Her Voice
by Oscar Wilde
The wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily-cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,--
It shall be, I said, for eternity
'Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done,
Love's web is spun.
Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.
Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,--
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.
And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,--you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you.
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
One World Was Not Enough for Two
Tuesday, July 09, 2019
On Academic Titles Again
There has been yet another flare-up in various social media quarters about academic titles. There's not really any point in summarizing the details, because it's always the same moronic issue. But I will simply restate what should be obvious to any decent human being, but apparently has not registered with some of the prima donnas who have come out of graduate school:
Having earned an academic title does not give you the right to demand that other people refer to you by that title; it gives you the right to refer to yourself by that title.
For everyone else, referring to you by any title at all is entirely a matter of their choosing to extend the courtesy to you, on the basis that you have done, or could be expected to do, good to them. If it really matters to you -- and it sometimes can, for legitimate reasons, such as if you worked your way up from a one-room shack -- just ask them and tell them why it matters to you, and people usually will. Anything else is (1) rude and self-important jackassery and (2) self-sabotaging, because it makes you look desperate for recognition.
I have previously talked about academic titles in:
Evening Note for Saturday, April 6 (on norms of etiquette), which focuses on the courtesy aspect;
The Authority of a Title, which focuses on the self-sabotaging aspect.
Having earned an academic title does not give you the right to demand that other people refer to you by that title; it gives you the right to refer to yourself by that title.
For everyone else, referring to you by any title at all is entirely a matter of their choosing to extend the courtesy to you, on the basis that you have done, or could be expected to do, good to them. If it really matters to you -- and it sometimes can, for legitimate reasons, such as if you worked your way up from a one-room shack -- just ask them and tell them why it matters to you, and people usually will. Anything else is (1) rude and self-important jackassery and (2) self-sabotaging, because it makes you look desperate for recognition.
I have previously talked about academic titles in:
Evening Note for Saturday, April 6 (on norms of etiquette), which focuses on the courtesy aspect;
The Authority of a Title, which focuses on the self-sabotaging aspect.
Not Profit, No: Nor Pleasure
To R. R.
On Rereading the "De Profundis" of Oscar Wilde
by Florence Earle Coates
He stood alone, despairing and forsaken:
Alone he stood, in desolation bare;
From him avenging powers e'en hope had taken:
He looked,—and thou wast there!
Why hadst thou come? Not profit, no: nor pleasure,
Nor any faint desire of selfish gain,
Had moved thee, giving of thy heart's pure treasure,
To share a culprit's pain.
In that drear place, as thou hadst lonely waited
To greet with noble friendship one who came
Handcuffed from prison, pointed at, and hated,
Bowed low in mortal shame,
No thought hadst thou of any special merit,
So simple, natural, seemed that action fine
Which kept alive, in a despairing spirit,
The spark of the divine,
And taught a dying soul that love is deathless,
Even as when its holiest accents fell
Upon a woman's heart who listened, breathless,
By a Samarian well.
Monday, July 08, 2019
Turn Poison into Medicine
There's a line of thought that's often called 'aesthetic theodicy'; it's usually associated with St. Augustine, although he is far from the only person to use the idea, and although he doesn't actually treat it as anything stand-alone. But we get something of the idea from the Confessions (Book VII, Chapter XIII), but perhaps most clearly in The City of God (Book XI, Chapter XVIII):
We find a similar idea in Berkeley's Principles (sect. 152), using painting rather than poetry as the analogue. Today music is probably the most common analogue used. For most of the past sixty years, if you would find a book or article that would discuss it, you would usually find it disparaged, due in part to John Hick's discussion in Evil and the God of Love. (Philip Tallon's The Poetics of Evil seems to be the primary exception.) But rejecting it outright requires drawing a much sharper line between the aesthetic and the ethical than can usually be maintained, and the actual concepts involved, like overall harmony (pankalia), are definitely not solely aesthetic, anyway. Further, we ourselves regularly use broadly the same sort of 'aesthetic criteria' in order to decide how we will handle bad things, what we will tolerate, what we will support, what we will actively punish, and what we will merely discourage. In addition, while it's generally not restricted to such, it's almost always primarily deployed in discussing what has usually been called 'natural evil'; other concerns always take the forefront when talking about moral evil in particular.
In any case, this post is not so much about that; I was just reminded of it by the following fascinating clip from an interview with Herbie Hancock, discussing a time when he hit the wrong notes while playing with Miles Davis:
For God would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing, the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses. For what are called antitheses are among the most elegant of the ornaments of speech. They might be called in Latin "oppositions," or, to speak more accurately, "contrapositions;" but this word is not in common use among us, though the Latin, and indeed the languages of all nations, avail themselves of the same ornaments of style.... As, then, these oppositions of contraries lend beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things. This is quite plainly stated in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, in this way: "Good is set against evil, and life against death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look upon all the works of the Most High, and these are two and two, one against another."
We find a similar idea in Berkeley's Principles (sect. 152), using painting rather than poetry as the analogue. Today music is probably the most common analogue used. For most of the past sixty years, if you would find a book or article that would discuss it, you would usually find it disparaged, due in part to John Hick's discussion in Evil and the God of Love. (Philip Tallon's The Poetics of Evil seems to be the primary exception.) But rejecting it outright requires drawing a much sharper line between the aesthetic and the ethical than can usually be maintained, and the actual concepts involved, like overall harmony (pankalia), are definitely not solely aesthetic, anyway. Further, we ourselves regularly use broadly the same sort of 'aesthetic criteria' in order to decide how we will handle bad things, what we will tolerate, what we will support, what we will actively punish, and what we will merely discourage. In addition, while it's generally not restricted to such, it's almost always primarily deployed in discussing what has usually been called 'natural evil'; other concerns always take the forefront when talking about moral evil in particular.
