Evolutionary Aesthetics

Concepts and More

2010-07-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

My work is expanding into Hayek's spontaneous order theory.

More, since I had children and have seen how my daughter learns and forms concepts, I would have to change what I said about concepts. It seems our brains are far more efficient than we sometimes imagine, as I have seen my daughter able to see one thing and extrapolate it out to include a wide variety of other things that look similar. It seems we can form concepts based on the example of one.

Literature as a Game

2008-03-28T20:27:00.001-07:00

An update on an old paper: here's the new site of Literature as a Game.

III. Introduction to the Fractal Distribution of Words in Literary Texts

2008-03-26T08:52:00.001-07:00

Strangely, my dissertation text is missing the following section -- one of the most important sections in the entire dissertation. Also, I could not for the life of me get the graphs on this site.

For Kundera, a novel investigates themes. “A theme is an existential inquiry” (AN, 84), the “examination of certain words, theme-words” (84). In other words, “A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental worlds,” which are “analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence” (84).

By the time I came around to rereading James Gleick’s book Chaos: The Making of a New Science, I had taken Kundera’s idea of theme-words in literature to heart, and was beginning to think about literature within the paradigm of chaos theory. Thus, I re-read Gleick’s book looking for metaphors that could describe literature. Mandelbrot’s observations regarding noise in a system, creating fractal time, made me realize that narrative, too, was an example of fractal time, the words acting as the “noise” in the “system” of the novel, similar to Cantor dust. This is best seen in a rewording of Gleick’s own words:

Mandelbrot saw the Cantor set as a model for the occurrence of errors in an electric transmission line. Engineers saw periods of error-free transmission, mixed with periods when errors would come in bursts. Looked at more closely, the bursts, too, contained error-free periods within them. And so on – it was an example of fractal time. (93c)

which I have reworded thus:

I see the Cantor set as a model for the occurrence of words (particular words) in a novel. There are periods where a given word does not appear, mixed with periods when the word does appear, mixed with periods when the word comes in bursts. Looked at more closely, the bursts, too contain periods without that word within them. And so on – it is an example of fractal time within the novel.

These dusts occur on smaller scales, each cluster giving clusters of spaces and clusters. In a novel one can only go down so far, but one can see the general principle holds. Fractals are repeated self-similar patterns. This is what made me think to graph words in a text to see if any patterns would make themselves apparent – and if they would show bifurcations and both steadiness in frequency and self-similar groupings of words. This is indeed happened with the word “friend” in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure at 1,000-word intervals, as we can see here.

This graph is what is called a “Poincaré map,” which “removes a dimension from an attractor and turns a continuous line into a collection of points” (142). “Such pictures ... [begin] to reveal the fine fractal structure” (144) of the system – in this case, the novel. We see word distribution in a novel “as a Cantor set arranged in time” (Gleick, 92), where “the degree of irregularity remains constant over different scales. ... the world displays a regular regularity” (Gleick, 98). This suggested to me that meaning in a novel is both emergent and fractal – as one goes down, one sees ever-smaller elements of meaning – elements that finally stop at the level of words, or morphemes. There is also perhaps the level of multiple interpretations of words – especially in context of the emergent properties of the phrase, sentence, paragraph, etc. Going down helps us see the fractal repetitions while going up (looking at the patterns the words make, looking at how they are functioning in a particular sentence, paragraph, scene, etc.) helps us see the emergent levels of meaning. The mere repetition of a word is not enough – it has to repeat in a chaotic pattern to create the strongest levels of meaning. Each word “repeat[s] itself, displaying familiar patterns over time. ... But the repetitions [are] never quite exact. There [is] pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder” (15). If we look at the graph above, we can see that the pattern of word distribution between 33,000 and 59,000 resembles the pattern between 69,000 and 89,000, and the word distribution pattern between 94,000 and 176,000 words resembles both, though it is flatter than the first two. They all resemble, but are not identical, to each other, as one would expect in a fractal. This specifically happens when we get a bifurcation – in the frequency of the word, which would indicate a bifurcation in the word’s meaning within the text, since in bifurcation, the attractor the line was following turns into a repellor, dividing the line. Although the word “church” has a similar number of respetitions in Jude the Obscure, as we can see here:

the fact that it lacks this kind of periodic behavior (orderly disorder) – the word “church” does not have either steadiness in frequency nor a bifurcation – while the word “friend” does, tells you the word “friend” is a stronger theme-word, having been created through the tensions in the novel. An even stronger example of this is when we look at the distribution of the word “the”:

We would expect a random distribution of a word like “the,” as it is an article, the type of word one would not expect to receive thematic development in a work such as a novel (though it may have thematic importance in such works as Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump”, which ends with the line “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” – but such works have different ways of emphasizing meaning). And that is what we see here. While repetition does create meaning in a text, it is not just any type of repetition (or else words like “the” would typically be the most important theme-words in a text), but patterned repetition. In another text, “church” may be a theme word. Here, it is not. But “friend” is. How does this happen? “Information is transmitted back from the small scales to the large... And the channel transmitting the information upward is the strange attractor, magnifying the initial randomness just as the Butterfly Effect magnifies small uncertainties into large-scale weather patterns” (261). So we would expect the peaks of the word “friend” to correspond to major plot points in the text.

Take another look at the first graph, of the distribution of the word “friend.” We find in the first peak of eight, at around 34,000-35,000 words entirely in chapter II-4, pg. 79-85, when Sue came to see Jude as he was working at his job as a stonemason on a Gothic church, and Jude takes Sue to meet Phillotson for the first time. The first “friend” occurs to say how Jude would not treat Sue, at first – to befriend her in hopes of it leading to romance (79). The second occurrence is of Sue saying to Jude in a latter she would have liked for her and Jude to have been friends while they had been in Christminster (81). She next speaks “with the freedom of a friend” (82), though this is their first real meeting as adults. As they begin to talk, Jude laments her leaving because she has “hardly any other friend. I have, indeed, one very old friend here somewhere,” speaking of Phillotson, whom he has yet to go see. They decide to go see him, and when they arrive, Jude says he came “to see him as an old friend” (82). Phillotson invites them in, after saying he had forgotten Jude, though the “old friendship was imperceptibly renewed” (83). When they leave Phillotson’s, Jude perceives that Sue’s “sentiments toward him were those of the frankest friendliness only” while “he loved her more than before becoming acquainted with her” (83-4). And when they part, Jude goes back to Phillotson to ask him for a teaching position for Sue, which Phillotson assures “Jude as a friend” (85) would be a waste of time for Sue unless she wished to pursue teaching.

What is going on here? Jude wants a lover, but gets instead a friend – thus inverting the way things “should” develop, from friend to lover. And the tragic situation is also set up in this chapter because of Jude’s friendship with Phillotson. It is because of this friendship that Sue and Phillotson meet, and that Sue works for Phillotson – all of which leads to Sue and Phillotson’s marriage. There is a complex of meaning and consequence created in this chapter by the strange attractor of friendship and the meaning of friendship.

The second peak occurs (at 51,000-52,000) after Sue’s expulsion of school, after her having gone to see Jude, the episode which leads into Jude telling Sue of his being married, Sue’s seeing Jude about her engagement to Phillotson, and the last two occurrences of “friend” in this peak in the second letter from Sue and the response from Jude regarding Sue’s marriage. Phillotson comes to see Jude about the scandal of Sue’s expulsion, and each felt their conversation “could not comfortably merge in a friendly discussion of their recent experiences after the manner of friends” (131). After Jude tells Sue of his being married, at that moment “She was his comrade, friend, unconscious sweetheart no longer” (132), though after further discussions they persuaded themselves that they could still be friends, and their “parting was in good friendship” (134). The next chapter (III-7) begins with Sue announcing in a letter her immanent marriage to Phillotson. In her second letter, Sue asks Jude to give her away in marriage, saying that her father is not “friendly enough to be willing” (136). Jude recommends in his letter that Sue marry from his house, not “from your school friend’s” (136). Here we go from not friendly, no longer friends, to a promise to remain friends, to not friendly and not another friend. We have a bifurcation in friendliness to unfriendliness, and a putting-off onto others the not-friendly and not-friend felt by Sue and Phillotson toward Jude. By negating others, by seeing Sue’s father as unfriendly, by rejecting Sue’s friend, Sue and Jude are able to remain friendly toward each other, despite Jude’s being married and Sue’s immanent marriage.

As we can see from looking at just the first two peaks, Hardy creates a development of Sue and Jude’s friendship that coincides with major plot points, even when we do not realize in our first reading that what is happening is a major plot point or crisis, as we saw with the first peak with Jude introducing Sue to Phillotson. The peaks correspond with major plot points and with the development of the theme-words in the novel. And we also see the first peak of the second pattern (pg. 192-4, at about peak 71,000) gives a re-affirmation of the ideas of friendship developed around the first peak of the first pattern, even as they occur right when Sue leaves Phillotson for Jude. But of course this reaffirmation is one done in light of the previous development of the meaning of the word “friend,” which means it becomes affirmed in a different light, and is thus given a different meaning, than was the first peak the reader encounters.

The existence of fractal word patterns shows us that a novel is a particular kind of fractal It is self-similar at lower intervals, but as one goes up, new forms are made, self-similar to what came before, but having emergent properties (meanings). What we see in deconstruction is a concern only with the “infinite coastline” of the novel, at the expense of the emergent meaning of that coastline in delineating the complete form of the novel. Since the novel is now seen to be both regular and irregular, to be, in essence, fractaline, one could perhaps see Gleick’s observation that “The degree of irregularity corresponded to the efficiency of the object in taking up space” (100) could be taken as a literary judgement. Is there perhaps a correlation between a novel’s degree of irregularity as a fractaline object and our finding that novel beautiful (and giving it long-term survival)? This complexity that a fractal view of the novel illuminates is also another way of judging a novel (or understanding how novels have perhaps been judged in the past) since, as Gleick says, “Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world” (116-7). We have to be careful when we say the word “simple,” since “simple systems can do complicated things” (167), as anyone who has read Hemingway knows. Further, “as [a] system becomes chaotic ..., strictly by virtue of its unpredictability, it generates a steady stream of information” (260). This is undoubtedly why we consider both predictable stories and stories that are not retrodictable to be bad stories. A chaotic story would be one that is not predictable, but is certainly retrodictable.

Gleick also says irregular patterns and infinitely complex shapes have “a quality of self-similarity. Above all, fractal meant self-similar” (103). Further, “self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern” (103). The presence of meaning in a novel is also not determined by its scale. Its words have meaning, and so do its plots, and every level in between. But, in the same way eddies of air are the same as a hurricane, only at different scales, the effect of the higher levels of meaning is as different from word to plot as the effects of an eddy of air are to that of a hurricane. All the same, an eddy of air can, building on other eddies of air, build into a hurricane over space and time in the same way as words, building on other words, build into a novel over space and time. This is because “each change of scale [brings] new phenomena and new kinds of behavior” (115). The existence of meaning applies “without regard to scale” (108) in a novel. And greater meaning emerges as we go up in scale, since these scales are hierarchical (116). “Fractal scaling [is] not just common but universal in morphogenesis” (Gleick,110). Since fractal geometry is “nature’s own” (114), and a novel is a part of nature inasmuch as it is a creation by a living organism, we should not be surprised to find that novels have fractal geometry. Further, “A geometrical shape has a scale, a characteristic size. To Mandelbrot, art that satisfies lacks scale, in the sense that it contains important elements at all sizes” (117). A good novel (that satisfies the reader) lacks scale, in the sense that it contains important elements at all scales, from words to plot.

The importance of looking at fractal distributions of words can be understood in Prigogine’s explanation of what occurs in a dissipative system: “One of the most interesting aspects of dissipative structures is their coherence. The system behaves as a whole, as if it were the site of long-range sources. ...the system is structured as though each molecule were “informed” about the overall state of the system” (171), a dissipative system being one that has both structure and disorder in it (143). One can see a sentence as having this very structure (Turner, The Culture of Hope). One can, in a sense, see how each “molecule” of the word “friend” is “informed” about the “overall state of the system” of the novel, helping it to cohere and have meaning. This is also how beauty is created: literature achieves beauty through linguistic density. Charles Kahn defines linguistic density as “the phenomenon by which a multiplicity of ideas are expressed in a single word or phrase” (89). This occurs in the relationship between the sign and the signified

if by sign we mean the individual occurrence of a word or phrase in a particular text, and by signified we mean an idea, image, or verbal theme that may appear in different texts. Then density is a one-many relation between sign and signified; while resonance [among signs] is a many-one relation between different texts and a single image or theme. (89)
One form of resonance “is a repetition of the very same word,” while others include “occurrences of the same theme in cognate words” (90), “the recurrence of a single image or theme which may or may not be expressed by the very same words: sleeping and waking” and “between words of similar or related meanings” (90). We can see this when we compare the graphs for “life” and for “live”. One is a noun, the other a verb, and yet the graphs independently give fractal distributions of words, though those fractals have a different geometry than did the distribution for the word “friend”. We would, of course, expect there to be differences in the fractal patterns for different words. What would be unusual, it seems to me, would be if one did come across words similarly patterned within a word. It would certainly suggest a strong correlation between the meanings of the two words. But let us look at the words live and life. First, Live:

And now let us look at Life:

The first thing to note is that they appear to be almost mirror images of each other in the way the major peaks are distributed. But it is life, with the most occurrences of the word, which is the stronger theme-word. And it has the stronger fractal geometry too, with the flatter single- followed by double-peaks pattern. We do see a similar pattern between “live” and “friend” to the extent that the single-double-peak pattern is there, but the pattern is less obvious because of the high number of words spread between them. However, we also notice here that there are very large peaks in each of these, particularly, again, in the graph for “live.” For the peak at 78,000, we have the repetition of the word “live” starting on pg. 176, where Sue is asking her husband, Phillotson, to allow her to move out. To which he replies: ‘And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?’ And she responds with: ‘Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude.’ He asks her to consider his reputation, and she agrees instead to live in his house, but separate from him. What we have in this passage is the irony of them talking about her living with Jude, while "living" is hardly what is being proposed in her staying with Phillotson. Thus we have a bifurcation of the meaning of “living” in this peak. We know she will not really live if she continues to live with Phillotson, and this is confirmed in the next chapter when she jumps out of the window of her bedroom to escape her husband when he accidentally walks into her bedroom to go to bed. She says she was asleep when she did it – and perhaps she was half-asleep – but what this then suggests is such a deep disconnect between living and living with Phillotson versus her desire to live with Jude, that it became expressed in a leap from a second story bedroom window rather than having to sleep in the same bed with her husband.

These graphs and the analysis they suggest is highly suggestive of further work in this direction. More works of literature should be analyzed using this method, to see what sorts of patterns develop in other works, to see how theme-words are developed. It seems likely that it would be in long prose works, particularly in novels, where fractal patterns of word distributions would be seen. There is a limit to the level of complexity that is comfortably taken in by the human brain. Thus we would expect simpler (though likely still fractal) patterns of word distribution in more poetic works such as Shakespeare’s plays, since there is already a great deal of complexity in the rhythms and the rhymes and other poetic techniques. But the apparent simplicity of prose allows for the development of more complex fractal word patterns, allowing for a different kind of meaning development of the theme-words. And it might also be interesting to look at both the retention of fractal patterns and development of the meanings of theme-words for a particular novelist, as well as the history of such patterns and theme-words through the history of literature. Can we find a genealogy of the development of the word “friend” that is traceable through the use of the kind of fractal pattern Hardy uses? And is the kinds of fractal patterns of word distribution limited? And what about issues of translation? Can a translation be judged better than another if it maintains these patterns? These and many other questions can be raised and investigated using this technique I have introduced here.

III. A Tragic Conclusion

2008-03-09T09:44:00.001-07:00

But I could be wrong. About everything I have written about in this work.

Factually wrong – not artistically wrong.

The beauty and grandeur of an interpretation of the world (alias philosophy) is what is now decisive for its value, i.e. it is judged as art. Its form will probably change: The rigid mathematical formula (as in Spinoza) which had such a soothing influence on Goethe now remains justified only as an aesthetic means of expression. (Nietzsche, PT, 49)

Even if all the science used by a philosopher or theorist turns out to be completely wrong sometime in the future, that does not matter. Aristotle’s ideas on science have been mostly disproven. Does that make Aristotle obsolete? Of course not. What is left after science has disproven certain elements of a philosopher’s work is the art: “philosophy does not follow the course of the other sciences, even if certain of the philosopher’s territories gradually fall into the hands of science. Heraclitus can never be obsolete” (PT, 53). I can only hope what I have written remains poetically true.

But there is no promise even of this. Influence waxes and wanes. Or I may be ignored during my lifetime, only to be rediscovered, or ignored completely. This is part of the tragedy of living, acting, and working. We do not know how much, if any, influence we will have – or if that influence will be positive or negative, no matter what our intentions. How else could the anti-nationalist, anti-socialist, anti-nihilist hater of anti-Semites be adopted by the anti-Semitic, nihilistic, National Socialists? Or, in a far less extreme misuse, how could the pluralistic postmodernists adopt the ideas of a man who said that “If we are ever to achieve a culture, unheard-of artistic powers will be needed in order to break the unlimited knowledge drive, in order to produce unity once again. Philosophy reveals its highest work when it concentrates the unlimited knowledge drive and subdues it to unity” (PT, 30)? Nietzsche wants to “produce unity once again,” while the postmodernists, particularly through deconstruction, have only contributed to the “unlimited knowledge drive.” We must not only unify knowledge, but “The culture of a people is manifest in the unifying mastery of their drives: philosophy masters the knowledge drive; art masters ecstasy and the formal drive;  masters , [agape masters eros], etc.” (PT, 46). We must unify our drives into art, we must unify eros, which isolates the loved from the unloved, into agape, brotherly love, the love of all. This is not to say we should sacrifice the one to the other. We must remember that Nietzsche does not want one side or the other to win, since if one side wins, that will be the end of agon, the end of creativity. Both are necessary.

Thus, I am willing to stand by this work, knowing I may be wrong about some things in it. I stand by it because in this work I have attempted to unify multiple perspectives, create complexity within simplicity in my style, make a creative work which will hopefully be generative, create rhythms – both regular and fractal – with my style, hierarchically organized the work, and shown the self-similarity of all aspects of the universe. If I may be allowed to be so bold: while Kant suggests in his Metaphysics of Morals that he knows his theory of morals is correct because it is incomprehensible, I will rather suggest that I know what I have presented here is correct because – having all of the above – it is beautiful.

II. Chaos Theory and a Possible Rebirth of Tragedy

2008-03-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

Ernst Fisher, after embracing Hutcheson’s definition of beauty as variety within unity, says that “knowledge of the structural principle of fractal images has led successfully to the discovery of uniformity in the variety of appearances, a condition that evokes the sense of beauty” (67). Fractals are the visual representation of chaos theory, and, in showing a finite space contained within an infinite border, “are the visible sign that freedom is possible” (Fisher, 67-8). This notion of variety in uniformity could be seen as having already been attached to tragic theory by Nietzsche, in his idea of tragedy as a combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in variety and in unity, something he points out are “artistic powers which spring from nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist” (Nietzsche, BT, 18) – in other words, these are “natural artistic impulses” (19), something that makes sense in light of chaos theory. If we understand the tragic as “the conflict felt by creatures who, because of their complex nervous systems, are capable of entertaining notions of infinity and yet who are in some way bounded by finite constraints” (Argyros, 335), we can begin to see the connection between chaos theory and the idea of the tragic. Tragedy is precisely about our inability to be unnatural, despite our best efforts. Any attempt by us to be unnatural will result in nature reasserting itself – tragically, if necessary.

If we have beings who are finite, but who entertain notions of infinity, and who live in a world that is itself fractaline (Fisher, Mandelbrot, et al), which is to say, finite, with the promise of infinity, we would expect to have beings capable of tragic action. We would have someone like Oedipus who thinks there is no end to what he could and should know – not realizing there are some things just too terrible to know. Oedipus has the “genuine confidence that the shortcomings of the present can be overcome in the future” (Argyros, 338), as Oedipus has shown in the past. All he needs is information, and he is confident he can solve the puzzle of what is causing the plague in Thebes. If we understand chaos theory from the consideration of “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions” (Argyros, 340-1), we could find the situation of the innocent, and apparently insignificant, dropping of a handkerchief leading to the tragic deaths of Othello and Desdemona. Tragedies occur on the edge order and chaos, with order threatening to slip into chaos, chaos being created through butterfly effects of small occurrences.

Insofar as chaos theory shows these elements we find in Sophoclean and Shakespearean tragedies to be fundamental features of the world, including our participation in the world, we can see that tragedy still has a strong role to play in contemporary culture – by emphasizing this aspect of nature, showing us that, as Fraser says, no final victory over evil is possible, since it is often difficult to know what the good is. And “even if we assume that it is possible to know what the good is, efforts to realize it are diverted from the agent’s original intentions and end up having evil effects” (Argyros, 343). For the audience, tragedy presents to us “our deep fear that every step we take forward on what we think is the road of progress may really be a step toward a foreordained rendezvous with disaster” (Knox, 133). Romeo and Juliet’s priest certainly did have good intentions in all of his actions – but because of the lateness of a letter, the deaths of the young couple became certain.

If “today’s tragic hero must live with the unresolvable conflict between transcendence and finitude without a sure sense of what transcendence or finitude means or how his or her actions can succeed or fail” (Argyros, 346), then the author of a tragedy must make it clear to the audience that these things are encompassed in the world as a chaotic system – that the heroes, even if not themselves aware they are bounded (and usually, they are not), have to be shown to be bounded by something. In a contemporary tragedy, biology would be a good element. E.O. Wilson envisions human action as bound by a long, stretchy tether to our biological human nature. So long as we act within the bounds of our biological nature, there is no danger of tragedy. But humans are not satisfied with staying within bounds – we feel the need to at least try to break out. We are, if nothing else, the rebellious species. If we consider Oedipus’ situation as his trying to overstep physis through nomos – in his case, physis containing the gods too as physical reality – and reimagine physis as physics/chemistry/biology, with nomos in each case being the human attempt to get beyond physis, we can see how adaptable such an approach to tragedy could be to modern understanding. The view of the world as a chaotic system also shows us how we can have both mystery and certainty (this is best seen in how Hawkins refers to chaos theory as “deterministic chaos”), which, as Camus points out, is necessary to have tragedy, since “If all is mystery, there is no tragedy. If all is reason, the same thing happens. Tragedy is born between light and darkness and rises from the struggle between them” (303).

So what, if anything, could make contemporary culture receptive to tragedy? Tragedy seems only to arise at certain times – the Age of Tragedy of Greece, the time of Shakespeare. Tragedies seem to arise during a conflict between a traditional view and an emergent view of the world (Argyros, 338). Knox notes that

The fifth century in Athens saw the birth of the historical spirit; the human race awakened for the first time to a consciousness of its past and a tentative confidence in its future. The past came to be seen no longer as a golden age from which there had been a decline if not a fall, but as a steady progress from primitive barbarism to the high civilization of the city-state. (140)

Spariosu notes that this same time period was a move from archaic (Homeric) to median (Platonic, Aristotelean) values. Camus too agrees with this view of tragedy, when he says in “On the Future of Tragedy,” that “great periods of tragic art occur, in history, during centuries of crucial change, at moments when the lives of whole peoples are heavy both with glory and with menace, when the future is uncertain and the present dramatic” (296). In other words, “the tragic age always seems to coincide with an evolution in which man, consciously or not, frees himself from an older form of civilization and finds that he has broken away from it without yet having found a new form that satisfies him” (298). In Shakespeare, particularly in Hamlet, we see a move from Medieval Man to Modern Man, with Hamlet being the Modern Man, educated, thoughtful, unwilling to act without putting considerable thought into the issue, and Hamlet’s father and uncle both being Medieval Men, unafraid to act to get what they want, without thought. The tragedy occurs when Modern Man Hamlet has to still deal with the Medieval value system, and is forced to act within it. Shakespeare deals with this transition in a different way when MacBeth, who has consulted witches and therefore has been making decisions based on mysticism, is defeated by a man whose very life is owed to medical science, having been born by Caesarean section. Again, we see a similar thing in Euripides’ Bakkhai, where the king, trying to be sensical and even-minded, is faced with the very archaic-value-driven Dionysus. In Bakkhai, archaic values may have won for the moment, but we know median values will win out in the end. In Shakespeare, where the one representing the old value system is a fellow human being, we get the satisfaction of seeing the representative of the old system die at the hand of the representative of the new system, even as we have to witness the tragic death of the hero. All of this being said, we must return to the question of what, if anything, could make the contemporary culture receptive to tragedy? Is our culture in such a transition period?

Since the Renaissance, the West has been in the Modern Era, where man is no longer a man of action, but of thought. One gets Ages of Enlightenment and of Reason only through contemplation. And the Romantics, though advocates of action, actually did a lot more thinking – this is how so many books and poems got written. Even the prime promoter of action, Nietzsche, actually spent most of his time reading, thinking, and writing. And those influenced by him mostly only wrote about the problems of thinking people like themselves: Thomas Mann in A Death in Venice, Gide in The Immoralist, Sartre in Nausea, Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek, and Camus in The Fall. And since “the tragic world is a world of action, and action is the translation of thought into reality” (Bradley, 20), we can see the Modern Era is not an era of tragedy. We further see that Existentialism is really nothing more than a further development of the ideas of the Modern Era, and is just a restatement of Rousseau’s Blank Slate, with Postmodernism just a further development of that. If we are only products of history, language, culture, etc., then changing those things will change our nature. Such is the belief in the blank slate. The gist of Steiner’s argument in The Death of Tragedy is that “the romantic vision of life is non-tragic” (128) – and our world view remains essentially romantic. At the same time, this Romantic rebellion against Newtonian determinism that has characterized our world for so long has recently been challenged on several fronts, particularly through chaos theory – and this is the potential source of a contemporary rebirth of tragedy.

The new traditional view of the world is that of the blank slate, which has been tied in with the thinking man of the Modern Era. Throughout this period, emphasis on the Other, particularly in the German tradition, has resulted in increasing fragmentation, leading to fragmented, pluralist, multicultural postmodernism’s collage-montage approach to the world. This modernist world view resulted in the fragmentation – the splitting in two – of tragedy in Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, with the tension between freedom and necessity (determinism) being split into the Romantic story The Wild Palms and the Naturalist story Old Man. The tragic world view is shown, in this strange, bifurcated novel, to have been split asunder – it is only through bringing these two elements together again that we can get a return to tragedy. Chaos theory shows us how this is possible, by showing us the world is both free and determined, both certain and uncertain at the same time. But “fragmentary” is precisely how Doczi defines knowledge. Thus, one could classify the Modern Era as the Era of Knowledge – at the expense of wisdom, which Doczi defines as seeing the world as holistic. By seeing the world as both varied (fragmented, something that can be known), and as holistic, one, we can see the world as beautiful once again – and as tragic. This suggests that to view the world as tragic is to view the world as beautiful, as we see in Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as unifying (in an agonal way) variety and unity through the Apollonian and Dionysian – the beautiful being affirmative. Though a part of the Modern Era, Nietzsche is one of the first to act as the answer to it, including the Modernist and Postmodernist variations of that world view (who both misread Nietzsche because of their reading him through Cartesian and Rousseauean lenses).

