Archives | Philosophy
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Style Matters
Intellectual style, that is.
When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism & post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.
There were large sections in my dissertation—Cognitive Science and Literary Theory—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, which had some diagrams, but not many, I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.
There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.
Take New Historicism for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.
It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.
* * * * *
I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
We need to make every effort to defend, in changed circumstances, the tradition that makes the humanities in the university the place especially charged with the combination of Bildung and Wissenschaft, ethical education and pure knowledge.
Curiosity about a pendant one Joshua Landy hung on a 2009 post by John Holbo led me, first to Landy’s comment (about Moretti on Sherlock Holmes) and then back to Holbo’s post. And that reminded me that I had intended to bounce a post off of Holbo’s. So here it is.
John is discussing a panel discussion he’d attended once upon a time not all that long ago. He remarks:
I was struck, in particular, by one panel discussion I attended at which it was more or less agreed by various participants that scholarship and pedagogy of literary history are, at present, mutually ill-suited. . . . On the one hand, you need a set of texts that will provide you with sufficient evidence to pronounce intelligently—justifiably—on such subjects as ‘the nineteenth century American novel’. On the other hand, you need a set of texts to fill out a 12-week syllabus for an undergraduate course of that title. There isn’t any one set of texts that can do both jobs.
Of course it isn’t so surprising that the most sophisticated scholarship goes beyond what can be crammed into an undergraduate semester. But there is more to the point, it seems to me. There seems to be a tendency for good undergraduate pedagogy to recapitulate bad (as opposed to merely incomplete or preliminary) historiography. The teacher finds him or herself proceeding as if ‘the nineteenth century novel’ (pick your suitably broad subject) is the sort of thing that is at all likely to show up through the lens of, say, eight novels to be read. Reading a small number of novels and writing a few interpretive essays can be a fine and enriching way to spend a few months. But it’s not the same kind of enriching activity as studying the novel historically, with scholarly rigor. In a sense no one really thinks otherwise. So tension between pedagogy and historiography is not just tension between for-students simplification and for-scholars sophistication. It is tension between certain notions of value and certain standards of validity.
Let me offer a brief interpretive gloss on this tension between value and validity, which may only have emerged into view recently but has been latent for a somewhat longer time.
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Monday, December 07, 2009
Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”
Previous posts in the series:
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject?
My recent posts about Claude Lévi-Strauss are about his ideas on myth, but they are also about the influence of those ideas on me. They are stories in my intellectual autobiography. I would like to continue with that autobiography and say more about how, for better or worse, I moved through Lévi-Strauss to cognitive science.
That could not have happened unless I had become interested in the cognitive sciences even as I was investigating Lévi-Strauss. For Lévi-Strauss & Co. was not all that caught my undergraduate interest when I was at Johns Hopkins in the 60s. I studied psycholinguistics under James Deese and thereby discovered Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar (& how it wiped behaviorism off the map). I learned about Jean Piaget under Mary Ainsworth, who also introduced me to John Bowlby and to primate ethology. Other thinkers were important as well, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, the early Wittgenstein, and, in a way, Philippe Ariès, though that influence is not so germane to this particular story.
What brought it all together, or, in a way, forced me to tear it apart, was a poem, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (text available here). I became interested in “Kubla Khan” during my senior year at Johns Hopkins in a course taught by the late Earl Wasserman. As you know, Coleridge had declared “Kubla Khan” incomplete: It came to him in an opium-induced reverie (opium was the aspirin of the time); he was interrupted by a man from Porlock; the reverie was dissipated and, with it, most of the poem vanished. The text was oh! so incomplete. I sensed that the two sections of the poem—the first, about Kubla and his pleasure-dome, the second, about a poet and his vision of the damsel with a dulcimer—had the same structure. I also believed that “Kubla Khan” became complete by asserting its own incompleteness: “Could I revive within me . . .” But he couldn’t, and so this incomplete poem asserted its own fragmentary nature, from within itself, thereby recursively attaining closure. It was a trick of the times.