In any case, this post is not so much about that; I was just reminded of it by the following fascinating clip from an interview with Herbie Hancock, discussing a time when he hit the wrong notes while playing with Miles Davis:
Sunday, July 07, 2019
Real and Unreal
There is a recurring pattern of possible positions considered with the range of possible accounts you could give of something's apparent existence. You could, first of all, take it to exist really, or not to exist really. If you take it to exist really, positions seem naturally to break into two groups: it really exists as a natural thing or as an artificial thing. Positions on natural real existence tend to break into two groups: either it really exists in its own right (like a body), or it really exists because it shares existence with something else (like the color of a body). If it's artificial, it could exist due to individual artifice (like a chair) or due to social convention (like a language). On the other side, if it does not have real existence, its apparent existence could be either by fiction or by illusion. If it is fictional, it is put forward as if real, despite not being so; it could either be a theoretical posit that sums up or approximates things that really exist (like a center of gravity), or it could be something put forward for some other purpose as if it were real (like a character in a story). If it is illusion, the illusion could either be defeasible (like a stump mistaken for a dog) or indefeasible (like a hallucination or an optical illusion); 'defeasible' and 'indefeasible' here mean the illusion itself. A hallucination is an indefeasible illusion in this sense, but of course one can know that it is an illusion; indeed, that's a sign that it might be indefeasible, it's consistently still as if there even if you have good reason to think it's not really so. We can roughly see these as going from 'most real' to 'least real', with the border between reality and unreality fuzzily lying somewhere between artificial and fictional:
natural
in itself (strong)
in another (weak)
artificial
due to artifice
due to convention
fictional
loosely connected to what is real
purely a matter of story or imagination
illusory
defeasible
indefeasible
For anything that seems to exist, you can divide up possible positions to the an sit roughly according to this taxonomy, although, of course, depending on the evidence and the like available, some will be more or less plausible. We can call the first 'naturalism', the second 'constructionism', the third 'fictionalism', and the fourth 'illusionism'. So a few examples, gone through roughly and loosely just to make the point and sketch out better what these options mean in practice. Let's start with an obvious one.
A. Santa Claus. Little kids are strong naturalists about Santa Claus; Santa Claus exists like you or me, in his own right. A 'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus' position is an alliance-building position -- it is deliberately ambiguous between weak naturalism and constructionism: Santa Claus exists, but not in his own right; he exists in our hearts or as part of our social good-will. The ambiguity makes it possible for weak naturalists and constructionists to conspire to keep the little kids strong naturalists. Fictionalists treat Santa as a fictional character, useful for a certain purpose, but that is all -- it's only sometimes as if there were a Santa; illusionists are the obnoxious kid insisting that Santa is not real, he's just a made-up deception by your parents.
B. The Self. Most people in the West are strong naturalists, taking their selves to exist in their own right as subsisting substances. If you hold that your self exists, but is only part of a greater thing, like a world-soul or God, you are a weak naturalist about the self. Constructionists take the self to be something we make as we go along; it is not a substance but something made by bundling things together (which can be done either on the fly, a la Hume, or by society). Fictionalists hold that there is no self, either natural or artificial, but it's handy to act as if there were one for certain practical purposes, just like it's handy to treat a center of gravity as if it were a real thing. Illusionists hold there is no self, of course, it's a provably bad or incoherent idea; they either think we can overcome this (eliminativists) or that we're stuck with this appearance of having a self we know we can't have (error theorists).
C. The External World. Most people take the external world, as we experience it, to exist naturally in its own right; idealists are weak naturalists, holding that it really exists in nature, but only in minds and perhaps ultimately the mind of God. Some people, like logical empiricists, have argued that it is constructed by the mind out of sensations. That's only a step or two away from fictionalism, which holds that there is no external world, we're making it up, but not arbitrarily. And illusionists, of course, hold that there is no external world at all, it's just an illusion, not even a useful fiction; as it would be difficult to hold such a position without being a solipsist, it is not a popular view.
D. Other Minds. Other minds is a sort of complement to positions about the self; most of us are strong naturalists about other minds, but you can find people here and there who think that other minds only exist in something else, as parts of a world-soul or something. Anything weaker than that starts looking like a kind of solipsism, although you might not even be a solipsist if you think all minds are illusions -- it's hard to make sense of the notion of an illusion when there are no minds for whom there can be illusory appearances, so it's not a common view.
E. Abstract Objects. Strong naturalism about abstract objects is usually called platonism, and sometimes, more tendentiously, exaggerated realism; weak naturalism about abstract objects is usually called aristotelianism or moderate realism. Conceptualists about abstract objects are constructionists. Illusionists about abstract objects are sometimes called concretists or particularists; they hold that only concrete, non-abstract things exist.
F. Funniness. There are lots of moral and aesthetic notions that will tend to conform fairly closely to the patterns for abstract objects. I know of no strong naturalists for funniness -- nobody who believes that there is a real thing, the Funny, that exists in its own right -- but a surprising number of people are 'comic realists' and think that real natural things can be really and naturally funny in themselves. Most people, however, are probably social constructionists about funniness; things are really funny, but only insofar as they are made so within a social framework. Denying that anything is really funny at all is a hard sell. I know of no fictionalists about funniness, who hold that nothing is funny but it's convenient to act as if some things were, nor of any illusionists about funniness, who hold that, despite appearances, nothing is funny, period, but in this world I would not rule out people that humorless.