I believe that the understanding of the world through chaos theory, as well as our understanding of ourselves and our basic human nature through sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both of which show that human nature meets the requirements of chaos theory in being both bounded and free within those bounds – something game theory is increasingly showing us, by helping us understand that many good rules create far more freedom (chess, which has a nearly infinite number of possible games) than no rules, or very few (checkers, which has a small, calculable number of games that can be played) – can be the preliminary developments of a new world view that will take us beyond the Modern Era, just as the Renaissance took us into the Modern Era from the Medieval Era. In The Modern Era, Rousseau managed to introduce to us the idea of the Golden Age of the past in the idea of the Noble Savage – anthropology is still trying to recover from this idea (Fox). We are beginning to see the suggestion of a view of history as improving, similar to the one Knox claims happened in Greece – only this time, people like Robert Wright are using game theory to show how there has been cultural, moral, and technological progress in a global sense. This contradicts the postmodern world view of progress being impossible (even in understanding progress as an increase in complexity, and capable of tragically slipping back into less complex states), seeing instead only change.

Considering the postmodernists’ tendency to be anti-science and anti-technology (the two things that most clearly do show progress), instead concentrating more on art, literature, and philosophy (where I would have to agree that notions of “progress” are entirely nonsensical), we should not be surprised. In fact, both world views are true – human culture both progresses and does not progress, but only changes. It depends on which aspect of the culture one is looking at. But this situation, too, is a ripe one for tragedy, since a tragedy could be written showing an agonal conflict between the forces of “progress” and the forces of “change,” of science and the arts. As one who believes the sciences and the arts and humanities should be brought together, so that the knowledge of science informs the wisdom of the arts and humanities, just as this wisdom informs scientific knowledge, I find this idea of unification exciting – while realizing too the potential tragic consequences. Steiner points out that “Instead of altering or diminishing their tragic condition, the increase in scientific resource and material power leaves men even more vulnerable” (6). The one with the view of infinity will necessarily, at some point, get reined in by the finite one. There is no end to the minutiae science can investigate – and to the changes that can happen over time. Thus scientific knowledge can progress infinitely. But art and philosophy only uncover aspects of existence we have forgotten – thus, wisdom in this sense is finite. Thus, we get the apparently ironic situation of (scientific) knowledge actually being the infinite one, and (artistic) wisdom being the finite one, with wisdom keeping knowledge in check, just as the finite space of a fractal holds in place its infinite border. Chaos theory helps us to see the finite-infinite tension in wisdom and knowledge, and thus shows us a tragic possibility.

In many ways people still consider the past to have been more moral than the present. People are constantly talking about how much better things were when they were children, when their parents were children, etc., and that things appear to just be getting worse and worse. But Wright notes that the philosopher Peter Singer has suggested that things could be getting better. This is an idea I myself had developed independently, and have only recently discovered that my great new idea was previously suggested by not only Peter Singer, but by Charles Darwin – it is the notion of the expanding tribe. Humans have two contradictory ways of viewing people: through the eyes of xenophobia, and through the eyes of xenophilia. We simultaneously fear and are attracted to the exotic, the unknown. This attraction is very often realized in sexual attraction. In tribal warfare, we want to kill all the men, but we want to take all the woman back as wives (think of the rape of the Sabines). Xenophobia makes perfectly good sense if you are a tribal hunter-gatherer. Those who saw new people and then ran out to joyously greet them typically got a spear through the body, while those who saw a new person, and then killed them, lived to reproduce. At the same time, attraction to the exotic is good, as it creates greater genetic diversity. Further, there are good political reasons to make friends with neighboring tribes – often to do battle with other tribes you hate more. But if we start befriending other tribes, strengthening that bond through trade, etc., we soon have a confederation. And with a strong enough leader from one, a chiefdom. Soon you have large cities and nations, which are so large one cannot possibly know everyone in the city or nation. And with enough expansion, one cannot recognize tribal (and, eventually, racial) differences. It makes little sense, if you are an American, to hate someone on account of their race, since this country has no real racial foundations (this does not prevent people from trying, though). With increasing global trade and interdependence, hatred of someone because of their race and/or nationality will increasingly make less and less sense. As such, our xenophilia (and plain old selfishness in wanting to make money from trade) will override, over the long term, our xenophobia. This will result in an increase in moral behavior. For example, murder is considered immoral in all cultures. What differs is what is considered murder. But it is always murder to kill someone of your own tribe who is not otherwise doing something wrong. And it is never murder to kill your foreign enemies. But what happens when we collapse the idea of “foreign”? What happens when people who look very different from you are people you consider to be in your own tribe? It becomes increasingly difficult to go to war, to kill people who do not look, act, or dress like you. Now, this does not mean such things will not happen. The 20th Century is filled with examples of people killing people in other “tribes,” including people we would consider to be within a “tribe.” But at the same time, how else does one explain the fervent outrage we have seen in the 20th Century at such things as the Holocaust, when it was considered the height of morality to slaughter Jews during the Inquisition? The “problem” with an expansionist view of morality is precisely its tragic aspect. A Holocaust now would be a more terrible thing than was the one during WWII, which was itself far, far more terrible than the one during the Inquisition. The problem with climbing high is that the fall is much farther – and far more terrible. And the very notion of progress contains within it the idea of regress. If we can go forward, we can fall back too. And the farther forward we push, the farther back we can fall – and the more tragic the consequences. If we see history and morality both as progressing, we have a world where tragedy is increasingly possible. Turner goes so far as to say that

true hope necessarily implies tragedy, and true tragedy implies hope. Tragic loss would not be tragic if what was lost were not worth having in the first place – so valuable that even if we knew in advance that it would be lost, we would choose to have it anyway. And hope would not be hope it if did not necessarily project itself into a future world of uncertainty, even one in which evil may well triumph (259)

If we understand the world as getting better, “The world that is to come will be the more tragic, for being the more beautiful and free and wise and holy, and the more these good things for being the more tragic” (Turner, 260). This view is supported by Camus in his essay “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée”: “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love or danger it would be almost easy to live” (201). But who would want to live in such a world? And who would not want to live in a world more beautiful, hopeful, magnificent, and full of love than is the one we live in? But to desire such a world is to precisely desire a world ripe for tragedy.

Now, as if the tragic possibilities of a more progressivist view of history and of morality (which is not necessarily an always optimistic view, in the same way that Marxism and Christianity are optimistic, since for each of them, there is an absolute certainty of a particular world to come, while this progressivist view I am suggesting is progress as increasing complexity, not leading to any sort of utopia, but instead to a world that is better, but much less definably better, since we often do not know what “better” really is until we get there and see it – this is why Steiner says “the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism are anti-tragic” (324), and thus identifies them as the world views that brought about the death of tragedy – though one could equally argue that something like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a tragedy in the same sense that Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is a tragedy insofar as both end with redemption, suggesting that there could be a Christian tragic metaphysics), and the suggested new tragic relationship between knowledge and wisdom, and the understanding of the world as a chaotic system were not enough to create a new tragic milieu, the new fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have provided us with an understanding of human nature that allows us to see human action as tragic. This has already been suggested above in my brief discussion of physis and nomos in ancient Greek tragedy. This new view of the biological basis for human nature provides us with a new physis with which to put our contemporary nomos in conflict. One could imagine any number of scenarios where a person’s understanding of their basic nature – perhaps because they continue to believe in the blank slate world view – comes into conflict with their biological nature. What else is the overprescription of behavior-altering drugs such as Ritalin in the United States (in western Europe it is prescribed at 10% of the rate it is in the United States) but an overzealous application of the view that human nature is infinitely malleable – even if that malleability is now seen as achievable through drugs? This can result in a tragic situation precisely because drugs such as these do have their appropriate uses – when properly used, in conjunction with a proper understanding of our biology. At the same time, we do not know the long-term effects of using behavior-altering drugs, especially on those who do not actually need the drugs. Certainly it is the potential for misuse in the direction of prescribing them to people who do not need them that can have tragic results. But why would anyone want to prescribe such a drug to someone who does not need it? Precisely because there are those out there who think we can and should mold behavior beyond its natural tendencies. And drugs is not the only possibility. One could imagine a story of someone using Skinnerian techniques to create any number of tragic situations in their attempt to force people beyond the limits dictated by their basic human nature. At the same time, this is not to say that just because it is in our nature to do something that it is good. This falls into the fallacy of believing that everything natural is necessarily good (we can thank Rousseau for this idea too). One can also have tragic situations created precisely because of our human natures – particularly, the conflict that can arise from different aspects of our human nature. I previously noted that humans have a tendency both towards xenophobia and xenophilia. Is this not precisely the conflict Shakespeare shows us in Romeo and Juliet? Certainly the 20th Century is full of precisely these kinds of tragic situations.

Another aspect of the world that makes it conducive to tragedy (as if the above were not enough) is the fact that we seem to be at a crossroads Camus recognizes as necessary to give birth to tragedy, in that periods of tragic art “mark a transition from forms of cosmic thought impregnated with the notion of divinity and holiness to forms inspired by individualistic and rationalist concepts” (297). Eagleton agrees with this idea, saying we see tragedy “emerging from a tension between old religio-mythical ways of thought and new politico-legal ones which still remain cloudy and contested” (143). It may appear strange to suggest we are now at a similar historical crossroad, since religion certainly does not appear to have the power it did during, say, ancient Greece and Medieval Europe, but a religious view of the world is precisely what we are abandoning in abandoning the Rousseauean Romanticism that has characterized the last half of the Modern Era. Pinker argues that the Blank Slate view of human nature is taken on faith by many, particularly those on the Left. And it is certainly defended by them with a religious fervor. The same has been true of Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage. And, in the form of Marxism, Romantic politics has a religiousity to it too – creating the same kinds of hermeneutic circles as religion (I know God exists because the Bible says he does, and I know the Bible is true because it is the word of God, and the idea that you cannot see this truth because the Devil is blinding you to it, vs. claiming the bourgeoisie cannot see the truth of Marxism because they are bourgeoisie, and if they were proletarians, then it would be clear to them – it is the same argument that you are being blinded by the Devil). We have ended up with a plethora of secular religions, that are no less religions for being secular. They are designed to provide Truth, to provide The Answer(s). If postmodernism is good for anything, it is that it did work to do away with many such secular-religious notions (while also retaining the religious belief in the blank slate). But science, which does not claim to provide Truth, but only facts – and these facts only work to raise more questions, while claiming it does not and cannot have The Answer – is precisely, for these reasons, not religious, though there are a few secular-religious beliefs surrounding it. One cannot precisely predict what the new rational world view will be, as it is the purpose of tragedy to move us toward it (though I am imagining an affirmation of the evolutionary, chaos-theory world view). But one thing I think we can say is with the rise of a contemporary tragic art, we would see the final death of Rousseauean Romanticism, and its Marxist and postmodernist offspring.

One final element that suggests the time is ripe for a new birth of tragedy is the development of a new view of time – I am particularly speaking of the umwelt theory of time (also, the evolutionary theory of time, and the theory of time as conflict) of J. T. Fraser. Schmidt says tragedy is the “poetics of time” (149), and that “the crisis which the tragedy unfolds is a crisis of time and, as such needs to be understood as opening me to the final meaning of time, namely, my death” (148). This is why he says rhythmical language has typically been used in tragedies, since “rhythm mimes the course of life” (149) by drawing our attention to time, to ourselves as time, to the passing of time, and therefore to our awareness of death. With Fraser’s understanding of time, we have time itself emerging from “randomness” into “order” – or, at least, human order. Fraser calls his theory of time both “the hierarchical theory of time and the theory of time as conflict” – the latter because “in its dynamic features it is a general theory of conflicts” (TCHV, 21). As a hierarchical theory, it has a fractal depth, and its fractal geometry shows how the deterministic world has elements of probability and of randomness, as recent work in chaos theory has shown. Lower levels of reality bleed through to higher levels, pure energy through to the quantum world, both through to the macrophysical world, all of these through to the biological world, and all of these through to the human (minding) world. Each of the lower levels are able to be experienced by the levels above. When this happens on the level of physics, we get fractal images. The world is shown to be both free and determined. When this happens with people, we get dreams and art – and, sometimes, madness.

For Fraser, tragedy arises because we feel our inbetweenness. “The unfolding of tragedy demands uninterrupted reflections upon the past, the future, and upon the choice among different paths of action thinkable in the present. These elements, skillfully combined, create what has been called the tragic present” (Time, 294). Time is literally of the essence of tragedy. “The moods of time are ceaselessly evoked and are intricately mixed: we feel the terror of chaos, the call of continuity, the demands, pain, and satisfaction of being alive, and the predicament of being able to think in terms of noetic time” (294). And tragedy is precisely the lot of humans, because “only humans can make a series of deliberate choices in support of an idea, a symbol they created by distilling what they judged permanent in their experience of time” (295). This is why,

when it comes to time-knowing humans with a single life and death, the appropriate drama is not heroic comedy but tragedy, because it must involve the decisions a person must make in terms of his assets – life and limb, love and hatred, freedom and duty – and in full awareness of the finity of his life. (TCHV, 160)

Our decisions and actions will have consequences – and one of the consequences could be death. This is tragic for each person, we being the species aware of our own deaths. And in a theory of time as conflict, tragedy is precisely the art form one would expect to see – and not just because Nietzsche sees the world, too, as agonal, since:

Tragedy describes a world where conflict is endemic, resolvable only in transient fashion, and where men and women, to be able to live with their dreams of a better world, must make present sacrifices for very chancy future returns. The tragic is a form of unresolvable conflict in the nested hierarchy of such conflicts: it is native to the nootemporal and sociotemporal worlds. In this it joins the lower-order unresolvable creative conflicts: those of life (between growth and decay) and those of matter (between forms of permanence and the ever-present chaos). (TCHV, 162)

This final comment brings us back to the issue of chaos theory and its relationship to tragedy. The time seems ripe for the creation of new tragic art. And this new view of time as conflict, and nature as deterministic chaos, show us a world where tragedy is possible – and, indeed, likely. We are at what seems to be the end of the Modern Era, and the chaos we have seen through the 20th Century, with the demise of the various experiments in Marxism, and, even now, in the final throes of the conflicts of the 20th Century in the current War on Terrorism (brought about in part by the way the United States and the USSR fought each other) seems on the order of that which, in a Prigoginian manner, will give rise to a new, higher social order, as we saw developing after the Renaissance (though much of the political realization has unfolded only slowly). Perhaps the current War on Terrorism is precisely that transitional element from the old into the new, and the beginning of something new. This past century has come about precisely because of the Rousseauean rejection of tragedy and the belief it fostered of our “perfectability” through social engineering. It failed – precisely because it did not understand the tragic situation of man. Insofar as postmodernism has embraced such Rousseauean beliefs as the blank slate (even if it does reject the idea of the perfectability of man), it too is incapable of creating a tragic art. To have a tragic art, one must be at the same time Romantic and Naturalistic, pluralist and unified, knowledgeable and wise, deterministic and chaotic – in other words, one can only have tragedy in a non-linear environment, and one can only create a tragedy if one views the world in this way. To create a tragedy, one must be able to see the world as beautiful.

Chapter 10: On Tragedy: I. The Modern Era: The Death of Tragedy

2008-03-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

In “The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture” from Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (McKeon, ed.), Franco Moretti argues that the Modern Era has been a pro-youth period, a time of European man’s adolescence. This, he argues, was the necessary conditions under which the European novel evolved, with its concern with play and with telling the stories of youth, of their development, education, and socialization. This also helps explain why the Modern Era has been one of rebellion, whether political or artistic, or even against the agonal nature of physis/logos, as we see in Hegel and Marx (it is this conflict which resulted in the 20th Century enacting tragedy rather than more safely performing it in artistic rituals). Postmodernism is a rebellion against Modernism, Modernism a rebellion against Naturalism, Naturalism a rebellion against Realism, Realism a rebellion against Romanticism, Romanticism a rebellion against the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment a rebellion against religion. All this after the rebellion of the Renaissance. One could perhaps see European history after the rise of Christianity as the long, serious-minded childhood of belief, finally giving way to the adolescent Modern Era. The novel has been the genre of this adolescence, giving us stories of adolescence, of Werther’s rebellion of love, of Jude’s rebellion against the class structures preventing him from becoming an intellectual, etc. These rebellions are all legitimate rebellions – against various forms of repression – the kinds of rebellions adolescents undergo in the move from the legitimate protections they had as children, unjust now that they are becoming adults. If this metaphor is accurate, this would suggests, once European Man’s adolescence is over, that adulthood should rise to take its place. But with adulthood comes the possibility of giving birth to a new child – and a repetition of the cycle – in the same way that the adult Greek culture (even if it was a Roman-controlled Greece) mated with the adult Hebrew culture to create the infant Christian culture, which reached adolescence in the Renaissance, and is now due to enter into its own adulthood.

But let us take into consideration some literary consequences of this late adolescence with Mann’s A Death in Venice and Gide’s The Immoralist. I want to discuss them together because they are so similar in their basic stories: an intellectual becomes sexually obsessed with a young boy. But it is in the different ways these two works deal with the situation that we find them uncovering two different existential situations we in the Modern Era have found ourselves in.

Mann presents us with the following situation: an intellectual (a poet) goes to Venice, where he finds himself not really in charge of his life – the gondolier will not listen to him, but takes him straight to the hotel; at the hotel he finds himself hopelessly in love with a young boy he sees; when he tries to leave, his things end up accidentally sent back to the hotel, making him have to spend the night, and eventually not leave – and so in love he cannot leave, even once he learns there is a plague in Venice. He is the consummate man of inaction. He will not act, so cannot affect or change anything. He will not act on his love, but only stalks the boy. He is a toothless, clawless predator (something we may be happy about, for the boy’s sake). This story of a toothless, clawless predator only works to highlight the impotence of modern man, with his tendency to over-think things, until it is too late to act. While Hamlet, who is a prime example of this situation at the entrance of European culture – which includes American culture – into the Modern Era, takes a long time to act, he does, in the end, act. But Aschenbach does not do a thing throughout the novel, which only leads him to finally die of the plague that has hit Venice, since he can neither act on his love for the boy, nor tear himself away from him. Mann shows us the possibility of impotence due to overintellectualization. Aschenbach only thinks about living – he never actually lives.

With Gide’s Michel, however, we have a somewhat different situation. Michel too is an intellectual, but whereas Aschenbach dies of his sickness, Gide shows us what could have happened had Aschenbach lived, as Michel does. The difference is that Michel is an historian, not an artist – which creates a somewhat different crisis for him in the novel. When Michel recovers, he sheds the mores of society, learns to love life, and revels in the senses. He finds it difficult to return to his life as an intellectual – finding instead a more pleasurable life tending his property – or, more accurately, getting into mischief with his property. The problem is, Michel is only playing at mischief, while those who actually live the life he is imitating manage to take advantage of him. This game being a failure, along with his wife getting sick, convinces Michel to travel – eventually back to North Africa. There, his wife dies, and Michel finds himself involved with a young boy and the young boy’s sister – the latter whom he is sleeping with, though his observation that the boy appeared jealous, and that he was not adverse to the possible consequences thereof, suggests homosexual possibilities. Michel is searching for a life that better fits this great insight he received with his recovery. One could imagine, had this happened to Aschenbach rather than Michel, that Aschenbach would have known what to do – since Aschenbach was already a poet. Michel received the kind of insight Nietzsche associated with great artists – but Michel has not figured out that it is art that he should be pursuing. One could presume that Aschenbach would have continued as a poet, but would have become a greater poet than he is in the story. By the end of The Immoralist, Michel is admitting to homosexual attractions, to essentially being without means to get by, having wasted his money and separated himself from his former work. Is this where living life according to Nietzsche’s dictums will get us? This could be precisely the situation we should be in: where we have no prospects, but every possibility, and nonetheless find ourselves happy and ready to press forward (one is reminded of the line on the first page of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.”). In the end, we are left not knowing what Michel is going to do. What should he do? What would we do if we were in his position? That, perhaps, is precisely the point. What we have with Gide is the existential possibility of the kind of insight that makes for great artists being received by someone who does not realize they should be making art.

Each of these characters represent one of two major existential categories of Modern man: the man who does not act, but has all the resources available to him to do something great if only he would act, and the man who does act, but has neither the knowledge nor the wisdom to do anything positive with his abilities. Michel knows neither the possibilities of making art, nor of truly engaging life. Michel is the man with the artist’s soul, but does not realize it. Aschenbach is the artist without the artist’s soul. He is the thinker without action. Following Descartes, the Modern Era has split people in two: body and soul. The consequence of this split is a world containing either Aschenbach or Michel, but very few whole people.

With postmodernism – the postscript to modernism – we have entered into a sort of late adolescence, where we are now rebelling against ourselves. If not just for the sake of rebelling. Modernism is the philosophy of eternal youth – specifically, of rebellious adolescence. It sees the world as a series of constant breaks with, rather than a continuation of, the past. It is anti-tragic. The belief that we can or should break with the past is to deny the past, and the attempt to deny the past is the attempt to deny tragedy. While modernist theorists promoted this myth, most modernist artists and writers themselves would be very surprised to learn they radically broke from the past and learned nothing from it. Much current scholarship has shown our greatest modernist artists and writers were devout students of the past. Yet, this myth of continual rebellion pervades our culture in the guise of postmodernism.

A specific example is the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, whose theory of science being a series of revolutionary breaks with the past is a prime example of modernist mythology. He bases his philosophy on the history of physics, so let us look at that history. He supposes that Einstein’s theory of relativity was a radical break with Newtonian physics. But this ignores the fact that Newton himself recognized that there was a problem with his theory of gravity regarding the orbit of Mercury. This problem was worked on continuously by physicists until Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. And Einstein himself did not work in a vacuum. His ideas were built on the foundation of all those physicists who came before him. Which is not to take away from the impressive work of Einstein, but, to paraphrase Newton, Einstein was able to see as far as he could because he was standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before him. Also, having been a physicist, Kuhn should have known that Einstein did not overturn Newton. Newton’s ideas are valid for the vast majority of physics between the quantum and galactic levels, as anyone who has taken a semester of university physics knows. No one uses relativity to calculate the velocity necessary to lift a rocket from earth into orbit. Newton’s calculations work just fine. Relativity was, in many ways, merely a fine-tuning of Newton’s theory of gravity, something needed to explain such anomalies as the orbit of Mercury. This is how science works. Scientifically derived knowledge is not constantly overturned, but is more often slowly and subtly modified. To paraphrase a story related by Konrad Lorenz, in science, today’s truth is not tomorrow’s falsehood, but rather tomorrow’s special case.

Much of this is a rebellion against such things as deterministic views of history, including theories of teleology and of progress. But we have seen in this work that the solution is a mixture, as found in the mixture between determinism and randomness in chaos theory. With chaos theory, we can see our belief in a deterministic world is only part of the story – there is a randomness to the universe too that allows for the possibility of free will. So we do not need postmodernism’s rejection of determinism in favor of randomness, nor, for that matter, its rejection of progress or our ability to understand others, or any of its other features. Progress can be seen as possible, though not certain. Just because we are walking forward now, it does not mean we will be walking forward always. And just because we are slipping now, it does not mean we cannot gain our feet later. The ability to walk forward implies the ability to stumble and fall too, or to walk backwards. Thus, we can legitimately say things like, “there has been marked progress in the speed of computers in the past twenty years.” Does this mean the speed of computers will continue to increase? Yes and no. It does suggest computer speed will, in the near future at least, continue to increase. If people did not believe it could, they would not try to make computers go faster. At the same time, there is certainly an upper limit to a computer’s speed, whether limited by the speed of electrons or light. And even then, we will probably continue to find ways to tweak computers to get another nanosecond out of them. So the ideally-fast computer will certainly never be reached, just as we will never see the ultimately fast human, since there is no telling how many fractions of seconds can be shaved off of anyone’s speed. We can also make this comment about things that have happened in the past. It can make sense to say something has progressed to the present time, even if we reject the idea that something will necessarily continue to progress into the future. The story of progress is like any good story – postdictable, if not predictable. We can say after something happened what happened, and why, even if we cannot say what will happen, and why, since the world is not determined. The present and the past are knowable, but not the future (insofar as postmodernism says we cannot know the past, it is also anti-epistemological). So it seems that, at least in science and technology, progress is possible, in this limited understanding of progress, and that it is a necessary belief to hold if advancements are to be made in science and technology.

But arguing for science and technology usually does not get you very far with the anti-science and technology postmodernists. So what about social issues? The history of social issues is one of progress and regress. Groups make advances, only to be pushed back. Jews once fled to Germany to escape anti-Semitism, only to encounter the Holocaust. In recent decades, at least in the United States, there has been much social progress in the way women and ethnic minorities are treated in this country. It is fashionable (and a product of postmodernism) to argue that things are as bad now as they were fifty or a hundred years ago. But if you were to tell an elderly woman or an elderly African-American that there has been no progress in the U.S. regarding the way women and minorities are treated in this country, they would laugh at you. Things have clearly gotten better, and to deny it is to be eminently ahistorical. This is not to say that the way women and minorities are treated could not be better – there is always room for improvement, and we have to fight against our xenophobic tendencies with our equally present xenophilic tendencies – but we cannot effect any effective change if we refuse to acknowledge that anything has changed in a positive way. To treat all times as the same is naive, at best. Has there been progress on these sorts of social issues? I think women and minorities should be treated as equals. Any movement toward greater equal treatment, I consider progress. And I consider it progress because treating people equally – while allowing for their inequalities – makes for a more complex society.

So where does this position against progress come from? Aside from the conservative opposition to progress already noted, and the anti-teleological stance of postmodernism (one with which I agree), it comes out of the postmoderns’ remaining blindly focused on art and philosophy. In dealing with art, literature, and philosophy, it makes no sense at all to talk about “progress.” In what way is stream-of-conscious progress over the Bildungsroman? To make such a statement is to speak nonsense. Is Picasso “improvement” over Michelangelo? A ridiculous concept. Indeed, in these realms, we have changes, but these are changes for which notions of progress or regress are nonsense, even in the sense of progress as an increase in complexity. DeLillo’s novels are certainly no more complex than Rabelais’ novel – nor, likely, any less. What we see instead is an issue of better and worse art reflected in the issue of complexity. DeLillo and Rabelais both are more complex than any romance novel – and that is what makes them literary, and continually interesting. Creative products of the mind reflect the complexities of the minds which create them – and that has not changed. We can, however, say that a world that has both Michelangelo and Picasso, rather than just Michelangelo, in it is a more complex world. In this sense, the mere changes in art have, through the accumulation of artifacts, made for more complex cultures.