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Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Sublime Funk of Cornel West
For what it’s worth, here’s a bit of controversy (at Crooked Timber) over Cornel West’s latest, an autobiography: Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Here’s a Facebook page for the book; and here’s an excerpt from it along with an interview with Matt Lauer. Here’s a paragraph from the excerpt:
But what does it mean to be a bluesman in the life of the mind? Like my fellow musicians, I’ve got to forge a unique style and voice that expresses my own quest for truth and love. That means following the quest wherever it leads and bearing whatever cost is required. I must break through isolated academic frameworks while, at the same time, I must build on the best of academic knowledge. I must fuel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire. And most importantly, I must be a free spirit. I must unapologetically reveal my broken life as a thing of beauty.
And here’s another paragraph, on his quest for love, taken from this review (Scott McLemee at IHE):
The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high—and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject?
When I wrote my first post on Lévi-Strauss I had no intention of writing a second. Rob’s response, however, led me to take a stroll through Derrida and Donato and in turn led me to take another shot at explicating Lévi-Strauss’s analytic method in The Raw and the Cooked. At about the time I was posting that second piece I’d also decided to develop that first post into a formal article and, in the process of doing that—I’m still working on it—I continued to read some older pieces, mostly about Lévi-Strauss and the subject, more in the Donato pieces, but also some de Man, which I’d not read back in the day, and Joseph Riddel. “So that’s what was afoot,” thought I to myself, though not exactly in those terms, “that’s what folks were all psyched about. Hmmm.” I’d pretty much forgotten that material, though I’d obviously read it with some care as the texts were underlined and had marginal comments. And then I got out Tristes Tropiques and reviewed some of the underlined passages, again, on the subject.
This is not my first copy of Tristes Tropiques, it is not the one I read in Dick Macksey’s course on the autobiographical novel at Johns Hopkins. That was an abridged translation, which I discarded when I purchased the 1973 translation of the whole book. So these underlings and marginalia were not those of a provincial newly arrived at the Big University. These markings were made by a sophisticated young intellectual who had both a philosophy BA and a humanities MA from Hopkins and who was then pursuing a PhD in English at SUNY Buffalo. I’d gotten my MA for writing a long and quite sophisticated thesis on “Kubla Khan.” Lévi-Strauss was my central methodological touchstone, but there was Jakobson and, I suppose, Piaget as well. And Merleau-Ponty. And the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Others, including Nietzsche, but also a bit of Chomsky.
I came out of that thesis convinced that cognitive science was the way forward. And that’s what I pursued at Buffalo. The story of how I managed to study cognitive science while enrolled in the English Department, well, that’s the story of an institutional style — and I do mean that, institutional — that may well have been unique in American letters, a style of adventure and generosity that is now gone. But that’s a story for another day.
Let’s return to Lévi-Strauss, and to the subject. I can’t imagine how puzzled I must have been to read about and hear talk of “the subject.” When I read Lévi-Strauss’ eclipse of the subject in Tristes Tropiques the exposition must have been strange, but without weight. That is, without the weight of the philosophical tradition Lévi-Strauss, himself trained as a philosopher, was critiquing. Sure, I knew of that tradition, and I’d even read about it in the later pages of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. But I’d not read Kant or Hegel, nor the phenomenologists. Thus, I suppose, Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of the self is where I began, one of the places. All the rest is backfill.
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
In response to my previous post on Lévi-Strauss, rob reminded me of Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” revised from his presentation at the 1966 structuralism symposium held at Johns Hopkins. And not only that. In evoking Kant and capital “R” Reason, rob also reminded me that both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida had been operating within a philosophical tradition that stretches back to Kant though Heidegger and Hegel and various others. While I certainly read in that tradition as an undergraduate, and marked those books in blue, red, and green felt-tip pen, I abandoned it with Derrida, or perhaps with Lévi-Strauss himself – the exact formulation doesn’t matter.
I want to revisit that abandonment. Perhaps, even, re-enact it. In a small way.
Let us consider some passages from Derrida’s essay, which I present not to critique them, but simply to display them. For example (p. 256 in Macksey and Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1970): “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” On the next page (257): “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. . . . Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.” From the subsequent discussion, in response to Jean Hypolite: “. . . this center can be either thought as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history¬—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.”