G. The State. Strong naturalism about the state is not popular position, but Hegel, for instance, sometimes talks as if it's true. If you hold that the state is a sort of natural outgrowth of people getting together in certain ways, you are a weak naturalist about the state. Social contract theorists are the preeminent examples of social constructionists about the state. I don't know of anyone who is an illusionist about the state, but perhaps there are anarchists somewhere who have such a view.
H. The Resurrection of Christ. By its nature it would have to be 'in' Christ, i.e., something He does or endures, so there isn't much room for a strong naturalism. Christian orthodoxy is weak naturalist about Christ's Resurrection: Christ's Resurrection is something that really happened to Christ. Modernism about the Resurrection is the heresy that is either constructionist or fictionalist about it: the constructionist holds that Christ really rose, but in the Church community, and the ficitonalist holds that Christ did not really rise, but it is a powerful and valuable story we tell. Illusionists, of course, deny it altogether.
I. God. People we call 'theists' are generally strong naturalists, and this is the most common position on the subject. People who try to treat God as a sort of aspect of the universe or ourselves are weak naturalists. Everyone else usually gets called an atheist. Although we usually are thinking of illusionists when we talk about atheism, I find in practice that there are a surprising number of both constructionists and fictionalists about God. They tend to be hard to pick out; they will often say exactly the same things about God, but just mean it figuratively, and I suspect you can find at least one or two of each in almost every church in the world, and I would guess that there are probably more of both than there are of illusionists. Most people that we think of as atheists obviously take God to be a defeasible illusion -- you may think that it looks like there's a God, but that's because you aren't looking at it the right way. The other kind of illusionism, the position that all indications of God are illusory but are an inevitable illusion was once not common at all; but it seems to be getting more traction -- the usual view is that God definitely does not exist, but we are hardwired to think socially, so our interaction with the world is social, and thus even the most rigorous atheist will naturally sometimes respond to the world as if it were a Person or had a Person behind it.
J. Atheism. Since atheism, as a position, is something attributed to persons, there is no strong naturalism associated with it (the idea that Atheism is a really existing being would be a weird position); some (we have to say 'purported') atheists try to argue that we should be weak naturalists about atheism, that atheism is a real natural position, but most people in fact are constructionists about atheism, for the same reasons that they are constructionists about most philosophical positions on most things: you can really be an atheist, but you make yourself one -- or are made one by society. A remarkable number of theists, however, are fictionalists about atheism -- they deny that anyone is really an atheist, it's just sometimes convenient to treat them as if they were. Illusionists about atheism are rare, but you do find here and there someone who speaks as if they were one: there is no atheism at all in the world, and (perhaps) we should stop coddling 'atheists' who are treating themselves as atheists, in the same way we tend not to coddle people who think they are Napoleon.
All of these, of course, are only examples, roughly and not precisely sketched, and a few of them, of course, are simply to make the point that you can apply the template quite widely. There are a great many things that tend to have a default position associated with them, a 'common sense view' as we would usually say. Almost everyone is fictionalist about Superman; almost everyone is constructionist about DC Comics; almost everyone is naturalist about comic books. People are overwhelmingly naturalists about landmasses, constructionists about national borders, and fictionalists about the equator. You do get cultural differences; people in Iceland are much more likely to be naturalists about elves than people outside Iceland, and people outside Iceland are much more likely to be illusionists about elves than people inside Iceland. 'Common sense view' should not be confused with 'respectable view'; sometimes it's treated as the vulgar or uneducated view, and even when it's not, there might be perfectly respectable views other than the common sense one (as you find if you are ever in a crowd of philosophers, for whom there is a always a wider range of respectable views than just the common sense view). There are probably also things about which there is no 'common sense view'; people just can't agree about what they are.
And you do get ambiguities; I think most people in practice waver a lot on things like ghosts or clairvoyant dreams, for instance, and it's only very die-hard folks who stay within the lines. The line between constructionism (X is a really existing, but artificial, thing) and fictionalism (X does not really exist, but is artificially treated as if it did) is sometimes subtle, and I think people are often not precise about which of the two they actually hold. Even philosophers get confused on that line; 'legal fiction' was a phrase coined to indicate things that were real but constructed by law ('fiction' originally indicating 'made' rather than 'false'), but most philosophers of law have tended to be fictionalists about legal fictions because of the name, leading to some really complicated theories due to the fact that in law some of them are, in fact, usually treated as if they were real artificial things and not as if they were unreal fictional things, and yet some things that are clearly fictional (like the posit of the 'reasonable person', which is just a fictional summary of reasonable people in general) have also come to be counted as legal fictions.
natural
in itself (strong)
in another (weak)
artificial
due to artifice
due to convention
fictional
loosely connected to what is real
purely a matter of story or imagination
illusory
defeasible
indefeasible
For anything that seems to exist, you can divide up possible positions to the an sit roughly according to this taxonomy, although, of course, depending on the evidence and the like available, some will be more or less plausible. We can call the first 'naturalism', the second 'constructionism', the third 'fictionalism', and the fourth 'illusionism'. So a few examples, gone through roughly and loosely just to make the point and sketch out better what these options mean in practice. Let's start with an obvious one.