Postmodernism has been particularly useful, on the other hand, in foregrounding many important ideas. There is a certain extent to which we cannot know with complete certainty that another understand us. But this is not to say understanding is impossible. It is instead an understanding and acknowledgment that there can be a level of misunderstanding – especially in dealing with written language. But when my friend calls to tell me, “My wife just gave birth to a baby boy,” I know with such certainty what he means, it might as well be absolute. This view of language breaks down with regular conversation among most people, even if it holds true for discussions of art, literature, and philosophy. Postmodernism has also been useful in making us beware of teleological arguments, especially those that lead to utopian visions. And it has been important in decentering us, making us more aware of our thinking as a human in a particular time, in a particular culture. But if we cannot use this information to adjust our thinking, if all we can do is think in this situation, then where has it really gotten us, other than the promise of stagnation? And this is one of the greatest problems I have with postmodernism. All it can do in the end, if we end with postmodernism, is cause stagnation. This is why we are beginning to get popular rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age in their song “Go With The Flow” singing “I want something real to die for / so it is beautiful to live.” Even popular culture is beginning to see the problems with postmodernism – in its inability to give us something real to die for, which is to say, something beautiful to live for. Without such ideas, we stagnate. Without ideas such as progress – even one decoupled from teleology would suffice – we cannot find the desire to change. One thing we can learn from history is that those cultures that went against progress were eventually taken over by those that did believe in progress. And certainly those who believe we should have a more fully human life will win out over any culture that dehumanizes us, as postmodernism seems intent to do. If we replace the dead-end of postmodernism’s myths with a more complex myth, one that incorporates what we have learned from postmodernism with what it has rejected, we can get out of the trap both sides create, and learn to become more human, and live in a more human society – one that affirms life.

II. Roses, Dogwood, and Milkweed – An Application of Scalar Self-Similarity to a Novel

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One way one could use chaos theory to helping one analyze a text is to search the text for elements of scalar self-similarity. Since “fractals consist of patterns that recur on finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense complexity” (Richard P. Taylor, “Order in Pollock’s Chaos, Scientific American, Dec. 2002, 118). The more scalar self-similarity one can find in a novel, for example, the more complex the novel. One should find thematic unity at every level of scale in a great novel (great because more complex) – from chapters and episodes, to scenes and sentences – including word distribution. We have seeon one example of this in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. We can see another, even more complex example of this in William Faulker’s The Sound and The Fury.

In the section narrated by Quentin, Faulkner creates a text full of rich symbolic imagery, none perhaps more full and beautiful than that found on page 77:

She ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses. Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of. Roses. Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed. I said I have committed incest, Father I said. Roses. Cunning and serene.

Quentin’s obsession with his sister, with Caddy’s virginity, drives him to tell his father he committed incest with her, hoping his father will punish him, the first of several times Quentin mentions he told his father he committed incest, though the only time Faulkner combines this “confession” with the images of roses, dogwood, and milkweed.

Faulkner uses flowers throughout this novel, such as the “curling flower spaces” of the first sentence, but he mentions these flowers, roses, milkweed, and dogwood, only here in Quentin’s section and nowhere else in the text. Why, in this section, does Faulkner choose roses, dogwood, and milkweed? And what does he mean by “Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed?” Faulkner places the last two flowers together in an unusual sentence. “Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed.” Faulkner uses milkweed as a visual symbol. Milkweeds bleed when broken, just as a woman bleeds when her hymen breaks. The milkweed does not bleed red, but white. White represents purity and, thus, virginity. When broken, a milkweed bleeds virginal.

Faulkner uses the dogwood, a more complex symbol, because of its use in Christian mythology. According to this mythology, the Romans crucified Christ on a dogwood cross. Previously large, robust trees, after Christ’s crucifixion on a dogwood cross, the dogwood became small and twisted, so no one could ever again be crucified using the tree’s wood. It then began to bloom flowers in the shape of white crosses to commemorate the crucifixion. The white flowers represented the purity of Christ, the dark splashes on the tips of the “petals” (actually bracts), the blood of Christ, and the spiny buds of the true flowers, the crown of thorns. Many believe Christ remained a virgin throughout his life; his virginity and his mother’s virginity when she conceived him are also recalled in the white flowers. Faulkner uses the dogwood to bring to mind the whole of Christianity: purity, because of the dogwood’s white flowers, and virginity, since Christianity started with a virgin birth and because Christ supposedly remained a virgin to his death (according to Christian mythology), as well as the blood and the crown of thorns. The dogwood represents virginity on three levels: Jesus’ purity and presumed virginity, his mother’s virginity, and the color of the flowers - white representing purity and virginity. Quentin places particular importance on virginity, especially his sister’s virginity. He expects his sister to somehow maintain an ideal form of purity, like that represented by Mary and Christ (and milkweeds and dogwood). He does not realize that in the real world ideals cannot and do not truly exist, since we cannot control every aspect of everyone else’s lives (or even of our own), as would be necessary for anyone’s idealized world to exist.
Finally, Faulkner uses roses several times in this section. The first sentence evokes scent, as Quentin similarly remembers the odor of honeysuckles: “She ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses.” The odor of roses, which signifies sorrow and death, had accumulated and become overpowering, as the honeysuckles have become, as Quentin’s repeated references to the odor of honeysuckles in his chapter suggests. Quentin feels sorrow at the loss of his sister’s virginity, and her subsequent pregnancy, and his mind has become very much preoccupied with death on this particular day, since apparently if the world cannot live up to his idealized expectations, he does not want to continue living in it.

But Faulkner does not keep the rose symbolism relegated to odor: “Roses. Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed.” Roses have a complex and, oftentimes, contradictory symbolism. Roses do symbolize purity and, thus, virginity. Christian mythology says the red rose came into being by sprouting from the blood that dripped from the crucified Christ onto the ground, further emphasizing the purity and virginity Quentin wishes his sister still had. But roses, especially red roses, also represent earthly passion, blood, and lust. We give red roses to those we love. Which makes roses not virgins, like dogwoods and milkweeds. Milkweeds bleed white, and thus stay virginal, but roses are red, like blood, like the blood created by a broken hymen. Quentin sees Caddy as closer to a rose than dogwoods and milkweeds. The image of the red rose incites the image of passion, especially sexual passion, which explains why Quentin mentions roses four times. His sister, no longer a virgin, and now pregnant, gets married because of her sexual passions. In classical and medieval symbolism, the rose acts as a symbol of female genitals, which relates again to Quentin’s obsession with Caddy, through her virginity, and his “admission” of incest. Quentin begs his father to punish him by claiming to have committed incest because of the sexual passion he feels for his sister. We do not know if he has actually done this or if he wishes punishment simply for having the desires, but it is the latter which seems most likely, from the references to Quentin’s virginity (78).

Faulkner combines the scent of the rose representing sorrow and death, the thorns of the rose representing martyrdom and pain (which Quentin unquestionably feels), and the flower representing lust, passion, purity, and the female genitals, as well as Time and Eternity. Quentin dwells upon time and eternity throughout his chapter, thinking about the eternity of time, how it comes back on itself because of the curvature of space, making time eternal and causing us to repeat our lives over and over forever (as suggested by Einstein’s theory of relativity and the way Nietzsche’s Eternal Return was understood at the time), which Quentin fully believes will happen, ultimately making his suicide meaningless, since he will relive his life over and over, forever, to create in these sentences a full symbolic picture of the themes in Quentin’s chapter. The rose represents the way Quentin sees life, to the way Quentin feels about life, about his passions, about his sister. She has caused him sorrow and pain because of her passions, because of his own passions for her. The rose’s scent represents death, the thorns the martyrdom he thinks he commits (but a martyr to whom? To himself?). And finally, the flower represents time and eternity. Quentin views time as eternal since space curves time into a circle, making it continuous. Eternity encompasses human life too, as we eventually come back around to where we started to repeat our lives. This reading of Einstein and Nietzsche proves the pointlessness of death and life, meaning Quentin’s committing suicide will have as little meaning as the decision to commit suicide would if he had decided to continue living. The rose evokes all these things.

But what about the fourth invocation of “roses?” What does Faulkner mean by “Roses. Cunning and serene.” The serenity could refer to the serenity of Christ, to the serenity of Time and Eternity, to the serenity, perhaps, behind the final decision to commit suicide. Perhaps Faulkner uses it as another reference to lust and passion, which must be cunning in order to be fulfilled. Or does Faulkner use it as a reference instead to the sentence before, since Quentin thought it cunning to tell his father he committed incest, since his “admission,” or at least the prospect of his father punishing him for it, could bring him serenity? There is also the etymological connection between “cunning” and “woman” in such words as cunnilingus (from Latin cunnus, for vulva), queen, womb, and woman. Or perhaps Faulkner combines these. Quentin’s “admission” turns out not to be cunning, nor does it bring him serenity, because his father does not believe him and therefore refuses to punish him. Willing to allow the rose to grow wild, he refuses to keep Quentin’s passions in check. But Quentin does not want his father to allow him to have these incestuous desires. If he cannot find serenity in the Law of the Father (Freud), he must find it in the only other place where serenity can be found: in death, as represented by the rose’s scent. The rose, representing lust and passion, but also purity and virginity and the Law of God, through the invocation of the image of Christ, and death, represents Quentin’s desires and the moods he feels, of sorrow and pain.

In this short section, Faulkner gives us a richness of symbolic imagery in the invocation of these three flowers. Symbolically, Faulkner neatly summarizes Quentin’s entire section in the central half of this paragraph. Quentin’s attempts to hold Caddy narcissistically in a mirror, only to lose her, her wedding, the confession of incest, the obsession with virginity. With the rose, Faulkner summarizes all of Quentin’s pain and desires, all the themes he expounds upon throughout Quentin’s chapter. In this small section, we can see the beauty and richness of Faulkner’s prose and his symbolism, as well as the scalar self-similarity of this small section to Quentin’s chapter – and to the themes developed throughout the novel.

Chapter 9: Chaos Theory and Literature: I. Strange Attractors

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Chaos and complex systems theory have been discussed at length in this work, and have been applied to understanding everything from the human down. If chaos and complexity theory are relevant for everything in the universe up to and including humans, it does not seem like much of a leap to apply these theories to understanding the arts and literature. Of course, I am not the first by far to delve into the use of chaos theory to understand literature. I have many predecessors: Alexander Argyros, Harriet Hawkins, C. Katherine Hayles, Frederick Turner, et al. My goal has been to show in considerable detail why these theories, in conjunction with game theory, information theory, Fraser’s theory of time, etc., are applicable to understanding the creation and appreciation of art and literature.

In Strange Attractors, Harriett Hawkins points out that chaos theory is an excellent way to analyze literature, since “deterministic chaos is the context, the medium we inhabit in everyday life, ubiquitously allowing for, and indeed mandating individuality too as unpredictability within a physically determined order” (2). We can immediately see how chaos theory

helps to explain why, after centuries, certain works maintain their operational fangs and claws and terrible beauty. They are the artistic equivalents of deterministic chaos, and as such evoke chaotic responses, contradictory interpretations, altogether different generic adaptations. Therefore, as in the artistic tradition itself, their complex metaphorical signifiers keep on floating around in the minds of individual readers (and generations) long after the text was first read. (8)

Chaos theory can explain why certain works have long-term value within and among cultures. More complex works create more ways of seeing the text, breed different interpretations, have people arguing about the text for centuries (sometimes millennia). Any work that creates a large number of interpretations is, according to this theory, a great work with lasting value.

Hawkins further shows how complex works generate new works as new artists attempt to emulate the work they are influenced by – usually in the creation of less complex works. An example she gives is Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was a less complex emulation – which itself had a less complex emulation in the movie version. She points out that another way of knowing a work is a great work of art is to see how many times people try to replicate it. Most of the replicants will be less complex than the original, and will therefore likely be forgotten. But occasionally, works of art will come along which go beyond mere emulation to create another highly complex work of art that will inspire future emulation.

The above works for older works, but how can we determine if a new work is sufficiently complex to fit her definition of a lasting work of value? “When a fractal is viewed on any scale, comparably complex details emerge. And comparably complex details likewise emerge in individual lines, books, actions, and characterizations, as well as on the mythic, narrative and temporal scales of a complex nonlinear work” (18). One way of seeing if a work meets this level of complexity is to ask yourself what it would take to write up a set of instructions to have a writer write any given work. A work is complex if the “instructions” on how to write it (as romance publishers give their writers) would be longer than the work produced (13). This brings us back to what I said earlier about theory, as one could, in a sense, see literary analysis as an attempt (actually, various attempts by various people) to write parts of the instructions of how to write any given work of literature. Using psychological analysis, for example, one could learn various elements of the psychologies of the characters in the work (let us say, a novel). Marxist analysis could point out the various class concerns the author had in mind. Formalism and structuralism could show on a formal and structural level how the novel was constructed. Poststructuralism could point out what the author left out and suggest why. And one could go back to older theories and see what they have to say about works of literature, since “even as chaos theory calls into question comparatively exclusive critical paradigms, it also allows for a retroactive, retrospective understanding of earlier artistic and critical insights commonly brushed aside as outmoded or as too obvious to need further thought” (19). Using chaos theory to understand literature reintroduces the idea of unity within diversity.

Chaos theory shows how these approaches can all work together to create a set of instructions for the reader to both enter the text and to better understand various elements of it, and for potential writers to understand how and why an author did what they did in a given work. It also provides its own contributions to the instructions. Hawkins points out that the butterfly effect helps explain how “an inadvertent dropping of a handkerchief, or someone else’s otherwise insignificant incapacity to tolerate alcohol (as in Othello) – can exponentially compound with other effects and give rise to disproportionate impacts” (16). She proposes this in opposition to “linear-minded moralists [who] have sought to charge tragic heroes and heroines with correspondingly great (quid pro quo) crimes, vices, sins and fatal flaws,” pointing out that “as chaos theory demonstrates, and as had long been obvious in ordinary life (as in comic as well as tragic art) very small, morally neutral, individual effects” (16) can, result in huge, tragic effects.

The themes and conflicts of a potentially great work of literature must themselves be complex, while “it simultaneously establishes what chaos theorists term nonlinear replications, iterations, self-similarities – that is, regular irregularities, structural correspondences (symmetries) and (asymmetrical) contrasts – between characters and actions” (61). Such a work would also seem to never have satisfactory interpretations, because “In complex works of art, as in the fractal formations of nature, there are interactive effects within interactive effects, and the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The holistic interaction between components cannot be analytically dissected precisely because analysis requires segregation” (77). One cannot consider a single chapter of the lengthy instructions of a work to be the complete instructions. This in particular puts deconstruction in a delicate position, since it does not acknowledge emergent properties in its analysis of a work’s smallest parts.

A great work of art is great because it replicates the complexities found in nature. That is the why it satisfies: the various arts “are not literal representations, but [are] metaphorically satisfying because they ‘work like nature’” (83) – they are scalar. All the elements found in a work of great art, “iterations, recursions, self-similarities, symmetries and asymmetries [are] operative in the nonlinear systems of nature, in contrast to the regularities and predictabilities of comparatively linear (generically determined) systems and fictions such as formulaic romance novels” (88). The instructions for such formulaic novels can be written up in an area smaller than the novels that are created. The instructions for the creation of a relatively small work, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, would take up volumes. This is perhaps why it takes so many people longer to enjoy and appreciate great works of literature – but when they do, that is also why

in the long run, the survival of a complex literary “fractal” . . . continuously resonates, on multiple scales – imaginative, aesthetic, intellectual, orderly and disorderly – in the minds and memories of individual readers of successive generations, in very much the same way it continues to resonate in the artistic tradition. (103)

The same can work with looking at the complete literary tradition, as Ngg Wa Thiong’o wants us to do. Many postcolonial theorists have viewed him as promoting pluralism only – but what he actually supports is unity with plurality, as he suggests that

each department of literature while maintaining its identity in the language and country of its foundation should reflect other streams, using translations as legitimate texts of study. An English or French or Spanish or Swahili student should at the same time be exposed to all the streams of human imagination flowing from all centres of the world while retaining his or her identity as a student of English, French, Spanish, or Kiswahili literature. Only in this way can we build a proper foundation for a true commonwealth of cultures and literature. (Moving the Centre, 11)

This allows us the possibility of a more complex cultural tradition, with multiple centers (as a fractal with multiple strange attractors is more complex and beautiful than one with but one strange attractor). He explained this as realizing that
knowing oneself and one’s environment was the correct basis of absorbing the world; that there could never be only one centre from which to view the world but that different people in the world had their culture and environment as the centre. The relevant question was therefore one of how one centre related to other centres. A pluralism of cultures and literatures. (9)
He is not asking people to give up their own traditions – or to lose focus on their own traditions. He is asking instead that we also consider other perspectives, to have beautiful cultures.

III. The Element of Play in Reading, Creating, and Understanding Literature

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Literature is a game in which each writer both abides by already existing rules and creates his own rules, which each reader has to accept upon picking up any particular poem or work of fiction in order to understand and enjoy that particular work. When a professor of literature hears a student say Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is stupid because who ever heard of a man turning into a bug, that may be less a problem of a lack of imagination on the part of the student than a refusal to play by the rules Kafka has set up in his story. If there is no agreement by the reader to the writer’s rules at the outset, no game can be played – if a reader does not agree to the implicit rules any given author gives him, he cannot enjoy, perhaps cannot even understand, the author’s work. This is undoubtedly why so many of those novelists we consider great – those we consider literary, because they are continually creating their own rules – often tell their readers how to read their novels through the very way the novels are written. Such self-referentiality is not unique to postmodernist novelists – it is found throughout the history of the novel, from Cervantes, Rabelais, and Laurence Sterne to Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, and Thomas Pynchon.

The statement that creative writers use rules in the construction of their works may at first appear to suggest that creative writing is completely conscious, that such writers “know” what they are doing at all times – but as anyone who writes fiction or poetry knows, much of what comes out and turns out to be the best work is not fully conscious, and some is surprising to the writer himself. But writers nonetheless do follow the rules of their craft, whether it be the most basic rules of syntax and grammar, the understood needs of any particular genre, ranging from lyric poetry to the novel, or even self-made rules, where the author decides (s)he is going to include certain words, have a certain rhythm, or have a certain rhyme scheme (or lack of a rhyme scheme). Once those rules are decided upon, the author soon finds himself abiding by those rules,
even when the story or poem seems to be writing itself. This way of writing resembles the way soccer is played. Soccer has particular rules, which all the players are aware of and abide by, though any particular soccer player may not be consciously aware of all the rules when the ball is coming toward him and he needs to pass the ball while keeping it on sides so one of his teammates can shoot for goal. For a good soccer player, the rules are so well-known that he can play without having to continually think of the rules he nonetheless plays by at all times. A writer writes using his rules of writing in the same way.

Anyone familiar with Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” and the idea of automatic writing may be tempted to see the surrealists as proof against this idea. But the surrealists were not really that good at being surrealists, if the idea of automatic writing is to be taken as the ideal. Aside from the fact that they all wrote grammatically, which is the most basic rule by which writers write, the surrealists are particularly famous for using puns. A pun is one of the most purposeful, conscious uses of words one can think of. It is a conscious play on words, and, as anyone knows who has either used or knows someone who uses puns, it requires some effort to come up with one. Any surrealist who used a pun automatically broke out of his “automatic writing” (which, by the way, could also be seen as a rule – a rule that required you to not edit and to write whatever came into your head, no matter what it was, but a rule nonetheless), and thus turned it into conscious play that abided by the rules of pun-making. The analysis I made of the placement of the pictures and the effort that had to have gone into the intricate metaphors Breton created in Mad Love further suggests that, whatever the writing was, it was hardly “automatic.” The surrealists, as with any literary writers, used what Huizinga identified as the various play-rules of literature, “metrical and strophical patterns, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, stress, etc. and forms (genres)” (132), a “range of ideas and symbols to be used,” as well as “special terms, images, figures,” and “image-making or figurative word(s)” (133). The surrealists, like the literary writers they were supposedly trying to break from, used every one of these rules, just as their predecessors had before them. Had they not, the surrealists would not be given the respect we now hold for them.

Surrealism was one of the many attacks on what was seen as the basic flaw of literature (and of the world in general): the existence of rules. Rules were seen by the surrealists and other anarchists as restrictive, preventing freedom of expression, and oppressive. But rules, while restrictive, create, through that restriction, greater freedom. Rules per se are not oppressive – they are necessary elements of freedom. Imagine driving without rules. You can drive on either the right or left side of the road. You do not have to drive in a straight line, and stop signs and stop lights are ignored or no longer exist. No one would want to drive under such conditions, but these are the conditions literary anarchists claim to want us to read and write by (the fact that this is not how surrealist literature turned out is further proof they worked by rules). This may seem an extreme example, but could anyone imagine playing chess without rules? What would you have? You would have complete randomness, and complete randomness has a tendency to look remarkably identical to other instances of complete randomness. This is undoubtedly why so much surrealist literature – and all bad surrealist literature, which typically comes from writers unfamiliar with the actual works of the surrealist literary movement – sounds so much the same.

Consider the following poem I wrote. For the longest time, I wrote poems “as they came to me” – I took the surrealist ideal of automatic writing seriously. In recent years I have been writing poems using more formal rules. One day, I returned to automatic writing in starting the following poem:

Without Rules

Im bored
floored, soared
seeming sailing high on winded sky
stupid, stupid, stupid
It all sounds the same every time I write
whatever comes to mind
poetically
continual rhyming – internal, alliterative,
same sounds over and over,
S and I
why?
Poe’s long O for sorrow –
even the sentence above sounds sorrowful –
But why my S and I?
S is slippery, serpentine,
I lifts the soul high –
how can high and slippery serpentine
possibly come together? –
a formalist problem –
the postmodernists know
even if I don’t.

It took only three lines for me to realize what I was doing and stop it. One can see that once I slipped out of my revery of automatic writing and started really thinking about what I was writing that I stuck with the same rules – but this time, I used them consciously, and the poem really began to speak. Undoubtedly there are also other unconscious rules in the poem, but I would argue that whatever they are, they work better in combination with the conscious rules. One could argue that such rules are only superficial – surface decoration. But one must have a surface if one is going to have any depth.

It seems the surrealists tried to sell the world a set of goods they did (and could) not use themselves. Before Breton developed the idea of automatic writing, most of the surrealists were already writers who well understood their craft. So we should not be surprised when their version of automatic writing comes out sounding remarkably like literature. They were writing by rules they had accepted so completely it became unconscious. Their idea becomes a problem when people who have not learned enough rules of writing use it. That is when surrealist writing really begins to all sound the same. Instead of creating a great proliferation of great writing, it created, after a while, a stagnant soup of identical-sounding works. This is why surrealism as an automatic writing movement has been mostly abandoned, except by those undergraduate writing students who consider themselves to be more radical than the “typical” writer, and just end up creating works that sound like all other undergraduate neo-surrealist writing. Rather than sounding different, all they end up doing is sounding exactly the same as all other “ruleless” writers.

Rules are found at all levels of society. They are what help different aspects of society work well together. This is not a defense of all the rules of society, or of all rules of literature. It was very healthy for poets to ask why it was necessary for a poem to rhyme or have a steady, regular rhythm in order to be a poem. Why could there not be other forms of poetry? Why not Dickinson’s slant-rhyme? Or Whitman’s free-verse? But even Whitman’s free-verse has its rules. He abided by the rules of poetry in deciding that what he was writing should have line breaks. He decided on various other rules in word choice or in particular rhythms or use of metaphors. So even when it does not appear that a given author is using rules, we are oftentimes surprised to find he is. And this questioning of rules is, I believe, one of the hallmarks of a great writer, whether it be the questioning of rhyme in poetry (or the current prejudice against it), how characters or situations or reality are portrayed, the use of alliteration, the use of metaphors, the choice of words, or any number of other things writers use. We consider Baudelaire a great poet mostly because he challenged the rules of appropriate topics for poems in the romantic style. He maintained the romantic structure, the rhythm and end-rhyme, and many of their turns of phrases, then twisted them with the topics he used, which challenged the rule of what was an appropriate topic for a great poem. Baudelaire is a great poet in part because he was able to write a romanticist poem about a rotting deer corpse.

The necessity for rules to create literature is not the only thing that makes literature a game or play. Among the functions play performs, Johan Huizinga has identified “training for the demands of life,” and “compensating for unfulfilled longings” (3), which one could argue (and Richard Rorty, among others, has) are indeed functions of literature, especially fiction. Play makes use of an “imitative instinct,” a ““need” for relaxation,” and acts as an “outlet for harmful impulses,” or as “wish fulfillment” (2). What does fiction do but imitate? Why else do we read literature except to relax? (There are other reasons, like intellectual stimulation, but this does not preclude play, since chess is played for this very reason too.) In the confines of his writing a writer can do or say things he otherwise would not. He can be smarter, braver, a bigger villain, more attractive, less attractive, etc. He turns himself into what Milan Kundera calls “experimental selves,” in order to try out various scenarios. If pretending you are someone else is not play, I do not know what is (this is precluding you do not have mental problems that make you think you really are this other person).

Ritual, art, and literature are all forms of play. Just replace the word “play” with either “reading” or “writing literature” or “viewing art” or “creating art” in any of Huizinga’s definitions of play (such as those already stated above), and the connection, the synonymity among them becomes clear. Huizinga says play has a “profoundly aesthetic quality” (2),that “is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain “imagination” of reality (i.e. its conversion into images)” (4), that “all play is a voluntary activity” (7), “we play because we enjoy playing” (8), “play is not “ordinary” or “real” life. It is rather a stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own” (8), that “the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture” (8) such as Roland Barthes argues literature does in The Pleasure of the Text, that “play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness behind” (Huizinga, 8), that play “adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual – as a life function – and for society by the reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function” (9), which are, again, things Rorty argues literature does in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Huizinga goes on to identify play as “distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration. . . . It is “played out” within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning” (9). Further, “while (play) is in progress all is movement, change, alternation, succession, association, separation” (9), it is either “a contest for something or a representation of something” (13) (and literature certainly does fit this definition of play), and that “in nearly all the higher forms of play the elements of repetition and alternation (as in the refrain), are like the warp and woof of fabric” (10). This latter idea is seen in the repetitive elements, or motifs, of any work of great art, and in the repetitions of words and phrases Kundera identifies as “theme-words,” which is necessary for a work of fiction to succeed and which convey information to the reader regarding the importance of a certain image or idea, but which the writer plays with in the construction of his work of literature. Finally, Huizinga says of play what could easily be said of great art and literature, that it

creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it “spoils the game,” robs it of its character and makes it worthless. The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play . . . seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play tends to be beautiful. (10)

He also points out that the words used to describe play are the same words we use to describe the effects of beauty: “tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.” and that play “is invested with the noblest qualitites we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony” (10). Any work of art or literature with tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, rhythm, and harmony could be identified as being a great work of art or literature. These may even be the very minimum requirements of great art or literature. If they are, and if they are elements of play, then, again, we cannot separate art or literature from play.

To sum up Huizinga’s definition of play and how he himself relates it to literature:

Let us enumerate once more the characteristics we deemed proper to play. It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action, mirth and relaxation follow.
Now it can hardly be denied that these qualities are also proper to poetic creation. The definition we have just given play might serve as a definition of poetry (132).

Or, indeed, of literature in general. “The rhythmical or symmetrical arrangement of language, the hitting of the mark by rhyme or assonance, the deliberate disguising of the sense, the artificial and artful construction of phrases – all might be so many utterances of the play spirit” (132). That is, “the creative function we call poetry is rooted in a function even more primordial than culture itself, namely play” (132).

“The writer’s aim, conscious or unconscious, is to create a tension that will “enchant” the reader and hold him spellbound” and “underlying all creative writing is some human or emotional situation potent enough to convey this tension to others” (132), and “such situations rise either from conflict or love, or both together” (133). Is this latter not an accurate summation of all of literature in all cultures from all times? If this is the case, the very subject of all literature is play, since “conflict and love imply rivalry or competition, and competition implies play” (133). Love and conflict, sex and violence, passion and tension – the very subject of literature is human play.