That is to say, talk and thought of the center, the subject, and the sign are intimately bound together. Eugenio Donato, in his contribution to the symposium (“The Two Languages of Criticism”), notes (p. 94): “It is the possibility of maintaining the discontinuity between the order of the signifier and the order of the signified that permits Lévi-Strauss to avoid dealing with the problem of the individual subject and makes for the extreme rigor of his work.” Note that phrase, “extreme rigor.”
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Friday, November 13, 2009
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Farewell to freedom in the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon.
– Hayao Miyazaki via Porco Rosso
The news of his death has, by now, no doubt spread to every region of cyberspace where his ideas have seen use and remembrance. I am speaking, of course, about Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), tamer of wild flowers, pollinator of myth, and diviner of opposites. I learned of his ideas in the days when Structuralism was something in its own right rather than being a doormat at the threshold of Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. I thought his ideas about myth were quite profound, but not fully-formed.
This note is an attempt to indicate what I saw in his study of myth despite the fact that I cannot give a concise account of what he did nor can I recommend such an account. You have to read the man himself. First I say a little about his ideas, then I suggest their implications for literary study by giving an example from early modern English literature, a comparison of Robert Green’s Pandosto with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I then suggest extensions of that analysis both into Shakespeare and into the novel (Wuthering heights). (There’s small collection of Lévi-Strauss links at the very end.)
The Structural Study of Myth
I first learned of Lévi-Strauss during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s. I believe it was in one of Dick Macksey’s courses, The Idea of the Theater. I forget whether Macksey assigned “The Structural Study of Myth” or merely suggested it. No matter. I read it, didn’t understand it, and was hooked: “The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce meaning.” First Oedipus; then the Zuni emergence myth, compared with those in other Pueblo tribes, finally a Plains myth to round things off. “In all cases, it was found that the theory was sound; light was thrown, not only on North American mythology, but also on a previously unnoticed kind of logical operation, or own known so far only in a wholly different context.” Yippie kayo git along little dogies!
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
How Heideggerian Are You?
You know what? It wouldn’t kill me to post at the Valve every year or so. I could, just for example, take time out of my busy schedule ... (it really is busy, my schedule.)
But I do find that Crooked Timber keeps me busy, and I’m bizarrely averse to cross-posting. (I don’t know why.) So let me link to a post at Crooked Timber, on typography, philosophy and the Nazi question. And let me just ask the humanists among you (that’s most of you, I expect): just how Heideggerian are you? How much of the stuff that matters to you can be traced back, significantly, to Heidegger? If you don’t know a damn thing about Heidegger, how seriously confused are you, sitting in a graduate seminar?
I realize it’s a trick question, because it’s vague. But answer as best you can. How much Heidegger have you actually read - for a class, say. Or assigned, for a class? I’m curious what the kids are being made to read these days.
But it’s not a trick question in this way: I’m not going to call you a Nazi. Life’s too short.
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Monday, June 01, 2009
Hey Kids! Free Plato Book! And you can help me make it better!
Yes, it is true! Visit the official book site. You can view the whole thing via Issuu.com, which has a very nice Flash-based reader: minimal and elegant but full-featured. And/or download the PDF for offline reading.
Want to see a neat trick? I can embed the book, like so.
Then you just click to turn the page (illegible at this size) or click to open and read in full-screen mode. It’s a very nice viewer they’ve got. Or I could make the embed open on a particular page, so when I’m blogging about a passage while teaching, I can just point the kids to the page in question. Or open the book itself onscreen in class and zoom so it’s readable. Neat, I call it.
The full book title (some would say: over-full): Reason and Persuasion, Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic book I, with commentary and illustrations by John Holbo and translations by Belle Waring. It will be out in print by mid-August. The version that is up right now is actually the final draft - so far as I can tell. But I still have a week-and-a-bit to catch any last typos or mistakes. (I have a terrible suspicion that the Stephanus pages may have shifted a bit during the last edit. Gotta check that. How tedious, but oh-so-necessary.) I hope there aren’t any major problems with the book still, at this point. But if there are - well, I will do my best to make needed changes. So if you would like to volunteer your services as proofreader/last minute reviewer/critic, you are most welcome.
Not pre-publication peer-review. Not old-fashioned post-publication review. Perinatal peer-review. (Socrates always said he was a midwife. So I assume he would approve.)