A. Santa Claus. Little kids are strong naturalists about Santa Claus; Santa Claus exists like you or me, in his own right. A 'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus' position is an alliance-building position -- it is deliberately ambiguous between weak naturalism and constructionism: Santa Claus exists, but not in his own right; he exists in our hearts or as part of our social good-will. The ambiguity makes it possible for weak naturalists and constructionists to conspire to keep the little kids strong naturalists. Fictionalists treat Santa as a fictional character, useful for a certain purpose, but that is all -- it's only sometimes as if there were a Santa; illusionists are the obnoxious kid insisting that Santa is not real, he's just a made-up deception by your parents.
B. The Self. Most people in the West are strong naturalists, taking their selves to exist in their own right as subsisting substances. If you hold that your self exists, but is only part of a greater thing, like a world-soul or God, you are a weak naturalist about the self. Constructionists take the self to be something we make as we go along; it is not a substance but something made by bundling things together (which can be done either on the fly, a la Hume, or by society). Fictionalists hold that there is no self, either natural or artificial, but it's handy to act as if there were one for certain practical purposes, just like it's handy to treat a center of gravity as if it were a real thing. Illusionists hold there is no self, of course, it's a provably bad or incoherent idea; they either think we can overcome this (eliminativists) or that we're stuck with this appearance of having a self we know we can't have (error theorists).
C. The External World. Most people take the external world, as we experience it, to exist naturally in its own right; idealists are weak naturalists, holding that it really exists in nature, but only in minds and perhaps ultimately the mind of God. Some people, like logical empiricists, have argued that it is constructed by the mind out of sensations. That's only a step or two away from fictionalism, which holds that there is no external world, we're making it up, but not arbitrarily. And illusionists, of course, hold that there is no external world at all, it's just an illusion, not even a useful fiction; as it would be difficult to hold such a position without being a solipsist, it is not a popular view.
D. Other Minds. Other minds is a sort of complement to positions about the self; most of us are strong naturalists about other minds, but you can find people here and there who think that other minds only exist in something else, as parts of a world-soul or something. Anything weaker than that starts looking like a kind of solipsism, although you might not even be a solipsist if you think all minds are illusions -- it's hard to make sense of the notion of an illusion when there are no minds for whom there can be illusory appearances, so it's not a common view.
E. Abstract Objects. Strong naturalism about abstract objects is usually called platonism, and sometimes, more tendentiously, exaggerated realism; weak naturalism about abstract objects is usually called aristotelianism or moderate realism. Conceptualists about abstract objects are constructionists. Illusionists about abstract objects are sometimes called concretists or particularists; they hold that only concrete, non-abstract things exist.
F. Funniness. There are lots of moral and aesthetic notions that will tend to conform fairly closely to the patterns for abstract objects. I know of no strong naturalists for funniness -- nobody who believes that there is a real thing, the Funny, that exists in its own right -- but a surprising number of people are 'comic realists' and think that real natural things can be really and naturally funny in themselves. Most people, however, are probably social constructionists about funniness; things are really funny, but only insofar as they are made so within a social framework. Denying that anything is really funny at all is a hard sell. I know of no fictionalists about funniness, who hold that nothing is funny but it's convenient to act as if some things were, nor of any illusionists about funniness, who hold that, despite appearances, nothing is funny, period, but in this world I would not rule out people that humorless.
G. The State. Strong naturalism about the state is not popular position, but Hegel, for instance, sometimes talks as if it's true. If you hold that the state is a sort of natural outgrowth of people getting together in certain ways, you are a weak naturalist about the state. Social contract theorists are the preeminent examples of social constructionists about the state. I don't know of anyone who is an illusionist about the state, but perhaps there are anarchists somewhere who have such a view.
H. The Resurrection of Christ. By its nature it would have to be 'in' Christ, i.e., something He does or endures, so there isn't much room for a strong naturalism. Christian orthodoxy is weak naturalist about Christ's Resurrection: Christ's Resurrection is something that really happened to Christ. Modernism about the Resurrection is the heresy that is either constructionist or fictionalist about it: the constructionist holds that Christ really rose, but in the Church community, and the ficitonalist holds that Christ did not really rise, but it is a powerful and valuable story we tell. Illusionists, of course, deny it altogether.
I. God. People we call 'theists' are generally strong naturalists, and this is the most common position on the subject. People who try to treat God as a sort of aspect of the universe or ourselves are weak naturalists. Everyone else usually gets called an atheist. Although we usually are thinking of illusionists when we talk about atheism, I find in practice that there are a surprising number of both constructionists and fictionalists about God. They tend to be hard to pick out; they will often say exactly the same things about God, but just mean it figuratively, and I suspect you can find at least one or two of each in almost every church in the world, and I would guess that there are probably more of both than there are of illusionists. Most people that we think of as atheists obviously take God to be a defeasible illusion -- you may think that it looks like there's a God, but that's because you aren't looking at it the right way. The other kind of illusionism, the position that all indications of God are illusory but are an inevitable illusion was once not common at all; but it seems to be getting more traction -- the usual view is that God definitely does not exist, but we are hardwired to think socially, so our interaction with the world is social, and thus even the most rigorous atheist will naturally sometimes respond to the world as if it were a Person or had a Person behind it.
J. Atheism. Since atheism, as a position, is something attributed to persons, there is no strong naturalism associated with it (the idea that Atheism is a really existing being would be a weird position); some (we have to say 'purported') atheists try to argue that we should be weak naturalists about atheism, that atheism is a real natural position, but most people in fact are constructionists about atheism, for the same reasons that they are constructionists about most philosophical positions on most things: you can really be an atheist, but you make yourself one -- or are made one by society. A remarkable number of theists, however, are fictionalists about atheism -- they deny that anyone is really an atheist, it's just sometimes convenient to treat them as if they were. Illusionists about atheism are rare, but you do find here and there someone who speaks as if they were one: there is no atheism at all in the world, and (perhaps) we should stop coddling 'atheists' who are treating themselves as atheists, in the same way we tend not to coddle people who think they are Napoleon.