If we recall the connection both Nietzsche and Huizinga make between words and metaphors, we can understand Huizinga’s statement that “poetry continues to cultivate the figurative, i.e. image-bearing, qualities of language, with deliberate intent” (137). Literature is not only playing with words, but, through literature “what poetic language does with images is to play with them” (134). Literature plays with images through using language that makes reference to actual things (remembering an idea is a thing), actions, or qualities. Great literature has this play element – there is as much playing with words and sentence structures as with images, form, ideas, and, in fiction especially, plot (which involves some element of human play) and character. While humans are in a continual state of play in regards to language – certain sounds are playfully associated with ideas, actions, objects we perceive, as well as with each other – literature is the play of language made more stylized and, therefore, made into a more complex game. Any book or poem where the element of play is minimized – such as the formulae of romance novels, where all an author is really doing is plugging new names into already-created slots, with the first sex scene on a certain page number, etc., thus preventing true creativity, since a recipe is not the same thing as rules – which is to say, any work that cannot be seen as having evolved from that which has come before, can be considered outside the realm of great literature. This could be considered a good working definition of literature: literature is any text in which the writer of the text has maximized the elements of play in that particular text, which means he has set up rules for himself (and accepted other rules necessary for the text to be the particular form in question), and played with language and images and, for fiction, characters and plot, within those rules.

While this does allow us to make some sort of determination of what constitutes great literature without the worries created by complete subjectivity, this does not mean that any given reader has to like the particular rules an author has chosen to use. A writer invites his reader into the game he has played with the words and rules he has used, but a reader has to agree to the rules of the game the author has constructed. This brings us to the idea of an implied reader for any given work, since one could easily see agreement to the authors’ rules as the reader essentially having the same taste as the author (as well as other implied readers). Naturally, if you refuse to agree to the authors’ rules, you will dislike the work. Readers also bring their own rules to the game of reading. These rules are historically, socially, and personally determined (formed in part by the reader), and include their own definition(s) of literature. The role of the professor of literature, then, could be seen as one of helping students to learn to play by as many new rules as possible, expanding their definition(s) of literature and the ability to appreciate more forms of literature. Further, for the serious student of literature, literary theory could be seen as acquiring a new set of rules to take to the game of reading, such as the rules of reading historically, socially, postcolonially, and using formalism, New Criticism, postmodernism, evolutionary theory, etc. Or even through the understanding that authors play in order to create literature.

By understanding that (and what) the author is playing, we can look for places where such play is obvious, where the language is tweaked, where the author has set up rules, etc. There are authors for whom this is fairly obvious. It would be almost too easy to talk about the play element in the works of Cervantes, Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, or even, as I have done, Milan Kundera. If understanding literature as a form of play will help us better understand literature as a whole, it should work on unobvious as well as obvious texts – the less obvious, the better. Further, I want to discuss an English-language writer, so the play with the language itself would be obvious. This is why I have chosen to discuss one of the great works of the Naturalist movement in England: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Hardy is particularly fond of allusions – he is continually playing with references to and fragments from other works. In Jude, Hardy makes several allusions to Bible verses. He makes an allusion to Luke 23:49 – when Christ was crucified, “all his acquaintances . . . stood afar off, beholding these things” – when he says “The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood at the moment afar off, like certain historic disciples” (10). Hardy is telling us these scholars will, as Peter did with Jesus, deny Jude, as Jude is directly denied in a letter from one of the college Masters (95). Hardy is already playing with the reader, telling his reader as early as page 10 that Jude is going to be shunned by what he loves most just as Jesus was shunned by those who followed Him. Intertextuality is a form of play – and references to other well-known games help us better understand the new game.

When Hardy says “In the glow he [Jude] seemed to see Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace” (20), he creates a very powerful image of Phillotson. But what else does this allusion do? It tells us a great deal about Phillotson. It tells us Phillotson, like the three brothers who were thrown into the furnace, is accepting of his fate and, because of that, will be in a way rewarded. What would have hurt him (as the flames for anyone other than the three brothers) does not appear to hurt him because of his love. Naturally, we can see this looking back, but what this allusion does is give us a hint regarding Phillotson’s character. Here the play of intertextuality helped Hardy develop one of his characters in a particularly powerful way.

Another way Hardy plays with language in this novel is in his use of rhyme and rhythm. I was very much surprised to find Hardy playing with rhyme and rhythm in this novel, which seemed for the most part very prosaic. A change from a-rhythmic prose to rhythmic, rhyming patters breaks us out of our prose reading pattern and draws our attention to the new rhythmic pattern. For example, Hardy uses rhyme to emphasize things that are strongly noticed by Jude. Talking of the picturesque English countryside, he says it is “being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveler’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs” (158). There is an alliteration with “sudden” and “surprise” and a rhyme between “surprise” and “eyes,” and the line itself is very rhythmical. It catches us by surprise just as much as the scenery is supposed to take the traveler’s eyes by surprise. Next the scholars Jude wants to join are emphasized again by rhyme when Hardy says Jude saw their “black, brown, and flaxen crowns” over the sills (159). The lyricism here helps convey the romantic way Jude thinks of scholarship. Later, Hardy uses end-rhyme to emphasize a particular theme-statement: “. . . there used to arise among wheeled travelers, before railway days, endless questions of choice between the respective ways” (227). The quote is in a passage that is literally about travel in England, but the lyricism and end-rhyme put particular emphasis on this line. Why? Hardy appears to have done this to draw attention to this particular phrase because the novel is in great part a commentary on the “endless questions of choice between the respective ways” in which people can chose to believe the world exists, as an Idealist or a Materialist world, since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle.

Hardy also uses in one particular passage a form of lyricism without end-rhyme that, in the way he ends it, tells the reader exactly what is going to happen in the novel. To see this, one must see the passage in its entirety:

‘It is odd,’ she said, in a voice quite changed, ‘that I should care about that air; because – ’
‘Because what?’
‘I’m not that sort – quite.’
‘Not easily moved?’
‘I didn’t quite mean that.’
‘O, but you are one of that sort, for you are just like me at heart!’
‘But not at head.’
She played on, and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated instinct each clasped the other’s hand again.
She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly. ‘How funny!’ she said. ‘I wonder what we both did that for?’
‘I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before.’
‘Not in our thoughts! Perhaps a little in our feelings.’
‘And they rule thoughts. . . . Isn’t it enough to make one blaspheme that the composer of that hymn is one of the most commonplace men I ever met!”
‘What – you know him?’
‘I went to see him.’
‘O you goose – to do just what I should have done! Why did you?’
‘Because we are not alike,’ he said dryly. (160)

This back-and-forth between Sue and Jude is very lyrical all the way to the end, when Jude finally ends it with his “dryly” said line. And look at the amount of information Hardy gives us in these playfully-rendered lines. First, we see Hardy understands their relationship to be one of play (as was stated above about all human relationships portrayed in literature) when he says Sue “played on” with the back-and-forth. Second, lyricism conveys information to a reader – it tells the reader there is a particular unity occuring in the lyrical lines. And the way Hardy ends it, with what Jude “said dryly,” and the fact that he said it dryly, conveys further information to the reader – Sue and Jude will be in agreement through most of the novel, but this lyrical existence together will come to an end. Thus, beyond the words, which tell us how their relationship will end, the way those words are written, the way Hardy had Sue and Jude speak to one another here, tells us a great deal about how the plot of the novel will unfold – it has fractal self-similarity to the plot of the novel, just on a different scale. By playing with rhythm, Hardy informs us about what to expect as the plot unfolds. It tells us that while Jude and Sue will be in sync through most of the novel, a day will come when they are no longer in sync; and when that happens, their relationship, as the lyricism between them in this passage, will end.

There are many other play elements in Hardy’s novel: He uses irony – which is a very conscious form of play – such when he says “After this exhilarating tradition. . .” (222) after a passage that expressed anything but exhilaration. He uses references to and direct quotes from several poets, particularly when he uses a section of another’s poem to describe something rather than describing it himself. And he uses authorial self-reference to his writing a story (such acknowledgment of writing a story within the story is a form of playing with the reader’s expectations) when Jude says, “‘I may do some good before I am dead – be a sort of success as a rightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story’” (256), which is perhaps one of Hardy’s intentions in writing this story. And he uses playful repetitions of words, phrases and ideas (he reiterates the idea that no one believes Sue and Jude are married because they get along so well, meaning married people are not supposed to get along, several times in the novel).

What constitutes the formal poetic element is the assonance which, by repeating the same word or a variation of it, links thesis to antithesis. The purely poetic element consists in allusions, the sudden bright idea, the pun or simply in the sound of the words themselves, where sense may be completely lost. Such a form of poetry can only be described in terms of play, though it obeys a nice system of prosodic rules (Huizinga, 122).

Hardy engages in each of these elements Huizinga identifies (though one could suppose that identifying the “sudden bright idea” in a work of art would necessarily be far more difficult to do than any of the rest) with the “purely poetic element.” Hardy plays with ideas in this story by having Sue represent Idealist philosophy, particularly in her views on love, and Jude represent a more evolutionary view of love, representing Materialism. Rather than writing a philosophical work condemning Idealism, Hardy has chosen to write a work of fiction where two characters represent these two ways of viewing the world and having them interact, creating a dialogue between Idealism and Materialism more complex than simple condemnation of Idealism and support of Materialism, no mattter how anti-Idealism we may find Hardy’s work to be in tone. He has chosen the most playful way of presenting these ideas and, in presenting these ideas, has played with the language and the structures of the novel in order to emphasize the themes of his novel. By continually playing with the presentation of his characters and by playing with the language in the novel, Hardy has shown himself to be a great literary writer.

Finding places where Hardy is obviously playing with the language, ideas, or elements of story-telling, such as allusions (which seem to be his favorite element to play with) can help us uncover elements of the story we may have otherwise overlooked. By asking “why does Hardy make this line rhyme, or read so lyrically, or have alliteration here, or make this particular allusion or have this particular quote?” we can uncover the themes, both intended and unintended, in this particular novel. The same is true of any other work of literature. Naturally, this method of literary analysis works best if the work is analyzed in the language it was originally written in, as is true of any form of literary analysis that has such a strong emphasis on the language itself, though there are still play elements that can survive translation, including themes, overall ways of presenting character and plot, and certain metaphors. Also, by understanding the play nature of literature, we can potentially develop more accurate ways of understanding how readers read, how writers write, and how literature, overall, means, as well as, perhaps, the very origins of language and literature itself.

II. Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Game-Book of Games

2008-03-03T14:23:00.001-08:00

Anyone familiar with Kundera’s novels is eminently aware of his perpetual playfulness. This is what compelled me to attempt to understand what Kundera was doing in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a game, using it then to help us understand what makes for a good game, as well as what makes for a bad game. And Kundera does indeed provide us with rich examples of game-playing, both good and bad, the attempts of some to prevent people from treating society as a game, and even how games can be brought to an end.

Mirek’s Game – Kundera’s novel begins with a story about a man, Mirek, and his country, Bohemia (Kundera chooses to use the name Bohemia, which he says is the more poetic, older name of his country, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic), engaged in their own forms of attempting to erase the past. The novel opens with a story of how the Communist government of Bohemia erased a man’s image from a famous photograph in an attempt to erase the man’s existence from the very history of Communist Bohemia. After this short anecdote, we move into Mirek’s story of his trying to erase his past by trying to get “rid of his compromising papers” (13). But to do this, he has to go see Zdena, a woman he was once in love with, but who he has also tried to erase from his past (getting rid of his papers will, he hopes, help him do this) because she is ugly, and he finds his past love for her embarrassing. Both the government of Bohemia and Mirek are trying to erase their pasts for the sake of their respective destinies. Which brings us to the Game of Destiny. With Destiny, life frees itself and has “interests of its own, which did not correspond at all to Mirek’s” (14). Destiny takes on a life of its own, plowing down even the person whose destiny it is. The individual, Mirek or others in Bohemia, can be happy, secure, in good spirits, and have good health, but Destiny is unconcerned with any of these. Each of these can and very often are sacrificed to Destiny. Destiny has grandeur, clarity, beauty, style, and intelligible meaning. A past has none of these things – it can even get in the way of these things – which is why those who believe in Destiny must destroy their past. But if we go about trying to forget what we did and why we did them, are we any longer playing a game? Destiny is deterministic, and a fully deterministic game is not a game at all, since we know with absolute certainty what is going to happen. The game of trying to destroy the past is a game with the ironic goal of destroying games as such. So what I previously called the Game of Destiny is really not a game at all. It is a serious thing done seriously.

Eva’s Game – The next story in this novel is about the game a young woman named Eva has of cheerful man-chasing, and the relationship game she is involved with in Karel and Marketa’s marriage. Kundera makes it clear what the rules of cheerful man-chasing are: the woman cannot be interested in marriage, meaning she is interested in friendship and sensuality only, she allows the man everything and demands nothing from him, and she is direct and honest with him. These are good rules because the person playing the game knows it is a game, and treats it lightly. No one is in any danger of being harmed, if the game is played properly. And it is a game that can apparently work, as we see in Eva’s relationship with Karel and Marketa. Karel is apparently incapable of being faithful, and Marketa has made up for this by both allowing Karel to cheat on her, and by engaging in threesomes with him and his mistresses. Eva is involved with them precisely because Karel and Marketa’s game failed. Marketa thought there was too much at stake with one of his mistresses, whom she suspected Karel of actually loving. Both learned that you cannot play a good game if the stakes are too high and you despise one of the players. Realizing Marketa had to have a positive and non-serious connection to the third player in their “debauchery games” (55-6), Karel arranged for Eva to meet Marketa so Marketa could introduce Eva to Karel as a fair game-player. All of this came about because they did not take caution in setting up the rules couples draw up when they first get together (51) – which is to say, they were not conscious rules were being set up between them, so less-than-best rules were established. One can only play the best game if one knows all the rules to the game. Anyone can kick a ball around a field, but it is knowing all the rules that makes the game soccer.

Kundera’s Game of Survival – Here Kundera tells an autobiographical story that deals with the issue of cheating, or the use of force (whether that force is the gun or lying). Kundera found himself excluded by the government from playing the economic game – which they were trying to turn into a non-game by making it deterministic and coercion-driven. Under such conditions, Kundera came to the conclusion that it was legitimate to cheat, by creating a false connection between him and a famous French astrologer so he could convince people he could do astrology, since the only way to play a game dominated by force is by using force yourself, even if it is a minor form of it, like cheating.

By cheating, Kundera created a legitimate play-space within the coercive game the government was playing. In this play-space he played the Astrology Game, using a youth magazine, which published his column. This led him to play the Astrology Game with the editor of the magazine, unbeknownst to the editor. As Kundera points out, a horoscope “can indeed wonderfully influence, even direct, people’s behavior. We can advise them to do certain things and warn them against doing others, and induce them into humility by acquainting them with the disasters in their future” (85), which is precisely what he did with the editor. Knowing the kind of person the editor was – a ruthless type one usually finds in charge in dictatorships – Kundera created a horoscope that turned the editor into a broken man, intent on at least trying to be a better person in the hope that doing so would counteract the negative things his horoscope predicted for him.

The Game of Literature – Kundera plays the postmodern game of pointing out to his readers that he is writing a novel, often by interceding as the author to point something out to the reader. A good example of this, which also happens to deal with the issue of what makes for good game rules in the creation of literature, is found chapter 1 of Book 4:

I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names. This time, to make clear that my heroine is mine and only mine (I am more attached to her than to any other), I am giving her a name no woman has ever borne: Tamina. I imagine her as tall and beautiful, thirty-three years old, and originally from Prague.
I see her walking down a street in a provincial town in the west of Europe. Yes, you’re right to have noticed: I refer to faraway Prague by name, while leaving anonymous the town where my story takes place. That breaks all the rules of perspective, but you’ll just have to make the best of it. (109)

Here, Kundera admits to breaking the rules of perspective. As a novelist, Kundera is creating a game, with rules (including a set of rules already prescribed by the history of the novel – and it is one of these he is now violating). A good game player is one who knows how to play the game so well (as Kundera does with the art of the novel) that they can now change the rules of the game – in the very spirit of the game they are playing. By pointing it out, Kundera is letting us know that he is fully aware he is breaking the rules of perspective, meaning he is fully aware of the rule, and that it is not a mistake, but a purposeful change. Kundera again gives us the rules he used to create this novel: “This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation, the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance” (227). He uses variation because “Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter” (226). He is speaking here of music, but it is clear he is also talking about the art of the novel, as the first quote suggests. Kundera often connects music, the novel, and poetry. So when he says music rises above its “essential stupidity” when the “first games with motif and theme” (248) are played, one could perhaps see this too as a critique of the novel. What is important here is Kundera sees things as becoming great only once games are played with them. Music, poetry, and the novel are all great only when we treat them as games, and do not take them too seriously, putting them in danger of no longer becoming a game, no longer becoming something new with each new work and reading of that work. This is how the game itself can have the ability to change you, as in Kundera’s novel the great poet’s poetry does for the student (192).

The Progressive Game – In the final book of the novel, Kundera introduces Jan and the Clevises. “The Clevises always supported the best possible progressive ideas” (273), which begs the question of what makes for the best possible progressive idea? How does one best play the progressive game? Kundera sets up the rules quite clearly. First, one must provoke others with the idea, but not in such a way that people become frightened – they must feel safe with you as you promote the idea. Second, the idea must be original, but acceptable by more than a few. Third, it must not be excessive – Kundera gives the example of supporting going topless at the beach, but not supporting going around town naked. And finally, the idea must not take too much energy to defend – it has to pretty much take care of itself, or take on a life of its own. A good game should be interesting, even to the point of appearing to be somewhat dangerous (something has to be at stake), but not truly dangerous (the most important things should not be at stake), it must be unique without being so strange people cannot relate to it, it must push the envelope without breaking out and getting so far away no one can understand it, and it must be something that does not need the creator around to keep it alive. These are good rules for games in general, and for art and literature in particular.

Kundera ends his novel with two examples of how one can ruin a game. The first example is given during the discussion at the Clevises, when Jan, responding to their fourteen-year-old daughter saying, “I’m not anybody’s sex object,” responded with, “My dear girl, if you only knew how easy it is not to be a sex object.”:

He uttered these words softly, but with such sincere sorrow that they resounded in the room for a long while. They were words difficult to pass over in silence, but it was not possible to respond to them either. They did not deserve approval, not being progressive, but neither did they deserve an argument, because they were not obviously against progress. They were the worst words possible, because they were situated outside the debate conducted by the spirit of the time. They were words beyond good and evil, perfectly incongruous words. (276)

After this, the progressive game came to a complete stop. Not all games are good, or should be played, so stopping a particular game is not necessarily bad. Jan managed to stop the game by doing something that could be neither condemned nor approved of, as it stepped outside of the play-space itself. He neither cheated nor played by the rules. He stopped the game cold. It is therefore ironic that later, when Jan is trying to play the orgy game, it gets just as ruined by someone else – in this case, the sponsor of the orgy. Kundera manages to give the reader one of the least erotic orgy scenes written by such a masterful (and very often, sensual) writer – all because the orgy is micromanaged by Barbara, who is hosting it. Rather than allowing people to interact in natural ways, Barbara goes around, forcing people together or apart, making sure people are switching partners and not settling down with any one person. By doing so, she manages to make her orgies boring – certainly not as much fun or as sensual as one would imagine an orgy should be, in any case.

Games are constantly being played in Kundera’s novel, and Kundera is quite explicit about what rules make for a good game, and what one can do to stop or destroy a game. We have seen that a deterministic game (the Game of Destiny), or one where force is necessary, is actually no game at all, that those who play too seriously make the game at the least no fun, and at worst so dangerous that what was a game now ceases to be a game, that micromanaging a game makes it boring, and that acting in ways beyond good and evil stops games. Kundera further sets up a contrast between those who play games and those who do (or will) not, or are indifferent to them, showing the hatred that arises for the game-players by the serious non-game players. For Kundera, those who refuse to see life as a game become very dangerous to those who do wish to see life as a game.

But if we want to do as Kundera does, and play the game of literature (or art in general), if we want to enjoy life by living it as a game, then Kundera gives us the rules, including the rules for setting up the rules (conscious rules you choose – along with our unconscious rules – are better than having only unconscious rules, or rules imposed on you). There cannot be too much at stake, so it should not force us to have to take it seriously. The players must all be friendly, direct, and honest with each other. The rules must be flexible enough to keep the game interesting. The game must have form, but it must have variations within that form. It should be interesting, even appear dangerous (something has to be at stake), but not truly dangerous. It must be unique without being so strange people cannot relate to it. It must push the envelope without breaking out and getting so far away no one can understand it. It must be something that does not need the creator around to keep it alive. And a truly good game will change the players themselves.

Chapter 8: The Game of Art and Literature: I. The Universe Is A Child Playing

2008-03-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Play as a metaphor for understanding the world is as ancient as philosophy. Heraclitus likens the world (world-time) to a playing child. Schiller attempts to negotiate between Kant’s noumenal and phenomenal worlds through play – specifically, the play of art and literature. Nietzsche, too, evokes play as a metaphor for how the universe acts. Huizinga wrote a book titled Homo ludens, wherein he discusses the level to which human activities as a whole are play. And more recently, Mihai Spariosu has proposed in Wreath of Wild Olive to move beyond the West’s (and, especially, postmodernism’s direct emphasis on the) mentality of power with what he calls the “irenic mentality,” which he sees as achievable through literature and its role in proposing “what if” scenarios.

I have dealt and will continue to deal with both Nietzsche and Huizinga, but for the moment I would like to briefly discuss Spariosu’s ideas on the role of play – it can help us better understand some of the issues I have been dealing with, particularly in response to postmodern views on art, literature, and culture. Spariosu sees literature as acting in what he calls a “ludic-liminal” manner – play – and on the threshold of perception. He sees literature (I would include all of the arts) as a form of play that challenges our perceptions, and can result in our changing the very world we live in. It does not attempt to do this through the exercise of power (as the postmodernists would have us believe), but through presenting us with “what if” scenarios we can either accept or reject.

From an irenic-ludic perspective . . . [the] ideal readers will not attempt to master the text or enter into a competitive relation with it. On the contrary, they will approach it in a spirit of responsive understanding, opening themselves to it and allowing themselves to experience, through it, that liminal time-space which can produce alternative realities and new historical worlds. (Spariosu, 228)

Spariosu similarly sees this as the work of the critic. The critic should analyze a work because the critic loves it and not because they love themselves and want to show off (as, he suggests, and I am sympathetic, the postmodernists do and see the role of their work as critics – thus their claim that their work as critics is on the same level, too-written, and as important as the work they are critiquing). The critic’s role is to open the text up, to help other readers to more easily enter the play-space of the work – the critic’s role is to try to uncover and explain the rules underlying a work of art or literature.

Spariosu sees three basic approaches to achieving his irenic (peaceful) world, where the Other is not seen as Other, but is truly understood: Bahktin’s dialogics, the philosophy of Levinas, and Zen Buddhism – though he sides more with Zen, seeing the first two as still able to revert to a power mentality. With dialogics, the novel portrays each character as having equal worth with the other characters in the novel, regardless of sex, religion, etc. Spariosu quotes Bahktin in regards to monologism, saying it “denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I (thou)” (101). Both monologism and dialogism are styles of knowing. Any work that deals with an issue from but one perspective – whether that perspective be history, science, economics, or any one of the “-isms” – is a monologic work, thus a work of knowledge only. Dialogics is the style of wisdom, in that it takes many perspectives (ways of knowing) into account at the same time. This is undoubtedly why Spariosu privileges literature as the way to achieve the irenic mentality, since it is more capable of (and more likely to try) achieving dialogics than philosophy (since, he argues, Plato’s “dialogues” are really ways for Socrates to win). Bakhtin’s dialogics “carefully and lovingly preserves the integrity of the other” (101), which makes it an irenic and not a power-mentality approach. He then argues that with Levinas, we get a direct philosophy of peace. Levinas wants an “originary relation between peace and being,” and sees that what the West calls peace is “simply an instrument of war” (Spariosu, 106). As such, the West does not truly understand peace. Also with Levinas, “pluralism is an inherent unity” (105) in a way, I would argue, that chaos theory suggests. By saying that pluralism is an inherent unity Levinas is arguing that beauty is inherent in the world. Spariosu then argues that with Zen, we again see unity in plurality, but in a somewhat different way, since “the Buddha-nature is both mind and matter, permanence and impermanence, unity and multiplicity, as well as neither” (110). Zen says that the Buddha-nature is beauty. Spariosu further says that Zen has a different view of the Nothing than does Nietzsche (and here I think he misunderstands Nietzsche) and the postmodernists, since with Zen the Nothing is really a liminal-irenic space where creation can occur.

Spariosu suggests that the play of literature can and should take a very specific direction in the “what if” role of literature. In discussing Crime and Punishment, Lafcadio’s Adventure, and 1984, he shows how works that are seen as embedded in the power mentality also show various irenic alternatives. He further suggests that the reason these works work is that they are in a liminal region where irenic possibilities can be investigated from a place wherein people already find themselves (the mentality of power). What Spariosu argues is that a world of love and peace are possible – through literature. Perhaps this is a bit on the idealistic side, but I do think this extreme view is on to something. As a violent species that requires rituals such as art and literature to stave off our expressions of violence toward each other, not to mention the inner conflicts we feel, it appears unlikely any sort of utopian world of love and peace among everyone will ever be achieved – even through art and literature. I would go so far as to say that if we were to ever get rid of conflict (or at least the threat of conflict, which is itself conflict) entirely, we could not have art, literature, culture, or religion. But what art and literature can do, as well as culture and religion and other rituals, is allow us to become more loving and peaceful. They will do so by helping us to integrate ourselves more fully into the very play-nature of the universe.

While Spariosu appears more interested in pursuing the irenic mentality through spiritual means, I am going to look instead to dialogics, as it deals most directly with the issues of art and, especially, literature. I have been teaching Freshman Rhetoric, so this idea of dialogic writing made me think about using this "irenic" writing method as a way to teach writing. I discovered while teaching Freshmen rhetoric that most of the arguments my students made were either from a political or a religious perspective – it seemed students could think in no other ways, and they rarely gave anyone else’s perspective fair consideration. Spariosu sees dialogics as a way of creating more irenic writing by showing how much the writer values various Others. It occurred to me that one could teach dialogics by having students write a series of monological Argue to Inquire papers, wherein the students summarized the information they found on a given topic, and then used the information they gathered to write an Argue to Negotiate paper, wherein they would have to come up with a creative solution that irenically negotiates between two sides of an issue without giving in to either side or playing a simple give-and-take, making neither side happy. I assigned the series of monologic Inquiry papers from various perspectives: psychology, sociology, philosophy, biology and the other sciences, art, literature, economics, politics, and religion – using evidence that both supports and goes against their positions from each of these perspectives. This taught my students to deal honestly and respectfully with several perspectives and with those who oppose their views, teaching them to value various perspectives. One could also encourage them to investigate their topics along the entire spectrum from logic/reason to emotions (not that they are separable). In this way not only would we be teaching them to value various perspectives, but also how to best investigate a given topic. Further, I have also taught some level of poetics (I made them write a sonnet, and I had them analyze several poems) to draw their attention to the rhythms and word choices in their writing. The end product of all of this was a dialogic paper that made use of the information from all the investigations they undertook. If there were any students who still felt strongly about one side or the other, they could do a Convince or Persuade paper, while those who found their ideas changed considerably could do a Negotiation paper.