The book is published by Pearson Asia (that’s a story in itself) and will be available in paperback by mid-August. They’ve been bringing out nice, inexpensive draft versions for my students in Singapore (that’s why I have an Asian publisher.) For this first general release I insisted on extending the deal I had insisted on for my own classroom use: I reserve the e-rights and so have a free hand to try manner of cool free e-stuff. I’m hoping one reward for my virtuous ways will be that some folks will want to adopt the book for classroom use. (Free e-availability is a big pedagogic bonus, I think.) And will then see to it that copies of the book are in school bookstores, so Pearson (and I) get paid a little. That seems fair.
OK, that’s all for now. If you want to talk Plato, please come on over to the book site. (And link! Please link! And help me edit the book, last minute, if you wouldn’t mind.) But it might be fun to chat about e-publishing in academia in this thread. If you are inclined. Doesn’t this sort of thing make a lot of sense. whatever you think of my particular book? I say it does.
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Friday, May 22, 2009
Deresiewicz on Darwinism, Literary
Writing in The Nation, William Deresiewicz looks at six books of evolutionary criticism. He observes that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers” but regards Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape of Troy as the best of the lot, “prudent, patient, thoroughly researched and very smart.” All that’s beside the point, however:
Finally, these common-sense conclusions about beauty, love and the death of the author are noteworthy only in relation to the nonsense of Theory. That such arguments need to be made in the first place only shows what a pass we have come to. If literary Darwinism does nothing more than discredit the old paradigm, it will have done very well indeed. But it will, I fear, do a great deal more. The Darwinists have a research program, and few things in the academy are more powerful than that. Gottschall wants to put readers in MRI machines to test their responses, though he is also willing to take advantage of less expensive technologies, like “simple salivary swabs that can provide hormonal indicators of emotions experienced during reading.” Carroll lauds a study that analyzed the creative process by giving subjects a personality test “to determine their position on a scale of Machiavellianism,” then had them write short stories. Hearing of such remarkable schemes, I feel I’ve been transported, with Gulliver, to the Academy of Lagado, where one sage endeavored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and another sought to restore ordure to the condition of food.
I must confess, I’m not so bothered by the MRI – which has been put to use in studying response to movies – or the salivary swabs, or even the personality test, though I do think Carroll has an overly reified sense of what those tests are about. To be sure, I think the work of these evolutionary critics needs amending in many ways, if not a whole reframing, but I doubt that my version will give Deresiewicz any comfort. He’ll regard it as just more pointless folderol in the Academy of Lagado.
But let’s allow him to continue:
It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is the nature of literature itself. That interpretation succeeds interpretation in a seemingly endless cycle is not a weakness of criticism but its essential strength. The great works persist because they have the power, in every age, to make us ask the most important questions, which are the ones that have no answers, or rather, that have only personal answers: What are we doing here? What does it feel like to be alive? What should we do with our time on earth?
Yes, a naturalist literary study is not going to answer these questions, though it might well think about why homo sapiens sapiens poses them, about why they must be posed and, even, why the answers can never be closed. And, even if naturalist criticism cannot, in principle, provide answers to those questions, it might provide knowledge that is of general interest to those seeking such answers. Until we get there, we can’t tell.
Still, one might ask to what extent those existential questions have ever been real questions in academic criticism, for it is around those questions that Deresiewicz would have literary criticism stake its defense. Is Deresiewicz in fact indicating a substantial line of argument, or is he simply retreating into old rhetorical gestures?
* * * * *
P. S. Though his comment on adaptive explanation in evolutionary criticism is a bit smug, the punch line is rather clever:
Rather than testifying to the novelty and vigor of the field, the diversity of theories within Darwinian aesthetics--Carroll’s cognitive regulation, Dutton’s sexual selection, Boyd’s cognitive play and so forth--merely shows how feeble they all are. Choosing among them would be like trying to decide which imaginary girlfriend to sleep with.
Adaptation is a critical concept in evolutionary biology, but the attention to mechanisms in evolutionary criticism is so sketchy that it seems to function more like élan vital.
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.
Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.
Lest you think I’m mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter’s introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it? These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged?
Maybe I’m still in a foul mood, but I don’t think so.