All of these, of course, are only examples, roughly and not precisely sketched, and a few of them, of course, are simply to make the point that you can apply the template quite widely. There are a great many things that tend to have a default position associated with them, a 'common sense view' as we would usually say. Almost everyone is fictionalist about Superman; almost everyone is constructionist about DC Comics; almost everyone is naturalist about comic books. People are overwhelmingly naturalists about landmasses, constructionists about national borders, and fictionalists about the equator. You do get cultural differences; people in Iceland are much more likely to be naturalists about elves than people outside Iceland, and people outside Iceland are much more likely to be illusionists about elves than people inside Iceland. 'Common sense view' should not be confused with 'respectable view'; sometimes it's treated as the vulgar or uneducated view, and even when it's not, there might be perfectly respectable views other than the common sense one (as you find if you are ever in a crowd of philosophers, for whom there is a always a wider range of respectable views than just the common sense view). There are probably also things about which there is no 'common sense view'; people just can't agree about what they are.
And you do get ambiguities; I think most people in practice waver a lot on things like ghosts or clairvoyant dreams, for instance, and it's only very die-hard folks who stay within the lines. The line between constructionism (X is a really existing, but artificial, thing) and fictionalism (X does not really exist, but is artificially treated as if it did) is sometimes subtle, and I think people are often not precise about which of the two they actually hold. Even philosophers get confused on that line; 'legal fiction' was a phrase coined to indicate things that were real but constructed by law ('fiction' originally indicating 'made' rather than 'false'), but most philosophers of law have tended to be fictionalists about legal fictions because of the name, leading to some really complicated theories due to the fact that in law some of them are, in fact, usually treated as if they were real artificial things and not as if they were unreal fictional things, and yet some things that are clearly fictional (like the posit of the 'reasonable person', which is just a fictional summary of reasonable people in general) have also come to be counted as legal fictions.
Fortnightly Book, July 7
In his early twenties, it looked very much like Oscar Wilde would become known for being a competent, albeit not stunning, poet. At twenty-five, he wrote a play, Vera, or The Nihilists, and as he knew almost nothing about the theater, it is not surprising that it never managed to do well. The Duchess of Padua, his next, didn't do much better, and he had difficulty finding anyone to stage Salome. At this point, he reassessed what he was doing and made a change that would change everything: having struggled at tragedy, he decided to write comedy. Lady Windermere's Fan was a great success -- although the audience didn't like Wilde smoking a cigarette when he came out to address them. A Woman of No Importance, which soon followed in 1893, was also successful -- although Wilde himself was booed when he addressed the audience on opening night due to a tasteless comment about the English (he himself was Irish, of course). An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were staged in early 1895, a significant year for Wilde.
In the meantime, Wilde was carrying on an affair with Alfred Douglas, one of which Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, very much did not approve. The latter publicly insulted Wilde as a "somdomite", and Wilde, despite his cleverness never a good judge of how other people would see things, had Queensberry arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel. Since Queensberry could only defend himself in court by arguing that what he said was something a reasonable person could take to be true on the evidence, this meant that Wilde's entire life was put on display in the courtroom. It became clear that Wilde was not going to win, and he dropped the case (which made him bankrupt because he had to pay Queensberry's legal costs). But all the evidence was now public, so he was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency, and now he had to defend himself. This was easier to do though; the result was hung jury, but new evidence resulted in the prosecutor retrying the case, and Wilde lost. He was sent to two years of hard labor. In 1897, still in prison, he wrote a book-length letter to Douglas, later published as De Profundis. After he was released, he left England, never to return. In 1900 he caught a severe illness and, having spent all of his life straddling the border of Catholicism, was conditionally baptized and received extreme unction. (He may very well have been baptized as a Catholic as a child, and claimed to have a vague memory of it, but didn't know for sure, and he had once arranged a date for baptism and at the last minute sent the priest a bouquet of lilies as an apology for not showing up.)
I happened to pick up a copy of The Plays of Oscar Wilde recently at Half Price Books, and so, as you might expect, the books for this fortnight will be The Plays of Oscar Wilde and De Profundis. My condensed-term summer course starts this week, and reading plays I always find slower than reading novels, so we will see if I actually get through it in a fortnight -- I don't foresee any problems, but I'm also not going to be bothered if it goes over.
In the meantime, Wilde was carrying on an affair with Alfred Douglas, one of which Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, very much did not approve. The latter publicly insulted Wilde as a "somdomite", and Wilde, despite his cleverness never a good judge of how other people would see things, had Queensberry arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel. Since Queensberry could only defend himself in court by arguing that what he said was something a reasonable person could take to be true on the evidence, this meant that Wilde's entire life was put on display in the courtroom. It became clear that Wilde was not going to win, and he dropped the case (which made him bankrupt because he had to pay Queensberry's legal costs). But all the evidence was now public, so he was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency, and now he had to defend himself. This was easier to do though; the result was hung jury, but new evidence resulted in the prosecutor retrying the case, and Wilde lost. He was sent to two years of hard labor. In 1897, still in prison, he wrote a book-length letter to Douglas, later published as De Profundis. After he was released, he left England, never to return. In 1900 he caught a severe illness and, having spent all of his life straddling the border of Catholicism, was conditionally baptized and received extreme unction. (He may very well have been baptized as a Catholic as a child, and claimed to have a vague memory of it, but didn't know for sure, and he had once arranged a date for baptism and at the last minute sent the priest a bouquet of lilies as an apology for not showing up.)