Along these lines, in thinking about introducing more play into the teaching of writing (though the students have no idea at first that what they are doing is play), I have also used a method I developed from an idea I discovered in an essay by Paul Harris, "Scaling Mortality to the Letter: Geroges Perec's Stylistics of Death" in Time, Order, Chaos. Harris discusses writing using self-imposed constraints, since doing so serves "two functions: they create a syntactic frame, thereby marking off the "potential" play-space of the artistic production, and then inscribe the generative code of a text into its very texture" (53). The

conception of writing as a truly creative act exemplifies what could be termed a stylistic mechanics: if style pertains to syntax, structure, and other formal interrelations in the verbal medium, and mechanics is the study of interactions between matter and forces acting on it, then a "stylistic mechanics" investigates style from a microscopic level on up, looking for specific ways that syntactic components combine into meaning and form. (54)

Setting up arbitrary constraints forces you to really pay attention to your writing, which, I would argue, can only help make you a better writer – as the more good rules there are in a game, the better and more complex the game. Harris points out that Perec, in one novel, did not have a single appearance of the letter "e" – while in another, the only vowel he allowed into his novel was the letter "e." What kinds of writing would one expect from one's students if such arbitrary rules were imposed on a given paper, say, not allowing the letter "e" to make an appearance in one paper, banning "to be" verbs (or perhaps some other commonly-used word) in another, an insistence on the use of certain words in a work, or a complete restriction on the number of words used: say, exactly 753, no more, no less? I suspected that once the students began to understand what they were doing as play-rules to the game of writing, we would see improved writing (we would perhaps see it even in those who did not get it, though I suspect one would get more complaints from those who did not understand what they were doing and why). Curious as to how this approach to writing would work, I gave one of my classes the assignment in class of writing a paragraph that did not have the letter “e” in it. They did it in the Learning Record Online, where they have to post 2-3 observations a week. So I had examples of their most recent writing. While most of the paragraphs the students wrote were, not surprisingly, terrible (though there was one student who managed to create a most beautiful piece of poetic prose – better than anything she had written before), what happened after they wrote that paragraph was notable. After they wrote their paragraphs, I had them write me a paragraph telling me what they thought about the assignment. Most of the students said they found the assignment fun, even if they did not understand why they were doing it, but that is not the most important part, though it was an added bonus. The most important part was that every one of the students wrote a better observation after the assignment without the letter “e” than they had written in the observation before it. What the elimination of the letter “e” forced them to do was slow down and think about each and every word they chose. Once they did that, they began thinking more about their word choices, and their writing improved. Since then I have included this exercise, and others like it, including paragraphs without the letter “s”, without “to be” verbs, without commas, without simple sentences, with only one-syllable words, and descriptive paragraphs without any adjectives or adverbs. They do the ones without “to be” verbs, commas, and simple sentences to learn how to use these elements of writing better; the one with one-syllable words forces them to simplify their writing; the one without adjectives and adverbs makes them strengthen their nouns and verbs. And I make them write a sonnet, as the strict rules really force them to think about the language. While they are playing these games with the language, using these arbitrary (or not-so-arbitrary) rules, they are also learning how to write. I have noticed significant improvements in writing in the classes where I introduced this method over those classes where I had not. The lesson of this is not that one should necessarily make up these kinds of rules to be a good writer – but that if one wants to be a good, or a great, writer, one should have some kind of rules one is working by. Especially if one wants to create literature. That is why the rules of poetry are so important. It is the rules we create for ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, that make us great writers and artists.

V. A Quick Summary of Beauty

2008-03-01T19:10:00.001-08:00

This entire work has dealt and will continue to deal with the issue of beauty. I have dealt in great detail in this chapter with two main aspects of beauty and its relation to humans, but now I would like to give a quick summary in one location of the elements of beauty as I have dealt with them through this work. I have argued that beauty is or contains the following features:

Complexity within Simplicity
Digital-Analog
Emergent from Conflict
Evolutionary (changes over time)
Generative and Creative
Hierarchical Organization
Play
Reflexivity or Feedback
Rhythmicity
Rule-Based
Scalar Self-Similarity
Time-Bound
Unity in Multiplicity

These are also features of the universe as a whole – and thus describe a (meta)physics. These also describe a way to come to know the world – and thus describe an epistemology. Fuchs lists the following features as aspects of self-organization:

Emergence
Complexity
Cohesion (digital-analog)
Openness
Bottom-up-Emergence
Downward Causation
Non-linearity
Feedback loops, Circular causality
Information
Relative Chance
Hierarchy
Globalisation and localisation
Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)

And for Emergence, he lists the following aspects:

Synergism (productive interaction between parts)
Novelty
Irreduceability
Unpredictability
Coherence/Correlation
Historicity

If we compare the lists, we can see there is a correlation between self-organizing complex systems and beauty. Each have the same attributes. “Cognition, co-operation and communication are phenomena that can be found in different forms in all self-organizing systems. All self-organizing systems are information-generating systems. Information is a relationship that exists as a relationship between specific organisational units of matter” (Fuchs). All beautiful objects are information-generating systems. And to the extent that something is a self-organizing system, it is beautiful – which means, beauty is scalarly found from strings all the way up through art, literature, philosophy, and religion.

IV. A Specific Example of Truth and Lies: André Breton’s Mad Love

2008-02-29T18:08:00.001-08:00

On the issue of truth and lies as elucidated in the previous section, Breton’s novel Mad Love becomes problematic on two levels. First, it is unclear just how fictional Mad Love really is. Much of it is straight autobiography, and a good portion of this book appears essayistic. One could perhaps argue that it is being true without being a lie. But other sections appear more “traditionally” novelistic, which is to say, fiction – thus, a lie. For this reason, I think we can consider it, in full, a novel, and thus a work of art.

The second problem with Mad Love is Breton’s use of photographs. The novel as a genre creates visual imagery through words (the lies of metaphors), but the use of photographs in Mad Love appears to subvert the language-created imagery in some places in the novel. The photographs show us what photographs can show us – they create, at least in this novel, “true” images. The images in Mad Love appear primarily to act as illustrations to the text. For example, on pg. 16, Breton describes how he uses cards as a way of reading his own fortune. But on pg. 17, we get a photograph by Man Ray showing what Breton has just described (though the black, artificial hand in the picture does make the image strange). Also, after discussing crystals on pg. 11, we see a photograph of crystals on pg. 12. These illustrations – and certainly this latter one – do not appear to add to the text, but appear more to only show us what we have already imagined, or, worse, make it obvious the author does not trust us to imagine the imagery he created in the text in the right way. He appears to be pushing truth rather than allowing his lies to create truth. If this is the case, one could argue that this novel is inartistic. His use of images is much different from the way Carole Maso uses images in her novel the art lover. Aside from the fact that she uses the repetition of many of her images to create meaning (we are reminded of the image each time it is repeated, making us recognize the image as meaningful, since memory makes meaning), she uses images effectively as text (creating a novelistic example of Derrida’s dictum that “everything is text”). For example, Maso has a section titled “The Message on the Machine” (129), which I will quote in its entirety:

“Hi. It’s Steven. Guess what? We’re neighbors. I’ve checked into St. Vincent’s. Doctor’s orders. My number is 427-4410. Give me a call, darling. Bye.”

This is followed by an illustrative image showing a sectional view of HIV. This is one of the most powerful, effective sections I have read in a novel. It works because it says, with the image, something that could not have been said as effectively any other way. It is an effective lie. This conjunction of image with text says something that could not be said any other way, and thus serves the lie, making it more true. I have seen similar illustrations of HIV in textbooks, magazines, newspapers, etc. – but none had the impact it has in Maso’s book. Her use of the image created a complex of emotions that could not have been created if Maso had just come out and said the caller had AIDS.

Breton does not approach this level in the pictures he uses in his novel, though the illustration on pg. 20 of what he means by saying convulsive beauty must be “fixed-explosive” (19) does clarify this phrase in a more helpful way than does the illustrations illustrating what he has already described. One could argue that he gave us the truth that served the lie. However, this method could also be justified as a way by which Breton draws our attention to the disparity between what he was imagining when he was writing (which the photographs supposedly illustrate), and what we are imagining as we are reading. In this novel Breton could be showing us the disparity between the author’s imagination and the reader’s imagination (no matter how well-guided by the author), drawing our attention to the existential space of the novel itself, as the space where two dreams are brought together, the same, and yet different. This, then, brings us to the definition of beauty I have been using: “uniformity amongst variety.” Breton makes disparity in vision (perspectivism) beautiful. He is showing us the lies of our truths – through the use of two styles of art: the novel and photography.

But this novel is not just (or primarily) a collection of photographs illustrating text. Breton also makes wonderful use of metaphor to break up our conceptual categories. If we take a look at an unillustrated scene toward the beginning of the novel (6), we find the following situation: a man enters, who has, Breton believes, loved the women Breton sees seated on a bench. Breton then goes on to describe the man:

He scarcely is at all, this living man who would hoist himself up on this treacherous trapeze of time. He would be unable even to exist without forgetfulness, that ferocious beast with its larva-like features. The wonderful little diamond slipper was headed off in several directions.

What do we have in this section? The narrator first comments that the man has a certain unreality and transience about him (to the narrator): “He scarcely is at all,” and “He would be unable even to exist without forgetfulness.” Is this meant to be understood objectively or subjectively? It is unclear, due to the presence of the first person narrator – but one whose style appears to create distance. There is a shadowiness to this man the narrator sees; but we do not know if the shadowiness is real, or if it is only because the narrator perceives him as shadowy. Or is the shadowiness real because the narrator perceives it?

There is also an ambiguity in who the “diamond slipper” is: is it the man, or is it perhaps some woman the narrator is after? It is difficult to tell from the text at this point in the story, but the fact that the “diamond slipper” is separated by forgetfulness being described as a beast, suggests the slipper could be someone else (the diamond slipper is suggestive of Cinderella). Either way, the narrator’s bringing these three metaphoric descriptions together needs explaining. What does it say about the narrator that these things are brought together this way? Is the narrator mad (as per the title)? Perhaps not. The man on the trapeze of time would swing back and forth in time (from past to present), but he only scarcely exists, even if forgetting were not a problem. Breton shows us with these descriptions just how transient we are to others: we barely register with them, and would barely register with them even if forgetting were not an issue. Breton captures, in this small space, the situation we all find ourselves in amongst anonymous strangers within the modern world, which is filled with anonymous strangers. We each pass in and out of people’s vision, barely registering with them (we get a level of irony here in Breton, since he says the man “scarcely is,” yet is able to register the fact that the man barely registers with him), while hoping we will continue to exist in memory (the “trapeze of time”). But if we are only noticed by someone for a moment, we will be forgotten: forgetfulness will eat away at memory as a maggot does a carcass – forgetfulness, “that ferocious beast with its larva-like features.” Breton metaphorically creates in this scene the situation of non-registry with anonymous others. And the diamond slipper? A reference to Cinderella, who was searched after (remembered). There is someone whom the narrator remembers, and is after; but he does not know (any more than Prince Charming does) where she is (since she was heading off in several directions). The three sentences then deal not with the man, but with the situation of remembering and forgetting, brought together in the same way as, in Lautréamont’s famous (and favorite of the surrealists) phrase, “Beautiful as the encounter of a sewing machine with an umbrella on a dissection table” (Mad Love 123n9). We are forgotten – because barely registered – by most people. It takes something special (a diamond slipper) for us to be remembered. This is the situation we find ourselves in with other people. The Romantics believe “that the loved one is a unique being” (7), but Breton not only tells us that “often social conditions of life can destroy such an illusion” (7), he shows us this with how he himself perceives the man he saw. This occurs in the present day.

Breton creates another Lautréamontean metaphorical conjunction when he describes: “Big bright eyes, of dawn or willow, of fern-crozier, of rum or saffron, the most beautiful eyes of museums open so as to see no longer, upon all the branches of the air” (9). How are eyes either of dawn or of willow? One appears to suggest the beginnings of brightness, the flush of color, leading to blue. The other suggests an airiness (willows tend to be open, airy trees), and light green. Fern-crozier is the curled-up top of a young fern leaf – dark green and brown – spiraling in a Fibonacci spiral. Rum tastes brown (this is something I have noticed, and perhaps Breton noticed too – others have confirmed my observation), while saffron is yellow. So why didn’t Breton just say eyes of blue, light green, brown-and-green (hazel), brown, and yellow? Each of Breton’s images also captures further elements these eyes project, beyond mere color. The sense of beauty and awe we feel at the dawn. The airiness of the willow. The feeling of depth and of being pulled in by the spiraling of the fern-crozier. The liquidity of rum (as well as its warmth). And, the delicacy of saffron. Breton draws our attention to the plurality found within the unity of the eyes (reminding us of Hutcheson’s definition of beauty, which suggests why Breton’s Lautréamontean approach is effective) that could not be captured by his merely using the color names. By exploding the difference into such apparently different things (only four in reality: dawn, rum, museum, and various plants – there is, with the plants, “uniformity amongst variety,” creating two such levels, or a fractal depth in his descriptive words), Breton draws our attention to Hutcheson’s definition of beauty, reminding us of it in the strangeness of the objects in his list. This creates the “only beauty which should concern us . . . convulsive beauty” (Breton, 10), by challenging the categories we place things in. He forces us to wonder what connects things like the dawn and willows, forcing us to reshuffle our categories. He draws our attention to the way we create concepts, questioning our conceptual categories, forcing us to imagine others. If beauty in art is, as Kundera says, “the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said” (AN, 123), then Breton has certainly, in his Lautréamontean descriptions, said “the never-before-said,” which makes his descriptions of the eyes beautiful and, thus, an “unknown segment of existence.” A good deal of work is needed to access what Breton has uncovered – but I think it is worth the effort. So while Breton’s use of “truth,” as facts, in his work does tend to problematize the work, it does so in an artistic way – with lies, lies that tell the truth.

III. Beauty: Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

2008-02-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

“There can be neither society nor culture without untruth. The tragic conflict. Everything which is good and beautiful depends upon illusion: truth kills – it even kills itself (insofar as it realizes that error is its foundation).” (Nietzsche, PT, 176)

Everything we (think we) know and understand is an illusion. A chair has the appearance of being unchanging – a stone more so. However, these objects are made of atoms, which vibrate and whose electrons orbit; and there are chemical reactions going on – surface oxidation at the very least. In order to maintain a chair in its best condition, it requires constant maintenance. It must be cleaned and polished – changed – in order for it to appear to remain unchanged.

Art and culture are artificial creations of the minds of humans and, in the case of culture, the great apes in general. They are illusions. “Art. Necessary lies and voluntary lies” (Nietzsche, PT, 813). The mind itself is an illusion of the complex brain – in a sense, the “mind” or “minding function of the brain” is nothing more than a system of firing neurons. It is neurons in action, in their interactions with the rest of the body, with its interactions with the environment. Life too is an illusion of certain kinds of organic chemistry, as one could literally understand every single aspect of biology as a series of chemical reactions. And atoms are illusions of energy strings. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the universe as a whole is nothing but a hologram (Jacob D. Bekenstein, “Information in the Holographic Universe” Scientific American, Aug. 2003), an idea supported in part by information theory. Emergent properties are the illusions (perhaps holograms would be a good metaphor overall) of the interacting systems that underlie the emergent systems.

Much has been made of the dissolution of the subject-object distinction. And Sartre shows the dissolution of the object-quality (noun-adjective) distinction in Nausea when Roquentin realizes that “the tree’s root is black” is not a statement of essence, but of quality. We must now dissolve the noun-verb distinction. Only then can we break out of the problem of eternal conceptual categories (Ideas, Forms, essences, and other metaphysical ideas). When we speak of culture, society, or even of art and literature, we are speaking of these things as if they are unchanging categories. When we speak of people, places, things, or ideas as nouns, we are seeing them as unchanging categories. While this may be a useful fiction at times, we must not allow ourselves to believe in the permanency of categories – something we are always in danger of. Culture is not a thing. It is the action of various human minds. As many human minds work together, act together, co-operate, we get the emergence of culture – a culture, not perpetual and unchanging, but itself transient and changing. It has momentary, temporary characteristics we can identify and discuss – remembering those characteristics have passed into the past as soon as we have observed them. This does not preclude repetition – ritual, the arts – but even the styles of the rituals and the arts pass into the past. And the minds too change, are mind-ing, not minds, no objects per se, but emergent of the work done by the neurons in the brain (and the brain itself is the collection of neurons at work). The neurons and all other calls (the body is the body-ing of the cells) are the cell-ing of biochemistry. Chemistry is the chemistry-ing of atoms; atoms are the atom-ing of particle-waves; particle-waves are the particle-waving of energy. And energy is en-ergon, in work, pure object-less action, without essence. Every noun can be understood more properly as verbs, as the actions of other entities, which are themselves actions of other entities, all reducible to object-less, essence-less action, energy, work. With this (deconstructionist) approach, everything becomes reduced to object-less, essence-less action, or becoming.

The opposite approach to deconstruction is emergence – whcih leads to the appearance of objects (we get the nouning of verbs). Dissipative structures theory shows us how actions give us the appearance of objects (object-appearance). It also shows these objects to be the appearance created by action. We have to understand each object is action, in action – object-action (also subject-action, or subject-object-action, as we are in action ourselves). In a sense, to merely verb the noun (to exchange minding for mind, as Fraser has suggested, and I have adopted) is not enough. It would be better to have a combination word for each noun that expresses both the appearance and the action. Instead of mind or minding, a third, mind(ing). An intervention which works well when written, but hardly workable when spoken. And there is always the danger that old metaphysical habits die hard, and that we will try to turn the new words, or constructions, into their own columbaria (to use Nietzsche’s metaphor). In the meantime, allow me to suggest that the universe as it becomes has so far appeared to have become as: Energy particle-wave(ing)s atom(ing)s chemistry(ing)s cell(ing)s body(ing)s-brain(ing)s mind(ing)s culture(ing)s. This embedded noun-verb grammatical construction may help us see object emergence from actions, but realistically it is impractical (impracticeable) in everyday writing and speech. In order to have this understanding enter and deconstruct our metaphysics of language, it will be up to those artists who understand the world this way to nudge the language toward this understanding, and nudge it in a way where it can easily and understandably enter the way we speak of and about the world. The type of intervention I have done is clearly insufficient for the job at hand. Other ways of speaking this understanding will have to be uncovered by the language arts – in works people will want to read. This is how literature will be able to speak the truth of appearance in action. We need a language which enacts emergence from action, which enacts dissipative structure. Or maybe we cannot, due to the grammatical structure of our language, and we will continue to always forget.

Of course, art does speak truth in the form of lies in a different way, in the way our language works. It works to speak human truth in the form of artistic lies. And this works in other ways of knowing as well. Consider an example from biology. The following is an extremely shortened and imprecise explanation of what would happen in the following situation. Suppose we have some mobile bacteria in solution and we put a drop of toxin into the solution on one side of the container. What would happen in purely chemical terms is the following:

The chemical would dissipate from the point of origin through the liquid. Several toxin molecules would bind to areas on folded polypeptide molecules embedded in a phospholipid bubble. This would generate a change in the geometrical configuration of the polypeptide, resulting in a chemical reaction on the inside of the bubble (let us say, for the sake of argument, that the specific chemical reaction is the addition of water to guanosine triphosphate (GTP) – which is a composite molecule consisting of the purine guanine, which is attached to the 1'-carbon of a ribose molecule, which has a chain of three phosphates attached to its 5'-carbon – to create the molecule cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), and a diphosphate). The product of this reaction would build up so long as the toxin kept the polypeptide properly configured, until there was enough of the product (cGMP) to bind another polypeptide to create another chemical reaction. This chain of reactions would culminate in a configuration change in a polypeptide close to the highest concentration of the toxin, so the chemicals adenosine triphosphate and water could attach to it and react together to create adenosine diphosphate and a phosphoric acid molecule, along with a change in the geometry of the polypeptide, which makes it rotate a polypeptide connected to a chain of polypeptides. Continued chemical reactions of ATP and water result in more rotations of the chain of polypeptides. This entire chain of chemical-physical events continues until the toxin is at low enough concentrations to decouple from the initial polypeptide and thus interrupt the cascade at its origin.

And now for a biological explanation:

The bacterium senses the toxin, and swims away to a safe distance.

One will notice that the purely biological explanation is much simpler than the chemical one. That simple biological explanation is an illusion masking the chemical complexity (and I gave a shortened version of that) underlying what happens biologically. Does the fact that this is a lie make it any less real (or “true”) because what happens can be explained in chemical terms alone? The biological lie of organic chemistry becomes a new truth. And this new truth is good (it promotes life – in this case, is life) and beautiful (as a unification of the diversity of chemistry). We can then see what Nietzsche means by “truth kills – it even kills itself”: if we consider the truth (the constituent parts) as more important than, or superseding the lie (the emergent system), then we will increasingly see the world as meaningless, as the underlying truths (which are themselves lies) become increasingly meaningless. By focusing on these “lower” truths, we miss the “higher” truths. This is why and how truth kills itself – through deconstruction (in leaving the world only deconstructed).

One gets out of this trap through affirming the lies. At the human level, that means culture and art. “Art treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true” (Nietzsche, PT 184). If we recall the differentiation I made between truth and facts in chapter 1, we can see that facts are the truths underlying lies, while what we call truths are those lies themselves. In other words, from strings to humans, we speak of facts – while art, religion, and culture are the lies we make to tell us truths about ourselves. This is why Nietzsche says

The truest things in this world are love, religion, and art. The former sees through all dissimulations and masquerades; it penetrates to the core, to the suffering individual, suffers with him, pities him; the latter, as practical love, consoles the sufferer for his sufferings by telling him about another world order and teaching him to disdain this one. These are the three illogical powers, which acknowledge themselves as such. (PT, 177)

The truest things are love, religion, and art – these are the realms of truth, not of facts. The correspondence theory of truth is only applicable to umwelts below humans, to things knowable through science – or, facts. Facts which are lies covering other facts, etc. Love, religion, and art are the emergent properties-lies-products of humans which speak the truth. “When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance – as this being of truth in the work and as work – is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place” (Heidegger, PLT, 81). The pleasure we find in beauty (the unifying lie of pluralistic truth) is the pleasure of lying: “The pleasure of lying is an artistic pleasure; otherwise, only truth would possess any pleasure in itself. Artistic pleasure is the greatest kind of pleasure, because it speaks the truth quite generally in the form of lies” (Nietzsche, PT, 183). The bright colors of the goby are a lie – no goby has ever been as healthy as the male goby advertises itself to be. Which is itself a lie – since the goby obviously was fit enough to sport such colors and thus mate successfully. And each work of great art or literature is a lie – insofar as the work is better and more intelligent and wiser than the artist could ever be. Does this in any way denigrate the artist? Of course not:

man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions. (Nietzsche, PT, “TCNS” 2)

We wish to be lied to. And the artist, because (s)he can create things better, smarter, and wiser than (s)he is, is able to best lie to us and for us.

A good example of this desire to be deceived – and thus the desire to deceive – can be seen in the way we dress and act to sexually attract someone. A person who dresses fashionably rather than comfortably (or how they would prefer to dress when not trying to attract or keep someone’s interest) will attract far more (wo)men. They are in a sense lying with their clothes about who they are (regarding style, money, etc.). But it is an effective lie – as all advertising must be – and insofar as it serves life, it is beautiful. Someone who is well-dressed is in a sense beautiful – certainly more beautiful than a slob. A more extreme example could be used to illustrate this point. The most effective way to be so attractive to someone they would have sex with you right away (sooner rather than later) is to expand the lies beyond the clothes. A person who extensively (and confidently) lies about themselves will attract more people more strongly than someone who gives an honest portrayal of themselves. It is far more difficult to attract someone without lies – and one wonders exactly what kind of person one could attract without them, if one were honest (if that were possible) about the different masks one wears. At the same time, lies tend to fall apart over the long term. It is initial attraction which depends on lies – or exterior forms of beauty. However, if one wants to maintain a long-term relationship, one has to transition those we are attracted to into accepting the truths about ourselves our lies have covered. It seems those who are most effective at maintaining long-term relationships would be those who could create the lies that tell the truth about themselves, so the transition to their truths is built into their lies. This is part of the connection between acting and action. To “act” is to both do something, and to pretend to do something. So, if we act a certain way, after a while those actions can become actual. As Hamlet said to his mother, we should

“Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain [to-]night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence, the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either [curse?] the devil or throw him out
With wondrous potency.” (Act 3, Scene 4)

The same can be applied to the realm of art. Works of art and literature which only “tell the truth” (if that were even possible) would be inferior insofar as such works would be overly-detailed and thus not interesting – or they would show the utter meaninglessness underlying everything. No painting could ever tell the truth in this way, as the only way such detail could be achieved would be to fully recreate the object to be represented (but that too is impossible, since each object is in its full materiality unique). A fully “truthful” work of art is impossible. “Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem” (Heidegger, PLT, 72). Heidegger is here saying that truth is the lie that conceals (while simultaneously exposes) what is (the facts). In other words, art covers up what is. It adds an extra layer of lies over the lies of the original system, insofar as art represents something. In doing so, it uncovers truth. The uncovering of truths covers other truths – each unmasking is a masking. “The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such. The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. What went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work” (Heidegger, 75). On the other hand, the lie that is only a lie is also impossible. “Art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (Heidegger, 71). We have tried to get at it with various forms of abstract art, which are attempts to create in paint “pure” concepts of abstractions (lies), but in the end such abstract works end up representing something to us.

What we have in the great work of art or literature is the lie that tells the truth. There are several ways in which lies can tell the truth, from “photorealism” to surrealism to various kinds of abstractions – and everything in between and among them. In literature, we see some of the biggest failures in beginning writing students when they try to tell a story the way it “really happened.” These stories are failures because they attempt to tell the truth as truth, or fact. There is no art – no artifice – to the stories. The most extreme version of this emphasis on multiplicity at the expense of unity is in the so-called Language Poets. These poets too are attempting to get at the truth at the expense of the truth-telling lie. Thus, they fail. Further, one sees similar problems when beginning writers are too abstract. There is unity without multiplicity – there is a lie without truth. And the work, again, collapses. The problem is that each of these kinds of writers do not realize the importance of truth and lies – of multiplicity and unity – to art and literature. They either reject the lies outright as immoral, or reject the truth as inconvenient for the lies they want to believe. The important thing is that the lie serve life. Any lie that does not serve life is an immoral lie. To the extend it does serve life, it is true. This is the role which art must take – to create emergent realities – to create true lies.