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Cartoon Rescues Philosophy from Brooks
Some of you may have noticed that David Brooks has written a piece touting “The End of Philosophy" in which he argues that recent work in the psychology of emotion puts the kaibosh on moral philosophy:
It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
Language Log’s Mark Lieberman will have none of this and summons both a sequential visual narrative (aka a cartoon from chaospet) and David Hume against Brooks. Brooks loses.
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Friday, February 27, 2009
Across the Disciplines, Get Happy
OnFiction’s Keith Oatley summarizes recent studies showing that reading about events seems to involve mental simulation of those events:
In a previous study, Speer, Zacks, and Reynolds (2007) found that readers divide stories up into events, and that different brain regions are activated when, in a narrative, a new event occurs. In the study that is in press, this group has found that when they were reading about actions performed by a story character, activation occurred in the region of the reader’s brain that is associated with doing that kind of action in real life. For instance, says the Science Daily report, “changes in the objects a character interacted with (e.g., “pulled a light cord") were associated with increases in a region in the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Changes in characters’ locations (e.g., “went through the front door into the kitchen") were associated with increases in regions in the temporal lobes that are selectively activate when people view pictures of spatial scenes.”
The National Humanities Center has established a website, On the Human, featuring the work “of university professors who teach courses on humans and their relations to animals and machines.” The site currently includes course materials for 3-credit undergraduate course on this general subject, news items, an explanatory video, and an essay by Geoffrey Harpham, “Science and the Theft of Humanity." The website has a blog, also entitled On the Human; sure to check out the video of a whistling orangutan. More to come.
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Catholic and Protestant Imaginations and SF
I’m preparing to teach six weeks of Philosophy and Film. I focus on science fiction, so I’m reviewing a stack of critical writings on SF. I’m taking another look at The History of Science Fiction, by one Adam Roberts, which I’ve read before ... and I suddenly realize that I don’t quite get what is supposed to be a large component of the main thesis.
Adam wants to set up an opposition between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ imaginations, and he wants to privilege the latter - not in quality terms, but for purposes of defining SF. The main SF line is ‘Protestant’ in its imaginings, with Catholic impulses providing important counterpoint. Roughly, Protestantism is all about the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and Catholicism is about magic and sacralization. So SF is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic, and the fact that SF is often hard to distinguish from fantasy just goes to show that Protestant and Catholic imaginative impulses can intertwine and do complicated stuff. “If I am asked to condense into a single sentence, my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between ‘deism’ and ‘magical pantheism’) that emerges out of the seventeenth century” (p. xi-ii).
I take this binary to be vague but intuitive. (And really I’m not hoping for any non-vague theses hereabouts.) Fine. But now this:
“I am not saying, as some critics have done, that SF ‘embodies religious myth’, or secularizes religious themes. SF may, of course, do either or both of these things, but this is not my argument. My argument is that the genre as a whole still bears the imprint of the cultural crisis that gave it birth, and that this crisis happened to be a European religious one” (3). The crisis is the Reformation, obviously.
But here’s what I don’t understood. Before I noticed this sentence, I did take Adam to be arguing that SF ‘embodies religious myth’, or ‘secularizes religious themes’. I took him to be saying that this is the evidence that SF still bears the imprint of its Reformation-era origins. So now it looks to me like Adam is saying: I’m not arguing A, I’m arguing A & B. Which isn’t exactly a denial that you are arguing A.
So what does it mean to assert that SF ‘bears the imprint’ of the Reformation, while not asserting that it is a matter of secularizing religious themes. I guess I’m not getting it. Adam, what say you?
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Darwinian Aesthetics?
Denis Dutton has just published The Art Instince: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. In his NYTimes review, Anthony Gottlieb says that “His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating, and I doubt whether much of it really depends on the ideas of evolutionary psychology.” That feels right to me. EP is a good way to toss out a certain range of older and extant ideas, but once that operation is over, it is short on new insights.
Here’s Dutton in dialog with science-writer John Horgan:
And here he is delivering a lecture at Google headquarters:
Dutton is a very engaging speaker. In both talks he advances a “cluster” concept of art: 12 features, some, but not necessarily all, of which will be characteristic of anything we would call “art.” Sounds like a descendant of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance.
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