I happened to pick up a copy of The Plays of Oscar Wilde recently at Half Price Books, and so, as you might expect, the books for this fortnight will be The Plays of Oscar Wilde and De Profundis. My condensed-term summer course starts this week, and reading plays I always find slower than reading novels, so we will see if I actually get through it in a fortnight -- I don't foresee any problems, but I'm also not going to be bothered if it goes over.
Saturday, July 06, 2019
C. S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy
Introduction
Opening Passages: From Out of the Silent Planet:
From Perelandra:
From That Hideous Strength:
Summary: Elwin Ransom, a philologist, by chance becomes involved in the schemes of Devine and Weston. Weston has invented a means by which it is possible to travel into space, to other planets; Weston is involved because he wants to expand the human race so that it will not go extinct, and Devine, his financier, because he wants to use this discovery for profit. Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars, known as Malacandra to the natives, as a sacrifice in exchange for being allowed to take Malacandran gold. While there he escapes and falls in with one group of natives, the hrossa. When Weston and Devine kill a hross, they are all brought to the ruler of Malacandra, Oyarsa, for their fate to be decided. Weston's making a fool of himself by trying to over-awe the natives never stops being funny, and is one of the best satires of colonialism that has ever been penned.
Some time after Ransom, Weston, and Devine barely manage to return, Lewis is going to visit Ransom; they had begun correspondence over a term in Bernardus Silvestris, Oyarses, and Lewis had eventually learned all of Ransom's adventure. However, Lewis quickly learns that new things are afoot: by violating the boundary of our besieged world, Thulcandra, ruled by an evil intelligence, Weston and Devine had made it possible for the intelligence governing the planets and Deep Heaven to shift their policies with regard to our planet. Ransom is being sent by them on a mission to Perelandra, that is, Venus, to prevent some serious evil from happening. When there he will have to adjust to the new planet, and will meet the Lady, a green-skinned woman who is the Eve of that world. Things will become more complicated when Weston arrives -- and something else with him. Weston is the new paradise's serpent, and Ransom will have to decide what to do in order to save Perelandra from the same fate as our world. One of the major themes of Perelandra is that our distinctions among fact, truth, and myth, are often very artifical, things we've imposed; we want to treat morality, for instance, as a purely spiritual thing of the heart, but while it is indeed spiritual and a matter of heart, it also needs fleshly garb -- to overspiritualize morality is to rob it of force and effectiveness. Some facts have a mythic tinge; some moral truths need a mythic garb; some myths and moral truths are such as to become fact. Ransom actually remarks on a related point to Lewis before he leaves; but it takes a strength of will to act on it when life, death, and the fate of the world are in balance.
In That Hideous Strength, we return to our world, the silent planet, at some point after the Second World War, where we meet Jane and Mark Studdock, a recently married couple in their early twenties whose marriage is already not doing very well. Jane has begun having worrying nightmares. Mark, a sociologist, is spending a lot of his time playing academic politics at the college for which he is a Junior Fellow, and doing so brings him into the circle of Lord Feverstone, a flashy, wealthy, and charming politician whose name, we later learn, is Richard Devine. Jane's nightmares will eventually bring her into contact with a group of people at St. Anne's, gathered around a man named Mr. Fisher-King who claims to have been to Mars and Venus, and the discovery that her nightmares are in fact visions of actual events. Mark's association will bring him to the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, the N.I.C.E., a supposedly scientific organization that, as Bill Hengist, a physical chemist who is murdered after he attempts to leave N.I.C.E., says, is more a political conspiracy than any kind of scientific organization. For the only actual experiments we find the N.I.C.E. doing are vivisection, experimental political projects, and the like. Jane and Mark will find themselves on opposing sides of a struggle, the N.I.C.E., with all of the legal power of Britain behind it, and St. Anne's, with nothing but legend on its side. That Hideous Strength is subtitled, "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown Ups", and the course of the fairy-tale depends greatly on these two finding a way to come back to each other.
Reading THS this time around, I was very much struck by how accurate the depiction of academic politics is. As a satire on modern intellectual life, it is hard to beat, and the fundamental root of the disease -- a regard for neither nature, nor the value of a human person, nor reason, insofar as these things are tied up with each other -- is, I think, as accurate today as it was then. When nature, people, and reason are merely to be used to persuade, manipulate, or dominate, power over these things, not truth or goodness, becomes the only thing treated as valuable. And the tactics -- trying to defeat people by passive-aggressive, and sometimes aggressive, undercutting rather than honest fight -- are not unknown today, as well. And of course, the inevitable end of it all: from those who despise the Word of God, the word of man will also be taken away. Those who dare use reason as merely a means will eventually find themselves without it; those who dare use people as mere means will eventually find themselves used and thrown away; those who dare use nature as mere means will eventually find nature sweeping them out of existence. It's a point that could be taken to sum up the entire trilogy.