II. Beauty as Complementarity: The Agonal Unification of Opposites

2008-02-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

For Nietzsche, tragic beauty comes about through the agonal unification of the Apollonian and the Dionysian aspects of physis. Each is of equal importance (see BT) – if Nietzsche later emphasized Dionysus, it was to counterbalance the overly Apollonian-Socratic culture he was living in. After the 2oth Century, it is Apollo that is most necessary. Or, more accurately, a true balance between the two. Ernst Fischer goes further and says that all beauty has inherent in it an agonal unification of opposites, where “each contains the germ of its opposite, as expressed in the yin-yang symbol” (167). Each is complementary; one is not above another, they are equal in importance, and each requires the other for existence. Thus, Fisher lists the following agonally unified opposites as constituting beauty:

Native – Foreign
Light – Shadow
Logos – Eros
Emotion – Intellect (Reason)
Conscious – Unconscious
Soul – Technology
Feeling – Thinking
General – Specific
Universal – Particular

Some of these are more applicable to humans than to other animals (the agonal unification of Soul – Technology in particular) – meaning humans, having more agonal elements, have a deeper understanding of beauty. Humans perceive beauty because beauty itself merges “a (mental) interior and a (sensorially grasped) exterior to make cognition aesthetically possible” (135). Through this, beauty “generates truth simply by a fusion of the mental and the sensual” (Joseph Brodsky, quoted by Fischer, 135). Thus Fischer concludes that “it is by perceiving with our senses and recognizing beauty that we come to regard a thing as valuable and worth preserving” (159).

Chapter 7: On Beauty: I. The Birth of the Arts From the Spirit of Ritual

2008-02-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Ritual is how vertebrates attempt to reorganize the world when faced with conflicts having to do with their perception of that world. As Lorenz points out in On Aggression, the most common conflict among vertebrates is between the aggressive protection of territory and the needs of sexual reproduction. For animals such as schooling fish, this is not a problem. Herring are simple in both their coloration and in their behavior. Why spend energy on potentially dangerous bright colors to attract mates when everyone releases their eggs and sperm all at once, collectively? And why develop complex behaviors if there is no reason to, if there is no conflict, since there is no need to defend territory if you are a schooling fish in the open ocean? The beauty of herring is expressed only at the level of the golden mean – the simplest fractal form – in their shape, reproduction, and behavior.

Conflict creates greater feedback processes, transforming simple golden mean ratios into more complex fractal forms. An example would be the brightly-colored gobies, which are very territorial. “For many vertebrates, a clearly defined territory for offspring rearing seems to be fundamental. This involves aggressive behavior of a great variety on the part of the male (and sometimes the female too), usually of a ritual nature, but effective in defending an area” (Bonner, 86). The bright colors serve two purposes – to warn and to attract. The warning is for members of the same sex. The attraction is for the opposite sex. In both cases the bright colors advertise health: brightly-colored fish are strong, well-fed, healthy fish. The conflict comes about in the need to aggressively defend territory versus the need to sexually reproduce. If one just defends, one runs off potential mates. But passive gobies lose territory – and thus, ironically, cannot attract mates. What develops from the conflict between these straightforward actions of defense and sex is the mating ritual, a nonlinear feedback behavior designed to allow members of the opposite sex to enter one’s private space. It is a dance. It is a dance wherein linear elements conflict to create nonlinear systems, which reorganize the chaos created by the conflict into a sort of disorderly order. Ritual is the emergent system created out of the conflicting elements. It is a safe space in which the participants play out the conflicts, to ensure mating can occur. One effect of this is the development of the ability in gobies to differentiate between individuals. Territoriality (notions of private property) created individuality through the need to ritualize sex. In more social animals, including pair-bonding animals, this resulted in the development of personal relationships, including love. None of which could be possible without a complex neural system to allow for the creation of such complex behavior.

Complex ritualistic behavior resulted in more complex brains, as more complex rituals more effectively attract females. This is how vertebrates evolved more complex brains, leading to the complexity of mammalian behavior. Social mammals have strong social bonds even among those who are not mates. These bonds were generated through the elaboration of mating rituals into things like grooming rituals. Primates in particular have strong grooming rituals, which have elaborated into such things as sexual pleasure leading to recreational sex in humans and bonobos, and massage in humans. We can see this behavior in the fact that “the human neurotransmitter vasopressin, which is closely associated with aggression, is also deeply implicated in the drive to stay with and cherish one’s mate and protect one’s offspring. Without the resistance to strangers there could be no individuality and love” (Turner, Hope, 170). The conflict is found even at the neurotransmitter level.

If we understand ritual as the attempt to create a new recursive order from the disorder created by the conflict between two or more linear orders, we can begin to understand the origins of a large number of human behaviors. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, we could get athletic sports out of the ritualization of combat/conflict. This would allow very large numbers of people to live together, and could help maintain unity both within and among communities. It also allows us to ritualize our xenophobia – it is better to ritually dislike Philadelphia because the Eagles are playing the Cowboys than it is to actually dislike someone because of their race, color, religion, gender, etc. One may object that it would be better if we did not dislike anybody at all. But as a territorial species, that is not an option – and without it we would have neither individuality nor love. To have love, including love of one’s own, love of one’s community, etc., one must have hate. Each of the things that is best about humans comes with what is worst about us. This is a shameful situation we can deal with through ritual transference – in the case of love of one’s community, to athletic sports. Ritual, beauty, is how we get beyond this sense of good and evil, of the wya good and evil are entangled with each other, to help us to become better and to make a better, more complex game.

I have introduced an idea developed at great length by Frederick Turner in Beauty and in The Culture of Hope, which is the issue of shame. Rituals “accept, frame, organize, and elaborate the chaotic shame inherent in death, life-crisis, birth, sexual awakening, and pollution, in such a way that we recognize the beauty that also attends those moments of embarrassing emergence and self-reference” (Hope, 48). Turner connects the feeling of shame to the feeling of beauty – there is a certain beauty in the ways in which we try to deal with our shame, when we deal with it through ritual, and we feel some shame at the very experience of beauty:

The traditional pan-human artistic genres are keyed to our neurophysiological makeup in such a way as to remind us of our materiality, our mortality, the automatism of our delight, as well as the strange reflexivity of our awareness. We are embarrassed by our pleasure in rhyme, by the sweetness of melody, by stories with neat endings, by gorgeous color combinations, and by the great natural genre of representation in general. (Hope, 49)

We feel shame because these elements of the arts make us aware we are materially part of the universe. The arts are the rituals we use to deal with the conflict between this material awareness and our feelings that we are, or should be, more than our material being – which is to say, they ritualize the conflict between life and death, of our awareness of our own immanent deaths, which came with our fullest self-awareness. The moment we became more fully aware we were alive – and of the connection between sex and reproduction – we became equally aware that we would also die. Philosophy, religion, and the arts are how we have dealt with this awareness.

The internal conflicts we as humans feel we feel as shame. Ritual – beauty – is how we deal with this shame. However, there are those who try to deny shame, who wish to avoid dealing with our shameful feelings. One way to deny shame is through transference to an Other – resulting in hatred of that Other: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. These Others represent aspects of ourselves we wish to deny – and denigrating, or outright eliminating, the Other can appear to be an effective way to get rid of these feelings. But shame denial does not have to be relegated to those we feel ashamed at feeling superior to (and we should feel ashamed at that, while at the same time, we should not deny that we do feel that way toward some people, as denial only prevents us from properly dealing with those feelings). We feel ashamed of our material connection to the rest of the world. Body-soul dualism is the denial of this shameful feeling. We feel ashamed of our genetic connection to animals and other “lower” life forms. Creationism is the denial of this shame. We feel ashamed that we are more complex than other animals, that we are “special.” The hatred of humans – especially the best of and in us, of our art, literature, culture, technology, etc. – is the denial of this shame. We feel shame at receiving gifts. How can we ever “pay someone back” for the gifts they give us from the heart? Gifts create obligation (that is a gift’s cost), and obligation creates shame. For many, this is bad enough – but what if that gift is inherited? Intelligence is a gift from nature, from the particular genes we were born with, combined with the fortune of the parents a person is born to. It is a gift freely given, without the recipients having earned it (though education is the gift one can give one’s children, and to oneself, to make good use of that intelligence). So many intelligent people attempt to dumb themselves down through drink or drugs because they feel ashamed at being more intelligent than most other people. They do this to punish themselves, to try to deny the shame at receiving such a wonderful gift without having earned it. The attempt to deny their shame is an attempt to deny the gift they have received and to deny the obligation that comes with that gift. Instead, intelligent people should gratefully accept the gift they have been given, and use it to create gifts to give to everyone else. That is the proper use of a gift (be that gift intelligence, knowledge, wealth, or wisdom) – to create more gifts. To create the gift of beauty for others. But then, we feel shame at the very feeling of beauty. The postmodernists’ rejection of traditional artistic forms is the denial of this shame. It is here where we see that the rejection of shame is the rejection of beauty. Since beauty connects the (meta)physical world, epistemology, and ethics, we can also understand the postmodernists’ rejection of (meta)physics, knowledge, and any sort of universal ethics. When Milan Kundera admits to a distaste for rhythmic poetry because the steady rhythms remind him of his beating heart, which reminds him of his own future death (AN), we see the denial of shame in the denial of death itself – and, thus, the distaste for rhythmical form in poetry. Finally, we find in the rejection of the author (in Barthes’ death of the author) an attempt to deny the shame inherent in having someone (an authority) tell you a story, or how to think, what to know, or how to see the world.

The postmodernists’ denial of knowledge comes from the denial of their shame at realizing they cannot know anything with 100% certainty. The postmodernists are correct when they say we cannot know with 100% certainty what an author meant when (s)he wrote a work, as we cannot know their exact thoughts, emotions, state(s) of mind, attitude, etc.. Nor can we know with 100% certainty the cultural, historical, economic, etc. situation within which a work was written. Further, psychologists such as Jung and Lacan say the authors themselves cannot know exactly how and why their works are the way they are. All of which is true. But then the postmodernists go on to say that since we cannot know these or any other things with 100% certainty, we cannot know them at all – so we should not try. Thus Barthes’ call for the death of the Author. Why must we have this all-or-nothing approach? Why insist on knowledge-as-equivalence when knowledge-as-synonymity will do? As Eisendrath points out,

the reader’s difficulty in understanding the author’s intention, as the author’s difficulty in understanding his or her own, cannot argue away the residual usefulness of understanding the writer’s intentions and world. Whatever the difficulties, it seems worth attempting, even if full understanding is only an approachable limit, just as it is worth attempting to connect subjective experiences with neurophysiology, and, in real social relations, it is worth attempting to understand another person, or gain what is called “accurate sympathy”. (214)

The postmodernists see the difficulties before them and have given up – thus the source of contemporary apathy. But this too is a shameful position – so they try to convince others to join them in denying the possibility of knowledge. But this is just the denial of the shame we feel in realizing we will never be able to know anything with 100% certainty (other than those truths “of limited value” Nietzsche talks about in “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”). We should not join them in this exercise of shame denial. Even if we cannot know anything with 100% certainty, even if we cannot understand something someone else has experienced with 100% certainty (since there are no equivalent experiences), we can know things to an “approachable limit,” through synonymous experiences.

Nietzsche too noticed an increasing trend in shame-denial in the use of foreign words to designate something that could just as easily have been said in one’s native language:

When I say “wisdom” and “love of wisdom,” I certainly feel something more familiar and powerful than when I say “philosophy.” . . . the trick is sometimes precisely not to let things draw too near; for there often lies so much that is shameful in the familiar words. For who would not be ashamed to call himself a “wise man” or even merely “one who is becoming wise”! But a “philosopher”? This easily passes anyone’s lips . . . Is what we call “philosophy” today actually the love of wisdom? Does wisdom have any true friends at all today? Let us fearlessly replace the word “philosophy” with “love of wisdom”: then it will become clear whether they are the same thing. (PT, 47)

One could ask the postmodernists these same questions. But the postmodernists have gone a step further. For them, the word “philosophy” has become a shameful word. Wisdom is so foreign to postmodernism that “philosophy” has been abandoned for “theory.” There are fewer friends of philosophy – let alone wisdom – today than there were in Nietzsche’s day. It seems most have given up on the very idea of wisdom, exchanging the pursuit of wisdom for the pursuit of knowledge alone – which has also since been abandoned.

Ritual – including sacrifice, religion, and the arts – are how we deal with shame in an accepting and acceptable way. Sacrifice is a transference – a transmutation – of shame onto something of value. It is a commuted punishment. One form of this is the creation of the sacrificial scapegoat. But this scapegoating can be ritualized – through the artform of tragedy (goat-song). By turning scapegoating into tragedy, we show how shameful scapegoating itself is, through ritual, while allowing us to deal with that shame in the safe play-space of the tragic play. As all art provides a ritualistic scapegoat for all our shameful feelings in a safe-play space, all art has, as Fraser suggests, its origin in tragedy – even if it was only in the West where tragedy was purified.

These rituals all originated in the original mating rituals – which were dances. As Fraser suggests, the arts do originate in dance – as every ritual is a dance. Music is the dance of sounds (thus, the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music). And, as we have seen previously, language likely has its origins in music – thus, in ritual. Meaning our very awareness of death comes from ritual (mating ritual), which we have had to ritualize. Philosophy, religion, and the arts are how we ritualize our self-awareness of sex and death. Painting is at minimum the dance of arms, hands, and fingers, captured in the strokes of color. Jackson Pollock went so far as to turn painting into the capturing of the full body’s dance in color. And, as rituals have their origins in territorial species needing to mate, we can see the connection of beauty to reproduction. Beauty wishes to reproduce itself (Scarry) – which is why the universe is scalarly self-similar as it hierarchically emerges into new, more complex levels. Which is why art and literature are scalarly self-similar to the universe, though more complex than their creators – as we can see in the fact that readings of literature give rise to as many interpretations as there are readings (readers, plus re-readings), though good readings will be self-similar.

III. From Deconstruction to Reconstruction

2008-02-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

Now that I have deconstructed the human cultural universals to show their evolutionary origins, we are left with the question of where this leaves us. If we can trace religion, and all the constituent parts of religion, to our extended sense of time, created by the recursive narrative-grammar structure of language, and the combination of these with various instincts we inherited from our ape ancestors, does that mean that is all there is to religion? No more than organic chemistry is all there is to biology. In the same way certain kinds of organic chemicals combine to create life, an emergent reality with properties unpredictable from mere knowledge of organic chemistry, religion is an emergent reality with properties unpredictable from mere knowledge of its constituent parts. Deconstructing religion the way I have allows us to see it has naturalistic, evolutionary origins in the same way biochemistry allows us to see how biology is related to organic chemistry. But if we want to study religion as religion, we must turn to theology, not to biology (or psychology); and if we are to study organisms as organisms, we must turn to biology, not chemistry. Biochemistry is one perspective on biology. One must look at many perspectives on an organism – its biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, population dynamics, anatomy, physiology, sociobiology, ecology, etc. – if we want to approach understanding the organism as a whole. But we must not deceive ourselves regarding the naturalistic origins of religion any more than we should deny our need for religion, or that its existence creates a reality any less real for being an emergent system constructed of parts having naturalistic origins (is biology less real for being an emergent system of certain kinds of chemistry? – to allow ourselves an anthropomorphic moment, biology has the same unreal reality to an amino acid as religion has to a human being). What it does allow us to do is be fully conscious of what religion is: a game (as all complex systems are in this sense games) with rules we can and do change. It can allow us to be more self-aware, to better know ourselves, so we can more actively select those emergent social realities that allow for greater complexity – remembering that knowledge of and about the constituents of a system does not allow us to predict the emergent properties of that system. As it turns out, we do have several religion-systems we can look at and compare. We can use comparative theology to compare the emergent religion-systems, and look at the parts of each of these systems, to understand the relationship between the parts and the system which emerges from their interactions, including the people through which they interact. We could then continue to evolve our religions, as they have evolved in the past, only more self-consciously, with more self-awareness. If we managed to create better religions, or better versions of already-existing religions, they would be naturally selected for, while failures would be naturally selected against. The important thing for any reformer to remember is that any change should be for greater complexity – any system requiring the elimination of a group of people for it to succeed is one that goes against the very purpose of religion, which is to create a more complex, more moral society. At the same time, we have to remember that the very fact religions are complex systems suggests they are in many ways similar to organisms. Like organisms, religions have typically fought each other to protect their territory (some have even fought such things as science, mistaking it for another religion). This is perhaps because they are too similar – those of the same species fight for territory. Dissimilar species tend to live together, creating an emergent (eco)system. We need to learn the various religions can be understood as ways to understand God – but which do not negate the claim of any one religion to understand God – in a way that gives an emergent system from the constituent parts, the current religious systems.

Another option is to embrace the naturalistic view, rejecting eschatology, divination, and luck superstitions in favor of understanding that the future is inherently unknowable, incalculable, undetermined, as chaos theory shows. As naturalistic explanations proliferate, we can do away with magic, and as we understand that permanency is an illusion of becoming through dissipative structures, we can do away with soul concepts too (not to mention all notions of permanency, of Being). While understanding the world through the naturalistic chaos-complexity theory espoused here could lead to these conclusions, I am not certain that most people would be willing to embrace such conclusions, since it goes against our instincts. We need certain falsehoods.

The falseness of a judgement is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgement; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgements (which include the synthetic judgements a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invested world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that renouncing false judgements would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life— that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. (Nietzsche, BGE 4)

The other problem with this approach is that it is merely reductionist, deconstructionist – which means it cannot show us the value of having these instincts leading to religion. It cannot show us the emergent properties of the religion-systems that develop, it cannot show us their beauty.

Perhaps we can have a third option in an artistic understanding, one that allows for a world we now know to be in constant flux. In discussing the kinds of changes our landscapes are undergoing – including our relationships to those landscapes, from an idea that nature is unchanging to an idea that it constantly evolves, Frederick Turner, in “The Landscape of Disturbance,” explains the differences between the old view of nature, and the new, evolutionary one, which is also a new cosmological view and, potentially, a new religious view as well:

We are undergoing a major transition in our basic cultural model of the human relationship with the rest of nature. To sum it up in a sentence, it is a transition from a heroic, linear, industrial, power-based, entropic-thermodynamic, goal-oriented model, to a tragicomic, nonlinear, horticultural, influence-based, synergetic, evolutionary-emergentist, process-oriented model. The heroic model postulates a human struggle with nature culminating in human victory, while the tragicomic model postulates an ongoing engagement within nature, between the relatively swift and self-reflective part of nature that is human, and the rest. The linear model imagines one-way causes and effects; the nonlinear model imagines turbulent interactions in which the initiating event has been lost or is at least irrelevant. The industrial model requires a burning; the horticultural model requires a growing. The power-based model's bottom line is coercion; the influence-based model's is persuasion and mutual interest. The entropic-thermodynamic model involves an inevitable and irretrievable expense of free energy in the universe and an increase of disorder when any work is performed; the synergetic-evolutionary model seeks economies whereby every stakeholder gains and new forms of order can emerge out of far-from-equilibrium regimes. The goal-oriented model imagines a perfect fixed or harmonious state as its end product, and tends paradoxically to like immortal, open-ended narratives; the process-oriented model knows that the function of an ending is to open up new possibilities, and it prefers beginning-middle-end narrative structures; it knows that nothing in the universe is ever perfect and immortal, and that death comes to everything.

This evolutionary, artistic understanding is what we need in this case. We need unity combined with the plurality created by deconstruction. An artistic understanding helps us see the system as both unified and having parts that themselves can be understood. An evolutionary understanding helps us see these things are in time, and change, and have emergent properties as they combine. For any religion to survive, it will have to do away with eschatologies and teleologies containing notions of an unchanging reality, so the religions can better help us deal with the knowledge that there are no unchanging realities, only the appearance of permanence in dissipative structures.

Nonetheless, we can now see why we associate religion with wisdom: religion is the unified system whose parts are the individual people of that system, who are themselves bringing together various instincts to create the system. Religion is unified relative to us, the parts of the religion-system, and wisdom is seeing the world as unified. Religion (as well as philosophy) is associated with wisdom – it is one of wisdom’s primary domains. This is why art and literature were, until (post)modern times, associated with wisdom. And it explains the attraction of cultural explanations in that culture resembles religion. Each culture is an emergent system of the particular manifestations of the cultural universals, and as such can resemble a religion in its overarching ability to explain a variety of things. To this extent, culture is a religion for those who insist we are completely culturally determined. If we want a truly beautiful religion (or philosophy, or culture, or work of art or literature), it needs to deal with the connection between knowledge and wisdom, and the appearance of being in change.

II. Some Other Human Instincts: A Short Summary

2008-02-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

We have already seen that Frederick Turner adds combat, gifts, mime, friendship, lying, love, storytelling, and murder taboos to the list of sixty-seven human cultural universals; and I have included such neurocharms as narrative, selecting, classification, musical meter, tempo, rhythm, tone, melody, harmony, pattern recognition, giving meaning to certain color combinations, hypothesis, metaphysical synthesis, collecting, metaphor, syntactical organization, gymnastics, the martial arts, mapping, the capacity for geometry and ideography, poetic meter, cuisine, and massage. Many of these instincts are not uniquely human, though we have retained them: combat, gifts, mime, friendship, lying, love, narrative, selecting, classification, musical meter, tempo, rhythm, tone, melody, harmony, and pattern recognition can be found in other animals, including chimpanzees, gibbons, and, particularly the music neurocharms, in birds. But let us consider the possible origins of some of the uniquely human universals.

Table IV

Age Grading — this could have come from our extended sense of time, which we get from the recursive narrative structure of language + counting (which one could imagine coming from something like musical meter or tempo combining with language, or naming) + social hierarchy

Athletic Sports — this could have come from ritual + combat

Calendar — this could have come from our extended sense of time + counting + our recognition that there is a cyclical aspect to nature (an eternal return of the seasons, of the moon phases, of star patterns)

Cooking — discovery of fire + eating rituals + family feasting

Cosmology — need to explain everything to ourselves and each other, from langauge

Cuisine — instinct for beauty applied to taste + cooking

Dancing — ritualizing body movements to make more orderly + sexual display + music

Dream Interp. — our theory of mind + language + our instinct to create meaning

Ethnobotany — selecting + classification (as applied to plants)

Etiquette — ritualizing body movements to make more orderly + (for specifically dining etiquette) eating rituals + family feasting

Fire-Making — discovery of fire (from extended notions of what a “tool” could be)

Folklore — a kind of storytelling

Food Taboos — this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to an awareness that certain foods can cause illness (later extended to taboos such as the American one against eating horse, following the close personal relationship Americans developed with the horse, due to our history – showing such instincts can be expanded to include emotional concerns)

Funeral Rites — this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to an awareness of our own immanent deaths + ritual (to make meaning of the person’s death)

Hair Styles — bodily adornment + cleanliness training + hygiene (orderly hair = clean)

Hospitality — this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to extended notions of kin groups + gift-giving + family feasting + greetings + visiting

Gymnastics — ritualizing body movements to make more orderly + strength-sexual display

Inheritance — property rights + knowledge of paternity (developed as we became increasingly monogamous) + extended sense of time; this could have come about from the following equation: Property Z belongs to A, child B belongs to A, therefore property Z belongs to B

Joking — language + ritual bonding

Kinship Naming — language + knowledge of paternity

Law — community organization + cooperation + division of labor + ethics + games + government + property rights + ritual + status differentiation + language

Marriage — ritual + sexual display + need for knowledge of paternity (by both male and female)

Martial Arts — ritualizing body movements to make more orderly + combat

Mealtimes — ritualization of family feasting on a daily schedule + cooking

Obstetrics — medicine + childbirthing

Penal Sanctions — ethics + law + government

Personal Names — language + theory of mind (theory of self-consciousness/identity of others)

Population Policy— this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to a more fully-developed awareness of the connection between sex and reproduction

Pregnancy Usages— ritual + pregnancy (awareness that pregnancy = immanent birth, from our extended sense of time, leading to a more fully-developed awareness of the connection between sex and reproduction)

Puberty Customs — this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to a more fully-developed awareness of the connection between the physical development of a child, sex, and reproduction, with sex becoming associated with becoming an adult

Residence Rules — a variation of property rights

Sexual Restrictions – this could have come from our extended sense of time, leading to a more fully-developed awareness of the connection between sex and reproduction

Surgery — tool usage + medicine

Weather Control— ritual to attempt to make chaos into order, applied to weather

Weaving — extension of tool usage + fine manipulation of fingers

I have left out some of these, as I have been and/or will be dealing with them in much greater detail throughout this work. But these should give us a good idea of how combinations of instincts could have given rise to new instincts, while retaining the old instincts. The combinations I have suggested are not beyond question. Further investigation and research into these instincts should result in additions, subtractions, or recombinations for at least some of these. What I have done here is show how each of these unique human instincts could have easily developed out of the instincts of the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Every one of our actions, every one of our instincts, have evolutionary origins.

Chapter 6: On the Evolution of Cultural Universals: I. A Bad Story

2008-02-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Adam came downstairs, dressed in his suit, briefcase in hand. Bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, and grits made a blend of aromas that pulled him into the kitchen. His wife, Lily, placed the last glass on the table as Adam walked in. Both worked full time, and today was Lily’s turn to make breakfast,. She smiled at Adam as he came in and sat at his place at the table. The conversation they’d had the previous night was still on his mind.

“I don’t know why you’re smiling. I haven’t changed my mind,” Adam said.

Lily frowned.

“Do you want me to quit my job? Do you just want a housewife?” Lily asked.

“Why does having kids mean you’ll have to quit your job and become a housewife? Lots of women have kids and careers,” Adam said.

“Not my sister,” Lily said. She poured them both milk.

“That’s your sister’s choice,” Adam said.

Lily put the milk in the refrigerator and grabbed the plate of bacon and the bowl of grits and placed them on the table. Without a word, she grabbed the bowl of scrambled eggs and the plate of buttered toast and placed them in front of Adam.

The two ate in silence. Adam thought of his assistant at work, a tall blonde who was always eating fruit. She had been talking recently of how much she wanted to get married and have children. Eva was a good woman.

Adam shook his head and took a bite of bacon. He shouldn’t think things like that. Thoughts like that could get a man in trouble.

After they finished eating, Adam helped Lily clear the table and fill the dishwasher. Each kissed the other goodbye, finished getting together what they needed for work, got into their separate cars, and headed in opposite directions to their jobs. Adam continued thinking of the situation with Lily. Why didn’t she want children? What was the real reason? He didn’t buy for a minute her excuse. Now Eva . . . No. No. He mustn’t think that.

Adam shook his head to dispel this last thought, and failed to notice the red light. As he ran it, a semi truck hit his driver’s side, killing Adam instantly.

* * * * *

The above is a bad story because it leaves the reader unfulfilled. We are supposed to learn more about this developing conflict, not be left with such a stupid ending. But for the vast majority of us, our lives end exactly this way: stupidly. If it is not death by an accident, it is by cancer, heart attack, or any of a number of ways that deprive our deaths of meaning. Few of us get glorious ends, culminating our lives in any sort of meaningful ways. Faced with the practical certainty of meeting such a stupid end, we have all, every culture, set out like Don Quixote, determined to come up with a better end to the story, whether that end be heaven, a longer life granted by God/the gods to give you more time to create a better end for yourself, an afterlife state of bliss, elimination of suffering (in nirvana, for example), or earthly utopias.

