "an underlying meaning that contradicts its apparent meaning". Sober is certainly right that we often treat making a very small difference as making no difference; and it is undeniable, I think, that most of the time when people say, "There is no evidence for p," what they mean is, "Any evidence for p is so weak as to be negligible." On Sober's account, we could add 'for practical purposes' to the Absence Maxim and get something at least in the neighborhood of right; and this seems very different from an actual contradiction.)
Let's call 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' the Absence Maxim to simplify things. There are a number of distinct but related issues tangled up with the Absence Maxim that have never really been untangled; I don't hope to do so here, but it might be worthwhile to point out a few things that do seem constantly to arise.
(1) The first and most obvious thing is that the Absence Maxim gets its plausibility from the way it is structured. To be absent is simply to be not present, presence has to be presence of something, and evidence is always evidence for soemthing, so we could rephrase it as 'Evidence-for-X is not present' is not 'There is evidence for X-is-not-present'. If one were to deny this, there would be obvious questions, since the kind of shifting around of operators and scope that this involves usually suggests an equivocation. One would at least need a principled reason for denying the Maxim that shows that you aren't just trading on ambiguity. One obvious worry is how you get the existence of something (evidence for X-is-not-present) entirely from the nonexistence of something else (evidence for X). Where does the existential operator pop out from?
This, I take it is related to the issue raised in the following video by Ian Goddard, which argues that it is important to make a distinction between absence of evidence and negative evidence:
There is little doubt that you can have logical systems in which denial of the Absence Maxim is required under some interpretation (Bayesian interpretations of probability theory are common examples); but, as one can make all sorts of formal systems with all sorts of arbitrary assumptions, and interpret them all sorts of different ways, this does not get us very far on its own. The point is that any formal representation of a denial of the Absence Maxim raises questions that would require principled answers, and that these answers are not necessarily immediately obvious. And they will not fall out of the formalism itself at all.
(2) We do clearly recognize cases where absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence -- call these negation-as-failure cases. If I thoroughly search my room for a dog and discover no evidence at all that there is a dog, then that is indeed evidence that there is no dog in my room.
One of the things that characterizes obvious negation-as-failure cases is that they are cases in which either (A) we can reasonably guarantee that our search has been exhaustive (the closed world assumption), or (B) we can reasonably conclude that further search is increasingly unlikely to turn up anything fundamentally different from what we have already discovered, so that we can discount as unpromising whatever we have not yet searched (which is a practical closed world assumption). There are many cases, however, in which we cannot guarantee any kind of closed world assumption -- for instance, if I have been searching for a dog in the city for two minutes and have not yet found it, this search was neither exhaustive nor reasonably extensive, and most people, I imagine, would regard someone as an idiot if they concluded from such a cursory search that there was no dog in the city. And as with cursory searches, so with searches that are incomplete for other reasons than merely trying.
We are sometimes in situations in which we already know that our bank of available evidence is missing a lot. Indeed, we are often in these situations -- they are the norm in most historical contexts. We already know that our fossil record does not record everything; it also does not provide a representative sample, because it only gives us things that were in fact in situations in which they, in particular, could be fossilized. Happily, there is more than one way a thing can be fossilized, but each way has its own specific conditions, and if they are not met, we don't get the fossil. Let's suppose that our fossil record is indeed very, very patchy. One way to interpret this kind of situation is to say that the fossil record, considered on its own, only provides us any evidence at all about organisms actually showing up in it, because we already know that the field of organisms and organism-types that won't show up can be massive in comparison to the field of those that do. Unless you were independently trying to fit evidence to a principle like Bayes' Theorem, there doesn't seem to be any specific reason to take an organism's not showing up in the record as evidence that it didn't exist -- most organisms that existed don't, so there's nothing about the fossil record itself that requires that you take things it doesn't show not to exist. In general this will be the case with patchy evidence; by the very fact of its being patchy, there's nothing about the collection of evidence itself that licenses taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The license would have to come from elsewhere.
This perhaps is connected with Sagan's own diagnosis of the problem to which the Absence Maxim is proposed as a solution -- what Sagan calls 'impatience with ambiguity'. 'Ambiguity' is a term Sagan elsewhere uses to describe the situation of not having an answer to a question. Sagan does not, as far as I am aware, explain his use of the word 'impatience' in this precise context, and Sagan is usually quite sloppy when it comes to supporting his claims about critical thinking, but I think one can argue that the term is genuinely appropriate in this context: in cases of cursory search, it is absurd to hold that not having a clear preponderance of evidence for one side is a reason to conclude it false, because you should exercise the patience required to make your investigation reasonably thorough before drawing such a conclusion rather than hurrying to draw a conclusion. There will be times in many kinds of investigation in which it will be unclear or debatable what the evidence actually shows; this is not on its own a good reason to cut short the investigation. Thus the Absence Maxim could perhaps be regarded, and sometimes seems to be used, as a non-stopping rule for inquiry -- we should not stop inquiry (even temporarily) on nothing more than the ground that we have found no evidence yet. This raises the question of how to assess the thoroughness of an inquiry. It also raises the question of the exact relation between evidence and warrant to draw a conclusion.
(3) In general, if one models inquiry as a search, it would seem to make very little sense to deny the Absence Maxim for search in general; one has to justify a negation-as-failure rule, by establishing that one's search would have picked up the evidence for something if it were there. Thus, someone who claimed that there was no extraterrestrial life because they didn't see any evidence of it when they glanced at the sky has not done the kind of search appropriate to the conclusion they are drawing. And this seems to hold even if we say that glancing at the sky would be at least a minor part of a genuinely appropriate search.
Searches are organized for different ends and can be very different in character; you cannot assume that every search is a negation-as-failure kind of search. Thus if one models inquiry as a search, there seems some reason to take the Absence Maxim to be true as a default -- one has to set up a search of the right sort to get a case in which one can conclude No X from No Evidence of X. (And note that if you relativize Bayesianism to a given kind of inquiry -- so your probability measures are always only relative to a given inquiry -- then this at least qualifies any rejection of the Absence Maxim on Bayesian grounds.) In general, if one treats the nature of the inquiry in which the evidence is being used as important to the evaluation of evidence, this seems to favor something like the Absence Maxim.
I think there does seem to be a divide in approaches to evidence, one that has not been adequately examined -- namely, between inquiry-focused and general-measure-focused accounts of evidence. There is a lot of variation within the two approaches, but the former tends to see evidence as something constructed or formed in light of an inquiry that is limited by particular ends, tends to be favorable to the idea that what counts as evidence in one field of inquiry may not always do so in another, and tends to be pluralist about how evidence supports claims (i.e., it tends not to assume that all evidential support is of the same kind), whereas the the latter tends to reject all of these things. These differences can obviously lead to some significant oppositions in how evidence is evaluated.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God
Stephen Blackwood, The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
2. What book did you just finish?
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Volume I
I have also been reading over the past three weeks The History of Middle-Earth, which is Christopher Tolkien's study of the drafting stages of his father's works; I have finished up to Volume 10, and so have just two more volumes to go.
3. What do you plan to read next?
I don't know about next, but I'll be doing some plays by Ibsen and re-reading George Eliot's Romola at some point in the next few months. I'll be finishing Bulgakov's and Staniloae's series at some point, but that's probably a longer-term project.
I also keep meaning to get to Half Price Books, so that will doubtless turn up a few.
4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?
The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night; I am done with two out of three volumes, 2650 pages, and just need find a time to power through the last 1300 or so pages.
5. What book do you keep meaning to start?
Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys
6. What is your current reading trend?
I read too many books to be keeping track of reading trends.