I also read The Tortured Planet, which, as I noted, was an early abridged version of THS for the American market. As an abridgement it was quite good, no doubt because it was abridged by Lewis himself. It's a very quick read, and, indeed, one of the reasons to prefer THS to TTP is that TTP moves far too quickly. THS is much longer than the other two books in the trilogy, but what a reading of TTP really conveys is that the greater length is necessary for pacing the story. In TTP, events crowd in, one after the other, scenery goes by in a blur, and the characterization becomes less distinct because none of it is developed at leisure. When you read writing advice, the impression is often given that conciseness makes things more vivid, that cutting things down makes the images sharper, but this is never actually true unless the things you are cutting out are themselves vague expressions and fluff that conveys no ideas. In all other situations conciseness makes things more vague, less definite, less vivid. In TTP we don't get as many vivid descriptions of scenery, nor do we follow the thought processes of people except when absolutely necessary, which makes both the scene and the secondary characters have less to contribute to the story. And something that I especially noted is that you can distinguish all the major characters easily by their speech patterns in THS; this stops being the case in TTP, even though all Lewis is doing is cutting things out. Most of the characters start sounding the same. Even Wither, whose vague and rambling speech patterns are a key part of his character, sounds only slightly more diffuse and absentminded than anyone else. THS is a good argument that sometimes a more leisurely route gives the more powerful story. THS is a work of very high-quality; TTP is an enjoyable science fantasy thriller that can quickly be read. And the only difference is that the latter cuts about a third of the former.
Here is a sample so that those who have no access to The Tortured Planet can have a sense of the difference:
Favorite Passages: From Out of the Silent Planet:
From Perelandra:
From That Hideous Strength:
Recommendation: Highly Recommended. Each book is very different in character, but each is an excellent work of its kind. If there's only one that you read, in general, it should be Perelandra, but both of the others are well worth reading as well.
****
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, The Tortured Planet, Avon (New York: 1946).
Opening Passages: From Out of the Silent Planet:
The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling with the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road. A violent yellow sunset was pouring through a rift in the clouds to westward, but straight ahead over the hills the sky was the colour of dark slate. Every tree and blade of grass was dripping, and the road shone like a river.... (p. 7)
From Perelandra:
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no on eon that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit. The flat heath which spread out before me (for the village lies all behind and to the north of the station) looked an ordinary heath. The gloomy five-o'clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The few houses and the clumps of rd or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable. Who could imagine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth from where it looks like a mere point of green fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable? (p. 9)
From That Hideous Strength:
"Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said Jane Studdock to herself, "for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other." She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind. (p. 13)
Summary: Elwin Ransom, a philologist, by chance becomes involved in the schemes of Devine and Weston. Weston has invented a means by which it is possible to travel into space, to other planets; Weston is involved because he wants to expand the human race so that it will not go extinct, and Devine, his financier, because he wants to use this discovery for profit. Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars, known as Malacandra to the natives, as a sacrifice in exchange for being allowed to take Malacandran gold. While there he escapes and falls in with one group of natives, the hrossa. When Weston and Devine kill a hross, they are all brought to the ruler of Malacandra, Oyarsa, for their fate to be decided. Weston's making a fool of himself by trying to over-awe the natives never stops being funny, and is one of the best satires of colonialism that has ever been penned.
Some time after Ransom, Weston, and Devine barely manage to return, Lewis is going to visit Ransom; they had begun correspondence over a term in Bernardus Silvestris, Oyarses, and Lewis had eventually learned all of Ransom's adventure. However, Lewis quickly learns that new things are afoot: by violating the boundary of our besieged world, Thulcandra, ruled by an evil intelligence, Weston and Devine had made it possible for the intelligence governing the planets and Deep Heaven to shift their policies with regard to our planet. Ransom is being sent by them on a mission to Perelandra, that is, Venus, to prevent some serious evil from happening. When there he will have to adjust to the new planet, and will meet the Lady, a green-skinned woman who is the Eve of that world. Things will become more complicated when Weston arrives -- and something else with him. Weston is the new paradise's serpent, and Ransom will have to decide what to do in order to save Perelandra from the same fate as our world. One of the major themes of Perelandra is that our distinctions among fact, truth, and myth, are often very artifical, things we've imposed; we want to treat morality, for instance, as a purely spiritual thing of the heart, but while it is indeed spiritual and a matter of heart, it also needs fleshly garb -- to overspiritualize morality is to rob it of force and effectiveness. Some facts have a mythic tinge; some moral truths need a mythic garb; some myths and moral truths are such as to become fact. Ransom actually remarks on a related point to Lewis before he leaves; but it takes a strength of will to act on it when life, death, and the fate of the world are in balance.
In That Hideous Strength, we return to our world, the silent planet, at some point after the Second World War, where we meet Jane and Mark Studdock, a recently married couple in their early twenties whose marriage is already not doing very well. Jane has begun having worrying nightmares. Mark, a sociologist, is spending a lot of his time playing academic politics at the college for which he is a Junior Fellow, and doing so brings him into the circle of Lord Feverstone, a flashy, wealthy, and charming politician whose name, we later learn, is Richard Devine. Jane's nightmares will eventually bring her into contact with a group of people at St. Anne's, gathered around a man named Mr. Fisher-King who claims to have been to Mars and Venus, and the discovery that her nightmares are in fact visions of actual events. Mark's association will bring him to the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, the N.I.C.E., a supposedly scientific organization that, as Bill Hengist, a physical chemist who is murdered after he attempts to leave N.I.C.E., says, is more a political conspiracy than any kind of scientific organization. For the only actual experiments we find the N.I.C.E. doing are vivisection, experimental political projects, and the like. Jane and Mark will find themselves on opposing sides of a struggle, the N.I.C.E., with all of the legal power of Britain behind it, and St. Anne's, with nothing but legend on its side. That Hideous Strength is subtitled, "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown Ups", and the course of the fairy-tale depends greatly on these two finding a way to come back to each other.