Thus is born various teleologies, eschatologies and soul concepts. The way we get to them is through and because of language. We have, through and because of language, narrated our own lives beyond the present, through various futures, to our own certain deaths, and discovered that we inevitably end up with terrible, meaningless, stupid endings. So we narrate the story beyond our lives, to afterlives, including material afterlives (Communist utopias, for example). Or we fashion our own glorious endings (in suicide bombings, etc.). Every time we work for the future, for our children, for a future society we will never see, it is from the same eschatalogical drive that creates and created the world’s religions. Because we have recursive narrative (grammatical) language, we have created the need for religion, to make the future meaningful. So we can see, then, that for religion, in the beginning (arche) was the word (logos). Without it, one cannot get religion at all. Thus, Nietzsche’s statement that “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar . . . “ (Twilight of the Idols, 5) is quite profound in its insight.

All of the human cultural universals that constitute the various elements of our religions have this same origin in (recursive, grammatical) language leading to an extended sense of time: divination, funeral rites, luck superstitions, magic, propitiation of supernatural beings, religious ritual, soul concepts, and eschatologies. Our extended sense of time allows us to project into an increasingly uncertain future. It makes good evolutionary sense to have a fear of what is unknown – since what is unknown could be a predator. Our extended sense of time creates an increasingly unknown and unknowable future, meaning our fear of the known “out there” in a spatial sense gets applied to time, as it becomes increasingly unknown. At the same time we, as all the great apes (and perhaps all animals), have a sense of causality: in the past A resulted in B several times; therefore, A causes B. And it is important in an evolutionary sense for a species, such as chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, which develop much of their understanding of the world through learning, to have evolved a sense of causality – if you do not figure out that the leopard or something like that leopard is the cause of the death of a fellow troop member, then you will probably end up becoming leopard (lion, etc.) food yourself. But our extended notion of time makes us realize predictability breaks down over time. Faced with the contradiction of belief in causality and long-term unpredictability, we developed divination. Divination is the attempt to make the unknowns of the future “known” through applying causality to the far future, beyond when reasonable predictions can be made. Luck superstitions would be the attempt to explain in a causal way why good things happen to some people, but not to others – it is a variation on the sense of justice (also felt by chimpanzees), applied to that part of the world not within our control. It is in a sense related to the idea of magic, which is how we attempt to make sense of the unknown and unfamiliar in the absence of causal explanations. All of these are possible only with language. They require being put into words and being discussed. The discussions about “that strange thing that just happened” lead to causal explanations because we need causal explanations, even if the cause is magic (which makes more sense to most people than there being no cause, or no cause that can be discovered – and what is technology to one is magic to another), of which miracles for this discussion are a part. Miracles in this sense are magic performed by supernatural beings, by those supernatural beings, or through people chosen by those supernatural beings.

These universals arise because they are how we can explain the unexplainable to each other, and they served us so well, they became instincts. This is why so many people have problems with scientific, naturalistic explanations. Science shows us everything has a naturalistic explanation – magic is not needed. But we need magic as an explanation. It is part of our need to have faith in something beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding. This is the source of faith healing, and it is also why faith healing in a sense works. Having a hopeful outlook helps us heal more quickly. If you have two people in the same health who receive the same surgical procedure, but one believes it will work while the other does not, the one who believes in the procedure will recover faster and more completely than the one who does not. At the same time, you can give placebos to people who think they are receiving real medicine, and some will react to the placebo as if it were real medicine. This explains both why there is some success rate among witch doctors and other faith healers, and why modern medicine is not always the best it could be. While we should not give up on the real advancements made in medicine, medicine could be served by combining it with some form of faith healing – modern medicine would supply biological benefits, while faith healing would supply psychological benefits. This would give us a more fully human medicine, by reuniting physical health with the holy. Modern medicine all too often feels dehumanizing to the patients. To the extent it deals with body parts without acknowledging those parts belong to a human being whose needs extend to a very powerful, creative, body-influencing psychological element, including deep instincts that sometimes – as in the case of magic, faith healing, luck superstitions, and divination – do not stand up in the face of contemporary scientific knowledge, it is dehumanizing. And until we either gain full faith in science (a danger too, in that it can suppress scientific innovation, as people have faith in the current or traditional scientific findings, as people did and still do with Newton’s physics – Laplace’s calculator is scientific divination), or evolve beyond the need for faith (as Nietzsche wishes we could do) so we can accept facts as facts (and not as truth) in naturalistic explanations, there will continue to be rebellion against purely naturalistic explanations for and approaches to everything. People prefer Laplace’s calculator over chaos and complex systems theory, as the former says the world is eminently knowable and the future calculable, if we could only have enough information, while the latter says the world is inherently incalculable, even if we had all the information in the world. Wolfram, in his recent work A New Kind of Science, attempts to bring a form of Laplace’s calculator back into complex systems theory, making it deterministic – showing how strong the drive is for divination.

Part of being human is believing in the supernatural. Even when we try to “get rid” of religion, all we do is replace one religion with another. Take Marxism. Its eschatology is the inevitable Communist anarchic utopia at the end of history. Its divination (divined by the prophet Marx) is the Marxist theory of history – the immanent (historically determined) triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeois. In this sense, luck will ultimately be with the proletariat, as it was with the bourgeois against the aristocracy. Anyone familiar with Lysenko’s biological theories knows the Soviet Communists at least (and, I would argue, anyone who believes reality is completely socially constructed to the extent that we can do things like grow wheat in the tundra) believed in magic. The proletariat had a deep, fundamental identity clearly separable from the bourgeois’ that is readily identifiable as different kinds of collective “souls.” Lenin and Stalin (at least while Stalin was alive) and other Communist heroes were treated as if they were supernatural (one could go so far as to say that in a sense all our heroes are “supernatural” in that they go beyond what the average human does in their thoughts and actions – thus our need for heroes). The universal belief in supernatural beings comes from the combination of eschatology from our extended sense of time, and the application of status differentiation into this realm (meaning beings have to exist in this realm for status to apply there), as well as relating this realm to kin groups (until Judaism, (the) God(s) in the Middle East were local, meaning they were coupled to property rights in a loose sense; until Christianity, God(s) were associated with kin groups, and were related – often literally – to those who worshiped them, all of which suggests we have been developing an extended sense of who belongs to our tribe for millennia). Religious ritual comes out of the combination of chimpanzee meat-eating rituals, where head male chimpanzees distribute meat the troop caught in such a way as to provide unity in the troop through fair distribution of the meat, as well as emphasizing the troop hierarchy, with the collection of behaviors that gave rise to religion in general – which suggests why religious rituals so often involve ritualized eating and drinking, including sacrificing food and drink.

This mixing of instincts makes sense if our brains generalized as they evolved, making specialized regions (for recognizing kin, for status differentiation, for narrative, and for communication) overlap or otherwise become connected in places – allowing for the retention of instincts while others developed from the overlaps and connections. The hierarchically nested brain evolved hierarchically nested instincts, so that “each integrative level subsumes the functions and structures of the one or ones beneath it, and each adds to the potentialities of its predecessors certain new degrees of freedom” (Fraser, TOC 10). Instincts follow the same pattern as I (and Fraser, Argyros, F. Turner, et al) have suggested the rest of the universe follows: an agonal relationship among parts that gives rise to new integrative levels that are scalarly self-similar. The new instincts are similar to the ones they develop out of, but at the same time, those new instincts give us new emergent properties, giving us more freedom. In this theory of the development of more instincts in humans, we see a parallel with chaos theory, which shows how a universal gives rise to a plurality with a family resemblance, with these cultural universals giving rise to endless variations of those universals. The fact that the extended sense of time created by the recursive narrative structure of language leads to divination, eschatology, funeral rites, luck superstitions, magic, the propitiation of supernatural beings, religious rituals (how we give meaning to religion), and soul concepts explains why these became combined into the various religions of the world, past and present. So when Turner says humans and animals both ritualize “mating, aggression, territory, home-building, bonding, ranking, sexual maturity, birth” while only humans ritualize “time and death” (NC, 9), we can see he is in effect saying that only humans have religious ritual.

V. A Likely Story III – From Strings to Language

2008-02-20T11:35:00.000-08:00

The universe appears to have fractal geometry, to have self-similarity on several levels, regardless of scale. The complexity of each level appears to be connected to the recursive linearity of certain levels in the universe.

In quantum string theory – which presently seems the best candidate for unifying gravitation with the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces – everything in the universe is ultimately made up of tiny vibrating strings that “play the familiar medley of particles as if they were musical notes” (Amanda Gefter, Scientific American, Dec. 2002, 40). These strings may be either linear or circular – or both. How both? There are two possibilities. Circular strings could give rise to one form of particle-wave (photons, perhaps? – this would work well with my proposition in chapter 2 that time for photons is circular, resulting in t=0 at the speed of light), while linear strings could give rise to electrons, neutrons, and protons, which can interact in more complex ways. The other possibility (and it may contain the first one in it, and vice versa) is that there is a recursive element to strings – that they are simultaneously linear and circular (we saw this idea in chapter 2, with Nietzsche’s eternal return). Recursive linear strings vibrate and interact (provide information to each other) to give rise to more complex atomic systems, which includes chemical systems.

Another form of recursive linearity giving rise to complexity is in the genetic material of organisms. Prokaryotic cells have circular strands of DNA, while the more complex eukaryotic cells have linear strands of DNA. And DNA itself looks linear (but wavy) from the side, but circular from the top, due to its helical structure. This suggests, if there is scalar similarity, my first theory of strings. But both forms of DNA are recursive in their cellular interactions, suggesting the second. This scalar similarity at the organismal level suggests how understanding organisms can help us to understand strings. Allow me to suggest the following metaphor: relative to a “3-D”cell, DNA is a “1-D” string. This string interacts with itself through other kinds of strings (RNA, proteins) to give rise to a higher-dimension reality – life. Naturally, these “strings” are in one sense 3-D; but in another sense, they have far more dimensions – in the number of genes, regulatory sites, etc., in the DNA. A strand of DNA can have hundreds to tens of thousands of dimensions – which interact to give rise to cells more complex than is the DNA itself. In the same way, strings are 1-D relative to the “4-D” universe, but also 10- or 11-D systems giving rise to the poly-dimensional universe. Recursive linearity gives rise to higher-order complex systems.

Language is simultaneously linear and recursive. Grammatical and syntactical structure and vocabulary are the many dimensions found in a given language. These linear structures become transformed into complex culture and literature – which have many more dimensions than does language. The ambiguities and ironies found in novels is a prime example of how greater complexity can rise from linear narrative. This also suggests that it is through certain forms of linear narrative – the recursive linear narrative – that we get the greatest amounts of complexity. This shows us why attempts to eliminate such things as plot and linear narrative by some postmodern writers were failures, insofar as they were overly simple, lacking in complexity (which is not to say they were not often complicated – which only works to emphasize the difference between the complex and the complicated). It may have been fashionable among some intellectual elites to read the poems by the so-called “language poets,” but history will show these poets to have been miserable failures, since analysis of their poems will show their complicated poems to have had little, if any, meaning. The work put into the poems are not worth what we get out of the poems – they are like engines that put out far less work than is put into them, as opposed to narrative works that produce more work than is put into them by the readers. If we say “I got a lot out of that,” it is a compliment to the work. If we say, “I didn’t get a lot out of that,” it is an insult. One doesn’t get a lot out of the language poets – especially for the work put into them. In the end, such works fade away and end up having little effect on long-term culture. The great recursive linear narratives have had significant effects on culture, including the arts and literature. And if we consider the short story to be a circular narrative (the end must come back to the beginning in some fashion), while longer, and necessarily more complex, narratives, such as novels, novellas, and epic poems, to be linear narratives, we can see, again, the correlation between less complex circularity giving rise to more complex linearity (or, to be more accurate, circularity giving rise to less complexity than can linearity). However, both are recursive in nature, and, as we have seen, are thus narrative fractals. Further, human culture is carried on language – and on ritual, which also sequentializes actions into recursive linear forms. There is a sense in which language does indeed create our reality – but only in the same sense that DNA creates biological reality, without negating the quantum physical-chemical world created by strings.

It seems there is an element to the universe that makes recursive linear systems give rise to more complex systems. This element may be the string-foundation of the universe, which was scalarly projected into higher levels of complexity. Information-containing strings interact with themselves in complex ways to give rise to complex systems. Linear strings gave rise to complex quantum physics, including chemistry; certain forms of chemistry gave rise to linear strings of genetic material which gave rise to complex organisms; certain organisms with complex brains gave rise to linear strings of words, which gave rise to the full flowering of human culture, including art and literature and technology. This is a universe which is fractally self-similar to at least three scales of recursive linear systems giving rise to complex nonlinear systems.

IV. Some Notes on Language and Literature

2008-02-19T14:40:00.001-08:00

We have seen how new instincts can emerge from older ones due to the neotenous development of the human brain. Thus poetics could have arisen from a combination of the music, language, narrative, and beauty instincts, in combination with the requirements of our short-term memory. It may appear odd to repeat narrative after having shown its importance for the evolution of language, but I do so because the increased repetition of narrative at newer, higher levels has been a hallmark of literary development. We have already seen how a sentence is a narrative. But a scene (found in lyric poetry and some short stories), which has two or more characters interacting, is also a narrative. An episode (found in some short stories and in novellas), consisting of two or more scenes, is also a narrative. And a plot (found in novels and plays), consisting of two or more episodes, is also a narrative. Thus a novel is a narrative fractal to at least four levels of self-similarity. A short story would be less complex, having only two to three levels of self-similarity. Boccacio’s Decameron would be an example of a form between the short story (it is practically a series of short stories) and the novel (they are practically unified), leading to the novel in complexity. A novel (and epic poems and some plays, including Shakespeare’s plays, are equivalents in this case) is a narrative consisting of narratives consisting of narratives consisting of narratives, the highest narrative fractal. One could project, perhaps, the further development of narrative into a five-level narrative fractal, a genre consisting of two or more plots – which may already be in development in the use of subplots and the multiple plots found in series. Since the latter could be seen as just one long plot, a better example of two plots in parallel may be Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, a novel composed of two apparently unrelated (they are not unrelated, as we will see in the chapter on tragedy), unconnected plots, which are approximately equal in length, and alternating. We seem to see an emergent art, entering into new levels of complexity that appears to be related to the evolution of culture and to its relative complexity.

So literature, at least on the level of narrative, is necessarily fractal. With the addition of other fractal levels of character, description, theme, sentence rhythms, word repetitions, etc., we get increasing complexity – a complexity resembling the fractal complexity of nature, since nature too is not complex on only one level, but is complex on several levels simultaneously. The recognition of this complexity, and the pleasure we feel at this recognition, is what we call beauty. The creation of this fractal complexity on several levels by humans is what we call art.

But why would humans evolve pleasure at recognizing the deep complex fractal structures of nature? James Watson, appearing on the PBS show Charlie Rose April 25, 2002, said that “Happiness is a reward for doing things that you should do.” He tied this to our pleasure receptors, pointing out that even fish have opiate receptors and, therefore, have some sort of emotion, or happiness as “a reward for doing things that [they] should do.” Our brain rewards itself for properly recognizing the structures of nature. Individuals unable to recognize these structures were less adaptive on two levels. One, those who could not understand the actual nature of nature soon found themselves killed by those who could (including predators who undoubtedly found those organisms walking around aimlessly, as would happen if we could not sufficiently recognize things in the world), and two, those who received pleasure from this recognition were, then, doubly rewarded. Death provided the stick, pleasure and happiness at the recognition of the nature of nature provided the carrot. Both made for a highly adaptive species. Any species that found pleasure in seeing nature’s patterns would naturally be more adaptive. And humans were hardly the first to do this. Any animal that uses ritual recognizes beauty, since ritual acts as a way to highlight nature’s repetitions, bringing them into full relief. We also create similar repetitions in our art – it is the very highlighting of nature’s repetitions in movement, language, sound, and lines and colors that we call art. Anything that highlighted nature’s repetitions would, naturally, be selected for, since those who could better pick up on nature’s repetitions would be better able to adapt to the environment, avoid predators and find and hunt for food. When we combine this with Pinker’s explanation of how and why a behavior (and recognition of repetitions is certainly a behavior) becomes an instinct, we can see that the recognition of beauty is as much an instinct as language – and with deeper roots, since any animal that engages in ritual is programmed to recognize these same heightened repetitions we call beauty. The difference is that we take these rituals and play with them – art is, as Storey points out, both play and ritual, since “ritual rarely relaxes its ties with the narrativically familiar and the sacred” (106), and play is ever-changing. Art is sacred play and living ritual. Art evolved out of our (ancestors’) instincts to both play and to ritualize. Poetics has both components. Here is a typical ritual of literature: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl, boy kills self. The play of literature has given rise to various forms of this ritual, including Romeo and Juliet and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Both of these works are ritualistically identical. What differs is the way the authors played with them.

In his essay in Time, Order, Chaos, Thomas Weissert points out that narrative helps us separate what is important out from the noise, and helps us turn the noise into meaning. Especially when we engage in ritual. Look at the story-ritual just given above: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, tragedy ensues; it is the noise surrounding this ritual that makes it into Romeo and Juliet versus The Sorrows of Young Werther. This is because

we use filtering and preconceived structures to obtain the narrative identity. We use the identity to recognize subsequent changes in the identity and, depending on the level of nature we describe, the changes define the meaning we can attribute to the narrative. The changes come from the background noise that to some degree obscures our view of the repetition of the pattern. So it is from the noise that we ultimately get meaning. (171)

Noise also “drowns out the possibility of divining meaning precisely, if at all. But without noise there can be no meaning. This noise represents a level of fuzziness beyond which we cannot see” (172). The ritual of boy meets girl, etc. gives information, but it does not give meaning. But each specific example given does carry meaning (though the meaning of each is ambiguous). One could apply this too to searching for chaotic patterns (noise) in word distribution. If one found such a pattern of words in a long work of literature, it would make that work more, not less, ambiguous. At the same time, it makes it more meaningful. Thus, we have a specific way in which language gives meaning in a work of literature by using pattern recognition and information theory.

Art and literature are highly complex ways we store and communicate social information. They both act as “institutional forms which persist across generations and shape past experiences that date back beyond the life of any particular individual.” These “authoritative resources can be stored across time-space distances. Storage of authoritative resources involves the retention and control of knowledge” (Fuchs, 15), meaning artists and authors help determine what knowledge will be passed on to future generations by retaining the knowledge in their works, while controlling how that knowledge is transmitted, understood, and perceived by future viewers/readers/listeners. This is not a judgement – it is an observation regarding what it is artists and writers do. And it helps to understand too the great responsibility the artist and the writer has. “In non-literate societies the only “container” storing knowledge were human memory, tradition and myths. Writing and notation have allowed a certain time-space distanciation of social relationships.” And ritual objects, wall paintings, building and tools allowed this to occur even before the advent of written langauge. What we now know can potentially be passed on hundreds, or thousands, of years. Oedipus seems timely – but Oedipus tyrannus is over 2400 years old. The American Civil War occurred about 150 years ago. The American and French Revolutions occurred over 200 years ago. Columbus discovered the New World for Europe over 500 years ago. Jesus was born and lived 2000 years ago. And Oedipus is older still. But Oedipus tyrannus was written down and passed down and performed and discussed through the ages. Through Oedipus and all the other writings from ancient Greece, the ancient Greeks are still with us, contemporaneous with us. We are richer, more complex for it. Because of them, “the basics of acting socially do not have to be formed in every situation” (Fuchs, 15). They – which includes all information passed down to the present day – serve “as a durable foundation for social actions” (Fuchs, 15), even if we do understand that this foundation is, as Nietzsche says, a foundation built on running water (TL), due to the fluidity of interpretation. Any given culture “can be seen as the subsystem of society in which ideas, knowledge, social norms, and social values are defined within the framework of habits, ways of life, traditions, and social practice” (Fuchs, 16). Culture is kept dynamic because it “encompasses a dual process of defining the rules and being legitimised by observing the rules” (Fuchs, 17). It shows us where we are going by reminding us of where we are and have been – preventing us from getting lost. This is important if art and literature – or any sort of information at all – is to be effective. In other words,

a message that does nothing but confirm the prior knowledge of a receiver will not change its structure or behavior. Thus, with confirmation up to 100%, a message gives no pragmatic information. On the other hand, a message providing only original/novel material completely unrelated to any prior knowledge also will not change structure or behaviour of the receiver, because the receiver will not understand this message. Thus, with firstness up to 100%, a message gives no pragmatic information. Only a relevant mixture of firstness and confirmation allows the receiver to get pragmatic information from the message. (Burgin, 61)

All good art and literature should be able to do precisely this – with each new reader and each new reading.

The combination of the instincts for language, beauty, and narrative give us the instincts of poetics and storytelling. What does literature do? It draws attention to our language, improving our use and understanding of it. It highlights the repetitions in the language, whether those repetitions are on the level of phoneme (drawing our attention to the musicality of the language – yet another fractaline level), word, phrase, or sentence, and it is in this highlighting that our attention is drawn to our language, to consider and reconsider how we use it. Repetition creates intensification, and it is the intensification of reality which we call art, with beauty the experience we feel from this intensification (Dissanayake, 83-5). Such repetitions too extend to various forms of storytelling, which draws our attention to narrative itself, helping us to make more and better narratives, so that we can project ourselves into the future, to try out various futures in a safe play-space before we try them out in real life. Any creature which could not only project itself further out into the future, but create alternative, “fictional” futures it could try out, would have a selective advantage over those creatures – especially those of its own species – which could not.

III. From Words to Meaning

2008-02-17T15:24:00.000-08:00

Many consider the word to be the smallest fundamental, meaningful unit of language. It is not. Laughingly. Market. Glass. Twirl. None of these words have meaning. All they have are associations, or references – they are metaphors which transfer from one mind to another the idea of an image, object, agent, or action. If I simply said to someone, “Laughingly.” I would get quizzical looks. What could he mean by that? To simply say “Laughingly” is to utter nonsense.

So what is a word? Why name things?

Naming something makes it stand out: The eighteenth-century philosophers Kant and Hegel were the first to make something of the effect words have on our perceptions of the world, a vein of thought still enthusiastically pursued today by philosophical schools such as structuralism and semiotics. . . . The tendency has often been to go too far and argue that our words effectively create the world we perceive. Some sobering research, such as a test of New Guinea tribesmen who have no words for colors yet can still tell two shades of red apart as readily as any Westerner, shows the danger of mistaking words to be more than handy labels for the perceptions themselves. (McCrone, 273)

Words only have meaning within language, which is to say, within a sentence or within a series of sentences – within narrative. Words get meaning when placed in a narrative. The rejection of narrative is the rejection of meaning (and of language). Extreme versions of deconstruction get into the quandary of meaninglessness precisely because they end up considering words outside of their contexts in the sentences. Meaning emerges only as words are patterned into narratives, with emergent meaning arising with emergent, more complex narratives. This is how and why words gain more meaning in and through literature.

Søren Brier goes a step further, saying that

language is a part of the socio-communicative system, but it does not really acquire meaning before it interpenetrates with the psychic system and gets to indicate differences of emotions, volitions and perceptions “putting words” on our silent inner being. But our cognitive, emotional and volitional qualities would only have a weak connection to reality if they were not connected to the survival of the living systems’ organization as a body in its interaction with the environment’s differences in the development of a signification sphere in the evolution of the species. (86)

There is no meaning without cognition, emotion, volition, and perception working together to create meaning from the sentence(s).

Carstairs-McCarthy, in The Origins of Complex Language, points out that only human language makes meaning from meaninglessness (13), and that the meaningless level consists of sounds and syllables, while the meaningful level consists of words and phrases. However, meaning only comes about as a referent is repeated and metaphorized within the context of other referents. So it seems he is confusing reference with meaning – an important distinction for our purposes, especially as meaning does not have to be linguistic, but can be found in music and the visual arts.

Let us take a particular example: the word “unbelievable.” “Unbelievable” consists of the following (meaningless) phonemes: un + be + lee + va + bl. Combinations of these result in the following morphemes:

believe
believable
unbelievable

If we look at the word “unbelievable,” we find that each of its constituent morphemes have reference. “To believe” is to perform an action, while the word “able” refers to a quality. If something is “believable,” it is able to be believed (by the person doing the believing). “Believable” is a quality a person gives an object. The prefix “un” acts as a negator. Does “un” mean negation? Or does it perform negation? One cannot use “un” in a sentence and have it make sense, so it cannot mean negation. “Un” performs negation insofar as it transforms “believable” into its opposite. As we saw in chapter 3, not all actions/performances are necessarily meaningful, and this would include the performative actions of a negator such as “un.” The “un” transforms “believable” into its opposite, “unbelievable,” which is a word with a referent of its own, the quality of being unable to be believed by someone. In this case the “un” is a morpheme that performs an action – but in words like “under” it is merely a phoneme, “un” + “der.”

One may object that we make meaningful use of the “un” in such words as “unbelievable,” and therefore the use of “un” must be meaningful. But is the use really meaningful, just because it is not meaningless? I have already suggested that one could place “referential” between “meaningless” and “meaningful.” While “Reference is a kind of meaning” (Carstairs-McCarthy, 45), we must notice that Carstairs-McCarthy uses the word “kind.” Reference is not meaning, though one could see it as a kind of meaning, as how meaning emerges from meaninglessness, through reference. As Nietzsche points out, words are calcified metaphors – they have calcified into referential words. One gets renewed and expanded meaning through their use in sentences and especially in their use in new metaphors. This is why I have momentarily drawn the meaning-reference distinction, to emphasize how meaning increases within a (con)text.

While words, morphemes, and the use of particular performative prefixes and suffixes are arbitrary, their referents are not. Words do not equate to things, they refer to things, and it is in our association of words with those things that our use of words begins to make sense. The use of the specific word “up” to refer to the idea of “upness,” of casting one’s glance above one’s head, is not necessary. Certainly, other languages have put together other phonemes to refer to this concept. But once we have associated this sound with this concept, it becomes embedded in the language, as a calcified metaphor, making it possible for us to say that “things are looking up” to mean that things are getting better for us. We have related “upness” with “goodness,” and the metaphor has become calcified in our language (for much more on this, in much greater depth, see Lakoff and Johnson’s The Metaphors We Live By, which begins to connect word-metaphors to our physical environment, and develops Nietzsche’s language theory from Philosophy and Truth). Thus, words get associated with truth.

What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are considered as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche, PT 84)

Nietzsche here equates words with truth. One could just as easily rephrase the above “What then is a word?” Or we could go as far as Carstairs-McCarthy (and I would) and further reduce the distinction between truth and reference, as people are
predisposed to think that the distinction between truth and reference is necessary . . . simply because they are native speakers of some human language and are therefore naturally inclined towards thinking that the sentence/NP distinction . . . must reflect something fundamental outside of language. (39)

This is due to the fact that

syntactic units called noun phrases are typically combined with other units called verb phrases to form sentences, one of whose functions is to make statements about the objects or events referred to. [These] statements can be true or false, according to whether they fit the world or not, and that reference too can be either successful or unsuccessful, according to whether the would-be referent exists or not. (27)

But truth and falsity “are objects to which sentences refer. Even a false sentence has a reference – namely, falsity” (40). We have truth/reference regardless of scale: words, noun (and verb) phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc. We have forgotten that words refer, and that we made up the words. Based on the theory of language Nietzsche develops in Philosophy and Truth, it seems that Nietzsche would reject, as I do, the idea, propagated by many postmodern linguists, that words have no referent. Without reference, communication is impossible. It is obvious to most people that if there is one chair in a room filled with other objects, and you told a fellow English-speaker to get you a chair, that there would be no confusion as to what object you wished brought to you. And even if there were no chair per se in the room, that the person would come back to you with an object that could be used as a chair, as Wittgenstein points out in his idea of family resemblances, and you (and that person) would still be understood. If one is a Platonist, who believes concepts (words) precede reality, it begins to make sense why one would believe words have no referent. But this is to get the world backwards.