Reading THS this time around, I was very much struck by how accurate the depiction of academic politics is. As a satire on modern intellectual life, it is hard to beat, and the fundamental root of the disease -- a regard for neither nature, nor the value of a human person, nor reason, insofar as these things are tied up with each other -- is, I think, as accurate today as it was then. When nature, people, and reason are merely to be used to persuade, manipulate, or dominate, power over these things, not truth or goodness, becomes the only thing treated as valuable. And the tactics -- trying to defeat people by passive-aggressive, and sometimes aggressive, undercutting rather than honest fight -- are not unknown today, as well. And of course, the inevitable end of it all: from those who despise the Word of God, the word of man will also be taken away. Those who dare use reason as merely a means will eventually find themselves without it; those who dare use people as mere means will eventually find themselves used and thrown away; those who dare use nature as mere means will eventually find nature sweeping them out of existence. It's a point that could be taken to sum up the entire trilogy.
I also read The Tortured Planet, which, as I noted, was an early abridged version of THS for the American market. As an abridgement it was quite good, no doubt because it was abridged by Lewis himself. It's a very quick read, and, indeed, one of the reasons to prefer THS to TTP is that TTP moves far too quickly. THS is much longer than the other two books in the trilogy, but what a reading of TTP really conveys is that the greater length is necessary for pacing the story. In TTP, events crowd in, one after the other, scenery goes by in a blur, and the characterization becomes less distinct because none of it is developed at leisure. When you read writing advice, the impression is often given that conciseness makes things more vivid, that cutting things down makes the images sharper, but this is never actually true unless the things you are cutting out are themselves vague expressions and fluff that conveys no ideas. In all other situations conciseness makes things more vague, less definite, less vivid. In TTP we don't get as many vivid descriptions of scenery, nor do we follow the thought processes of people except when absolutely necessary, which makes both the scene and the secondary characters have less to contribute to the story. And something that I especially noted is that you can distinguish all the major characters easily by their speech patterns in THS; this stops being the case in TTP, even though all Lewis is doing is cutting things out. Most of the characters start sounding the same. Even Wither, whose vague and rambling speech patterns are a key part of his character, sounds only slightly more diffuse and absentminded than anyone else. THS is a good argument that sometimes a more leisurely route gives the more powerful story. THS is a work of very high-quality; TTP is an enjoyable science fantasy thriller that can quickly be read. And the only difference is that the latter cuts about a third of the former.
Here is a sample so that those who have no access to The Tortured Planet can have a sense of the difference:
| That Hideous Strength | The Tortured Planet |
|---|---|
"Bless my soul!" said Wither. "How very right of you! I had almost forgotten, my dear lady, how tired you must be, and how very valuable your time is. We must try to save you for that particular kind of work in which you have shown yourself indispensable. You must not allow us to impose on your good nature. There is a lot of duller and more routine work which it is only reasonable that you should be spared." He got up and held the door open for her. | "Bless my soul!" said Wither. "How very right of you! I had almost forgotten, my dear lady, how tired you must be, and how very valuable your time is." He got up and held the door open for her. |
"You don't think," said she, " that I ought to let the boys have just a little go at Studdock? I mean it seems so absurd to have all this trouble about getting an address." | "You don't think," said she," that I ought to let the boys have just a little go at Studdock?" |
And suddenly, as Wither stood with his hand on the door-handle, courtly, patient, and smiling, the whole expression faded out of his face. The pale lips, open wide enough to show his gums, the white curly head, the pouchy eyes, ceased to make up any single expression. Miss Hardcastle had the feeling that a mere mask of skin and flesh was staring at her. A moment later and she was gone. (pp. 238-239) | And suddenly, as Wither stood with his hand on the door-handle, the whole expression faded out of his face. Miss Hardcastle had the feeling that a mere mask of skin and flesh was staring at her. A moment later she was gone. (p. 145) |
Favorite Passages: From Out of the Silent Planet:
They were even more interested in what he had to tell them of the aquatic animal with snapping jaws which he had fled from in their own world and even in their own handramit. It was a hnakra, they all agreed. They were intensely excited. There had not been a hnakra in the valley for many years. The youth of the hrossa got out their weapons--primitive harpoons with points of bone--and the very cubs began playing at hnakra-hunting in the shallows.... (p. 170)
From Perelandra:
...The Muse is a real thing. A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations. Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base. And when they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was--gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.... (p. 201)
From That Hideous Strength:
... Ransom gripped the side of his sofa; Merlin grasped his own knees and set his teeth. A rod of coloured light, whose clour no man can name or picture, darted between them: no more to see than that, but seeing was the least part of their experience. Quick agitation seized them: a kind of boiling and bubbling in mind and heart which shook their bodies also. It went to a rhythm of such fierce speed that they feared their sanity must be shaken into a thousand fragments. And then it seemed that this actually happened. But it did not matter: for all the fragments--needle-pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx-eyed thoughts--went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry. The doubling, splitting, and recombining of thoughts which now went on in them would have been unendurable for one whom that art had not already instructed in the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled vision. For Ransom, whose study had been for many words in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech. All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning. For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them: the angel that spins nearest the sun, Viritrilbia, whom men call Mercury and Thoth. (pp. 321-322)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended. Each book is very different in character, but each is an excellent work of its kind. If there's only one that you read, in general, it should be Perelandra, but both of the others are well worth reading as well.
****
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Collier (New York: 1965).
C. S. Lewis, The Tortured Planet, Avon (New York: 1946).
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