Huizinga too recognizes that:

Language allows (humans) to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually “sparking” between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature. (4)

The problem of whether or not words signify even arises with Jared Diamond who, in The Third Chimpanzee, asks “how do you explain the meaning of “by,” “because,” “the,” and “did” to someone who understands no English? How could our ancestors have stumbled on such grammatical terms?” (153), implying that each of these words have no referent. Some, such as Austin, suggest that words that somehow do something also have no referent, and that since all words technically do things, they appear not to have a referent either. However, Farb starts us off on the right foot by refuting this idea: “all languages possess pronouns, methods of counting, ways to deal with space and time, a vocabulary that includes abstract words, and the capacity for full esthetic and intellectual expression” (12). Each of these are referents. Every word makes either a direct reference, where I can point to an actual object the word refers to, or it fits into Farbs’ categories, which are themselves ways of referring to the world. Any word that is definable is referential, and if a collection of sounds is not definable, it is not a word.

We can show that any of the words Diamond lists has a referent. But first, we need to define what we mean by “referent.” This is where much of the problem of thinking of words as referring to something other than themselves comes from, because a referent does not necessarily have to be an object. A referent can be a person, place, thing, or idea (the corresponding words we call nouns), the traits of these things (adjectives), actions (verbs), or the traits of those actions (adverbs). These are the obvious divisions. But what about articles, like the word “the”? This example is the easiest, since articles are adjectives, and “the” is referring to a trait of any given noun we are placing “the” in front of. By saying “I watered the plant,” we are saying “I watered a particular single plant that, by my use of the word “the” implies the plant in question to be the only one either in the house or that you were talking about.” The plant has all the above stated traits, without all this necessary baggage. “The” is shorthand, and makes reference to all this that is understood by the person being spoken to. Just because we have been able to play with the language until we were able to come up with such shorthand as articles and “to be” verbs does not negate the referentiality of such words, or of words in general. Nor does the lack of articles in other languages imply the lack of referentiality in languages such as English, German and French, which do. The word “because” is a way of dealing with space and time, and refers to causality, which throughout most of human history was assumed to be a feature of the universe. Causality, things having a cause, or the idea of things having a cause, can be seen as a way of connecting two things. That is why “because”, from Middle English “bi cause” for “by the cause”, is a conjunction. It is part of the narrative structuring of thinking. To use a word Diamond does not suggest, but that easily falls into the trap of being considered without referent, is the word “if.” “If” has a referent, because “if” is an idea; it projects the idea of a future and the idea of possibility. “If” says, “let me posit the possibility that . . .” and is a necessary word (in its various forms as found throughout the world) for any language in that it allows for the projection of possible scenarios. These possible scenarios have in a sense a “reality” which “if” and other words can refer to, since one could easily define ideas as being imagined scenarios to test alternatives before trying them out in the real world (one could also define much fiction this way), and the ability to create alternative scenarios before taking actions (which would necessarily give any group that did this a selective advantage) requires the creation of words that could aid in the communication of those alternate scenarios, or ideas.

The question may then arise as to why the exact word “if” was chosen. Another way of asking this is: does language accurately reflect the natural world? The answer to this is, in a sense, no. Why should any particular sound or group of sounds necessarily represent any particular object? This is obviously not the case, since all languages do not share the same words (or else there would be just one language). It is clear the initial association of any given sound with any given object was initially arbitrary. After this initial arbitrary association of sound with object, however, you must have a family of users who “agree” to associate that particular word with that particular referent for language to work as language. From that point on, the users of that particular language, who, by definition, know of the associations being made between the words and their referents (not necessarily consciously, though, since one does not necessarily have to be conscious of the rules of one’s game in order to nonetheless abide by them), will recall the associations between word and referent when they hear the groups of sounds. So the choice of the sound “if” to refer to what the word “if” refers to was arbitrary (keeping in mind that the need for a word like “if” was not arbitrary), which does not necessarily mean the word “if” does not have referentiality for users of the English language.

Nietzsche further points out in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” that everything in the world is unique, that each object in a real sense shares nothing in common with any other, but that we treat many unlike things as though they are alike, creating concepts, which are words, which are metaphors. To categorize, conceptualize, we erase the differences we see (or smell, taste, hear, feel). Then we designate them with words, which are all always metaphors (which we forgot were metaphors). These words we see as truth – or as facts – forgetting they can change, that we can change them. It is in our power to change our categories, our concepts, our words, our metaphors. This is what art is about, and why it is needed and necessary – it keeps our languages alive, allows us to see and hear. If we stare at the same image long enough, without blinking or looking away, our neurons will fatigue, and we will cease to see. The image will vanish. We need to renew our images, our language, if we are to see and hear, if our eyes and our tongues are to remain alive.

This is not to say that there are not similarities among unique objects. There is a reason why we can find family resemblances among unique things. It is because these objects fall into patterns pulled together by strange attractors – they are self-similar, complex systems – and we, being self-similar, complex systems ourselves imbedded in a field of such systems, are capable of noticing such patterns. We associate the recognition of such patterns with beauty. Beauty is the ability to see the uniqueness of each individual thing within it created categories. It is to see variety in unity, unity in variety. That is why the creation of new categories, of new metaphors, is beautiful. A new metaphor creates a new set of varieties in unity – it makes us see new unities. We are surprised, saying, “Oh! I never saw it that way before. I never realized those things could go together.” We get a delight from this feeling of insight, from putting a new puzzle together, from seeing pieces put together that shows us something new in the world. It is the joy in becoming, the becoming which gives rise to the appearance of being.

The mistake made by most postmodernist, deconstructionist linguists is in the leap they make by suggetsing that if one can change a word’s meaning, what it refers to, then the word must not have any referent – thus, it must not have any meaning. They want a world of Ideas, which they associate with meaning. Faced with fluidity, they conclude the world has no meaning, that everything is just power-structures. The problem is that they are considering words outside their context – narrative. It is in a narrative, in a sentence, where words get meaning. And it is in the continued use of words in sentences where words have their meaning(s) expanded or contracted. The problem with deconstruction is deconstructionists see language in the same way quantum physicists would if they incorrectly thought the world was only quantum physics, without the emergent properties of chemistry, biology, etc. A word is only an atom within a larger, emergent system. If we extend this metaphor, the point can be made even clearer, particularly in light of the theory of emergent systems. One could see a word gaining meaning in the same way as emergent complex systems gain complexity. Indeed, increasing complexity of narrative would result in increasing complexity of meaning.

Table III

Phoneme — pure energy (no meaning at all)
Word — quantum physics (phonemes interacting to “solidify” into referential morphemes and words)
Phrase — chemistry (some meaningful word combinations)
Sentence — single-celled life
Paragraph — multicellular sexually reproducing life
Scene — Social animals
Episode — Human-type intelligence
Plot — Advanced culture

Carstairs-McCarthy points out that Wittgenstein

equates his own views of names and propositions with Frege’s view that a word has meaning only as part of a sentence. But, whatever exactly Frege meant by that, clearly he did not mean that every time a word appears outside the context of a sentence (say, in a shopping list) it is being redefined or relearned. (47)

Aside from the fact that a shopping list has a narrative context, giving it the kind of meaning one gets by having words in sentences, certainly neither Frege nor Wittgenstein suggest anything of the sort. Words get redefined only within sentences (narratives), not outside of them – it is this which gives them meaning. Words get increasing meaning within a text as they get used at each of the narrative levels shown above. One gets increased meaning with increased narrative complexity. Milan Kundera discusses the idea of novels having “theme-words,” the meanings of which the novelist investigates, expands, contracts, etc. through and in the novel (The Art of the Novel). And such meanings get developed not only in art, but also in our everyday conversations. Deconstruction can tell us as much about words’ meanings as quantum physics can tell us about human morality. Only within narrative structures do words have meaning. Outside of them, they only have referents.

Since words only gain meaning in sentences, we should take a moment to consider sentences in more detail, beyond their narrative form. I have equated the evolution of complexity to the evolution of meaning; let me now suggest that sentences themselves reflect Fraser’s “hierarchically nested integrative levels of nature” (TCHV, 10). Fraser points out that

the hierarchical theory of time recognizes five stable, hierarchically nested integrative levels of nature. By hierarchically nested is meant that each integrative level subsumes the functions and structures of the one or ones beneath it, and each adds to the potentialities of its predecessors certain new degrees of freedom. (10)

This also shows us how new instincts can arise from the combination of other instincts, but let us for a moment stick to the question of language working on various degrees of freedom. Language is a uniquely human instinct, and “It is not possible to make predictions about human conduct in the service of concrete or symbolic causes without allowing for biological intentionality, as well as for deterministic, probabilistic and chaotic contributions” (Fraser, 13), from the levels of macro-physics, quantum physics, and pure energy, respectively, for the last three. Looking at language as containing each of these levels is a good way of understanding the various elements of any given language as exhibiting the feedthrough of earlier states of nature “into the evolutionarily more recent levels of nature” (Fraser, 13). In English the adverb can be placed almost anywhere, meaning it acts randomly chaotic. English exhibits probabilistic behavior in that if you have a noun and a verb, there is a strong probability there will be a direct object (actually, to the extent that there is always an implied direct object, the direct object is in fact determined in each sentence). If there is a direct object, there is a probability that there will be an indirect object. English is deterministic in that if you have an adjective, you must have a noun following it (and if you have an indirect object, there must be a direct object – even if it is only implied). The only apparent exceptions are structures where we turn adjectives into direct objects – but now we are treating these adjectives as nouns. In French, however, adjectives are typically probablistic, since they usually come after the noun. But verbs deterministically follow subject-nouns in all sentences. Also, sentences have intention in that they are intended by the speaker to convey information or to do something. And, on the human level, language is symbolic in that the word “rock” symbolizes the actual object, and is concrete through performative speech, as “I hereby . . . ” and “I promise . . . ” are both concrete actions. Here we see Fraser’s feedthrough occurring in language.

II. Neoteny

2008-02-16T17:43:00.000-08:00

Neoteny

In Mexican pools low on iodine
The axolotls can’t become adult –
Mature infants swimming as a result,
With pale pink gills all feathery and fine.
Here one observant infant species learns
Something about itself while watching children-
Adults that swim and mate. Is this where we’ve been,
In this old youth that our maturity yearns.
We look into these pools, these clearer mirrors
Which show a stage we even now go through,
Young apes immaturing to people who
Can love axolotls, which open doors.
In these large salamanders we can see
The deepest source of our humanity.

Neoteny, “which means literally stretching out, or holding on to, youth” gives a species the ability “to reproduce . . . while still in the juvenile form” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 152). This happened in a Mexican salamander, the axolotl, and happened too in the evolution of vertebrates, when a line of sea squirt larvae were unable to develop past their notochord form into the stationary, sack-like mature state. The larval stage of sea squirts (tunicates, subphylum Tunicata) looks very much like a primitive organism having a notochord that exists today, the lancelets (subphylum Cephalochordata), which gave rise to the vertebrates. We are fortunate in having each of these stages of chordate evolution still alive, starting with lancelets, which gave rise to the jawless cartilaginous fishes (lampreys and hagfishes, Agnatha), leading to the jawed cartilaginous fishes (sharks, skates, and rays, Chondrichthyes), and then to the bony fishes (Osteichthyes), which gave rise to the land animals. Neoteny “allows a species to spring itself from the trap of specialization” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 154) found in sea squirts, and become generalists, as fish indeed are by comparison. With a specialist species, each individual species has its own niche, and if something were to happen to that niche, that specialist would likely die out. Generalists, however, have unity in form, but such adaptability as to be able to live in a wide variety of niches. Neoteny involves “very few gene changes” (Bonner, 51) – typically just regulatory-timing genes, as “there has been a simple modification of a few genes governing the duration of development of some parts of the organism” (Bonner, 51). These “mutations that affect the early development of an animal are likely to set if off down a new path and enable it to exploit the opportunities that exist, and neoteny seems to have been responsible for some of the major evolutionary jumps” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 154). All of this is relevant because of the idea proposed as far back as 1926 by Louis Bolk that humans, who are indeed unified in form, but can live in almost any niche, are a neotenous species of ape. A quick survey of human versus infant chimpanzee traits shows how persuasive this idea is: a large brain (relative to body size) encased in a domed skull,

our face is flat, with no ridges above the eyes, no muzzle, small jaw and teeth. Human adults have a baby-face compared with other apes, and a baby chimp looks more like a human than like an adult chimp. Even the position of the human skull is neotenous - the hole by which the spinal chord enters the skull is below the skull and points downwards in man, so that as we stand on our two feet our eyes are pointing forward (Gribbin & Cherfas, 158).

As Gribbin and Cherfas point out, the physical features, “large brain, small jaws, upright posture – are the most distinctive marks that set humans apart from the other apes. All three owe part of their existence to neoteny” (158). Another neotenous feature includes the forward-pointing human vagina (also found in bonobos), which is found in infant chimpanzees, but which moves as the chimpanzee matures until it is angled toward the back in adults (158). There is plenty of suggestive anatomical evidence that humans are nothing more than a neotenous species – that we are a juvenile that has not grown up physically, while still managing to reach sexual maturity, including the fact that there is a “relatively small change in the development of man, involving simply a difference in the timing of developmental processes [which] led to man’s increased intelligence and elaborate culture” (Bonner, 51). Our interest in playing and games also suggests we are nothing more than a juvenile ape, since our interest in playing and games matches that of juvenile apes. This propensity to play is the same thing as saying a propensity to narrate, since in order to play, one must narrate. Play is a way hunters learn how to hunt, which requires narrative. The same would be true in a strongly social species, such as chimpanzees, where play would prepare the young for the serious politics of adulthood. Play is a way of testing alternative scenarios (narratives) in a safe environment, before the seriousness of adulthood has to take over. If we remained infants, we would have also continued narrating, playing our way into language.

But Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind that sexual selection could give rise to youthful traits, which would give the appearance of neoteny (214). This does raise the question (a question Miller himself raises) as to why humans, and not chimpanzees, would select for youthful traits. In The Red Queen, Matt Ridley too expresses some doubt about neoteny, but nonetheless notes that neoteny “could be a consequence of sexual selection, and since neoteny is credited with increasing our intelligence (by enlarging the brain size at adulthood), it is to sexual selection [for youthful features] that we should attribute our great intelligence” (342). One reason both writers reject neoteny is that they associate neoteny with our being a “retarded” ape. But neoteny can be the kind of step back that results in a leap toward more complexity. “Adult animals tend to be well designed – well adapted – for a particular way of life, but juveniles, still in the process of growing and developing, are generally less well fitted to a particular adult niche” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 154). We also do not have to choose between the options of neoteny or sexual selection for youthful traits. There could have been a feedback loop between both, driving us toward neoteny.

Current genetic evidence suggests humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, with the line giving rise to chimpanzees branching off first, then the line giving rise to bonobos branching off from the line that gave rise to the hominids (bipedal apes). Bonobos are distinguished from chimpanzees in being slightly smaller, tending to move bipedally more often, having a forward-tilted vagina (like all infant mammals) rather than a rearward-tilted vagina (like all other adult mammals, excluding humans), and stronger social bonds created through increased sexual activity – including consistent bisexual behavior patterns. Among bonobos, most conflicts are resolved using sex. Bonobos being essentially bisexual suggests that humans too should be bisexual. So why are we not? This is perhaps the wrong question. We should instead be asking why very often humans have chosen to act in more stringently heterosexual ways (we do not always do what we feel like doing). There is evidence that suggests we are bisexual by nature (as evidenced by much behavior in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire), but that as we made the connection between sex and reproduction, we often chose in favor of more reproduction, over the possible social benefits. So while it is likely in our nature to act more like bonobos, we have chosen instead to direct sex toward reproduction rather than using it to strengthen social bonds.

As previously noted, the forward-tilted vagina is a neotenous trait. Thus, bonobos are slightly neotenous chimpanzees. Chimpanzees mate from behind, but the forward-tilted vagina makes face-to-face mating more comfortable. If mating is done from behind, the male and the female both are looking at things other than the one with whom they are mating – with the males focusing mostly on the backsides of the females, the retention of which would explain human males’ connection of sexual attraction to female bodies, especially the buttocks. The pleasure associated with mating gets distributed to the general environment, and no meaningful personal associations get made with mating. With a forward-tilted vagina, face-to-face mating is more comfortable, and the male and female both end up looking at each other during mating. The pleasure associated with mating gets connected with the face in front of the bonobo, and a meaningful connection is created – sexual pleasure becomes causally associated with the members of the troop, social bonds would be strengthened, and sexual contact would increase – as we see in bonobos. An entirely accidental retention of one neotenous trait in the common ancestor of humans and bonobos resulted in stronger social bonds and an increased importance given to sex by the social group, and to the individuals in that group. The added social benefits too would then select for those individuals who had the initial neotenous genetic change.

Small changes in gene regulation can result in large external changes in an organism. “All that neoteny requires is a minor modification to the genes that control development” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 154). This would explain the tiny genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees:

There are, in all likelihood, only a few genes that control the unfolding of development, so mutations to those genes will be quite rare. But when they do occur they are likely to have a profound outcome, affecting, as they would, all aspects of growth, maturation and development. All that external change balanced on a tiny internal change to the genetic code. (154-5)

We see a butterfly effect in evolution, with a developmental-gene butterfly creating the hurricane of human evolution. And with this genetic change,

neoteny accounts for the mechanics of the process whereby a minuscule change of just one per cent of the genetic blueprint can produce creatures as different in outward appearance as ourselves and the African apes. The final shape of an animal is dictated largely by the rate at which different parts develop and grow, and it is only the few genes that control the unfolding of development that would need to change in order to produce an upright ape from a knuckle-walker. (177)

Since neoteny comes from mutations that accelerated “the development of their sexual organs” (153), allowing the organisms to breed while still immature, we should not be surprised to see the first step in mammalian neotenous development is the forward-tilted vagina we find in bonobos.

Once neoteny had established itself in the forward-tilted vagina, sexual selection could certainly have become increasingly involved in further selection for neoteny. Those females with forward-tilted vaginas would carry the developmental genes for neoteny, and pass them on. Also, those with forward-tilted vaginas would likely breed more, since the face-to-face mating position would cause sexual pleasure to be directly associated with those partners. Males would prefer to mate with such females. The stronger social bonds created would also make the troop as a whole better able to survive. Survival of the fittest often means survival of the strongest social group, of those who can better cooperate. We also see suggestions of this initial neoteny in the bonobos’ tendency to walk upright more often than do chimpanzees, suggesting the initial neotenous change would not have been localized to the angle of the vagina. Since the toe has not turned out yet on infants, bipedal locomotion is easier, and thus more common. Since bonobos have some early neotenous features, we should not be surprised to find them acting like chimpanzees on the edge of infancy and adulthood. And not just physically.

Bonobos play more often than do chimpanzees (though much less than humans). Like humans, they are behaviorally more like infant chimpanzees. One would predict, then, that neoteny would create more youthful-acting males, who were more cooperative and easier to get along with (Ridley, 343) – easier to socially integrate. We see this in bonobos (and humans). Male chimpanzees tend to be more social among other males are than females, and more aggressive. Male and female bonobos, on the other hand, are more similar in their social behavior, and each is more likely to use sex (with both with males and females) to resolve problems than resort to aggression, as do chimpanzees. Since strongly social animals are better able to adapt – as a group – any selection for more social males would have an adaptive advantage. The ancestors of humans and bonobos were the first species to use domestication – on themselves. This is not to say that humans are necessarily behaviorally closer to bonobos than to chimpanzees in all ways. While human females act more like bonobo females, human males tend to act somewhat more like chimpanzee rather than bonobo males. Such differences are easy to understand if we see humans and bonobos diverging almost immediately after the forward-tilted vagina evolved – humans adapting to open woodlands/savannahs, bonobos to deep rainforests. It may be more likely the common ancestor of humans and bonobos acted more like humans, with bonobo behavior being the one that changed the most, deep in the rainforest. We act more like chimpanzees than bonobos do, despite the fact that we have language, and bonobos do not. But the neoteny that gave rise to bonobo behavior helped to mold us too, and there are many similarities between us and them.

We can even see a connection between neoteny and adult human love. The most obvious evidence for the connection between an adult’s love for its infant and the transfer of such feelings to adults is our use of baby-talk with those whom we love. The infant’s love for its mother would have resulted in neotenous males continuing to feel love toward females, and would have resulted in a feedback loop in females, strengthening female love-bonds. This would explain our need for touching and cuddling with those we love, a holdover from the infant ape’s need for touch and cuddling (as the famous baby monkey - cloth “mother” without food vs. wire “mother” with food experiment showed). Nietzsche also understood this connection, before the evolutionary evidence we have now existed: “The instincts of morality: maternal love – gradually turning into love in general. Sexual love likewise. I recognize transferences everywhere” (PT, 6).

The extension of the infant-mother bond to adults would create a greater tendency to create pair bonds in a species formerly polygamous, as this love-bond was created between adults. At the same time, our polygamous nature would still be there, an inheritance from our ape ancestors, driving us toward mild polygamy, though with an increasing drive toward monogamy, especially as notions of justice among men (an extension of the love–social-bond) and equality between men and women (another form of the notion of justice) developed and expanded. This expansion of the infant-mother bond into adulthood would also suggest Freud was tapping into something deep and fundamental in his Oedipus complex, though it is clear now that this is overridden by the Westermarck effect, already weakly expressed in chimpanzees, which creates a deep, gut-felt repulsion for having sex with those one was raised with from infancy. This would have resulted in more outbreeding, meaning fewer birth defects, and the behavior being passed on to more offspring. This would have counteracted the confusion created by the infant-mother bond becoming associated with sex in adults – though not perfectly, as the continued problem of incest shows. This neotenous retention of the love bond between infant and mother and its application to a sexually mature adult would explain both the sexual selection for youthful traits, driving neoteny, and the existence of pedophilia.

A pedophile is one whose brain has applied the infant-parent-sex bond to individuals who look even more like infants. This is a prime example of why we should not make the mistake of associating the “natural” with the good, Rousseau as does. Neoteny explains pedophilia – it does not excuse it. While tragedy shows us what happens when we attempt to push ourselves beyond our physis-bound natures, morality is how we keep in check the overextension of elements of our nature. We live in a delicate balance between the two. The overapplication of the connection between infant-mother love and adult sex results in pedophilia. The underapplication of it results in loveless sex, often resulting in children abandoned by their fathers. Each is immoral. The median application of such behaviors creates stronger social bonds within a community of adults, and the creation of children loved by fathers and mothers. The first is perversion, the second is antisocial. Between the two is the kind of love that creates strong families and strong communities, as that love is extended to more and more people.

The way neoteny expressed itself in the common ancestor of bonobos and humans gave rise to species which were more strongly social than the social apes from which they evolved. Bonobos are forest dwellers, so they remained quadrupedal – no environmental pressure drove them to become bipedal. But it would not be difficult to imagine an ape who already stood upright more often than its ancestors, due to neoteny, being driven by environmental changes which expanded savannahs and made the forests more patchy toward walking upright more often. Since neoteny was already at work on the species, one group, on the edge of the receding forests, could have had members with toes less turned out as they became adults, making upright walking much easier on flatter feet. To the extent upright walking allowed for more rapid crossing from one patch of food-bearing trees to another than did knuckle-walking (a very high-energy mode of transportation, especially compared to bipedal walking), it would have certainly been selected for (by hungry predators). What started out as an “accidental” mutation (they all are), then sexually selected for, would have then met with natural selection. Since “The correct positioning of the large human head for walking on two feet is achieved by neoteny – the angle of man’s head on his neck is the same as that of a neotenous ape” (Gribbin & Cherfas, 158), neoteny would have doubly allowed for upright walking. Overall, neoteny

gave our ancestors a vital package of adaptations: it allowed upright stance (useful to spot predators and freeing the hands to carry and manipulate things), delayed brain development (useful for the young to acquire new tricks of survival in a changing world by learning rather than waiting for inheritance), and, as a kind of bonus, provided a hairless skill (which helped our ancestors to keep cool as they ran across the plains, either to catch food or avoid being caught). Neotenous development also enhanced the natural ape curiosity of our ancestors, and the very powerful selection pressure of the new way of life rapidly weeded out those individuals who couldn’t walk well, or didn’t use their height to watch out for predators, or weren’t inquisitive enough to try new kinds of food. (Gribbin & Cherfas, 202)

Chimpanzees and bonobos are generally quiet (bonobos less so than chimpanzees) in the wild. Some of their communication is vocal, but most is facial and gestural (visual). Gibbons, however, sing. Gibbons are members of the “lesser apes,” and move through the trees using brachiation – they swing through the trees using their arms. This gives them and orangutans both more upright stances, since their legs hang down under their bodies as they swing. To attract mates and maintain social bonds, gibbons sing. So it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest the ancestor of humans could have been a singing ape too. Especially once our ancestors became bipedal, and our larynx dropped and stretched out, giving them a wider range of sounds. This would suggest that music could have been a primary precursor to language. Certainly, music “has a generative structure similar to that of language” (Corballis, 269), and Corballis goes further to suggest as I am, that “Given the rather diffuse yet pervasive quality of music in human society, it may well have been a precursor to language, perhaps even providing the raw stuff out of which generative grammar was forged” (269).

It was a long trek from singing to speaking: “the first hominids discovered upright walking and social graces, Homo habilis discovered tools, Homo erectus discovered fire, and Homo sapiens discovered language” (McCrone, 47-8). If we start with our common ancestor with bonobos, the neotenous forward-tilted vagina gave rise to face-to-face mating, strengthening social bonds and selecting for more neoteny; the neotenous unturned big toe gave rise to upright walking, which gave rise to a wider vocal range with the repositioned larynx; neotenous hands better able to grip than adult hands (as infant chimpanzees grip their mothers’ fur) allowed for finer manipulation of objects, leading to tool-making; more neotenous brains made for greater curiosity, leading to the discovery of fire and to trying different kinds of foods, food which could be made more nutritious by cooking, allowing the brain to grow even more as it had plenty of high-quality, high-energy food available. Our ancestors’ neoteny-created curiosity led to better nutrition, which led to the retention of more neotenous brains, as the energy was available to support them. Larger, denser brains led to more curiosity, leading to greater efficiency in getting food and in locating better sources of it, which drove the creation of larger, denser brains. Social behaviors became stronger and more complex, giving rise to new instincts from combinations of older ones as the brain created more, denser neural connections. We would have become more playful the more neotenous we became, as “Most mammals start out cute, playful, and innovative, and gradually become grim, pragmatic, and habit-ridden” (Miller, 407). And we are far more playful and innovative than bonobos and chimpanzees. Play allows us ways to test plans before we commit to them, as play does for infants learning how to become adults, and this ability to test plans in a safe play-space more than makes up for the high amounts of energy such play requires – which would have been solved, too, by our increasingly better nutrition. And as better nutrition led to larger, denser brains, we would expect, too, to find more connections in the brain, connecting specialized regions, turning the brain, and thus our behavior, more generalist.

Chimpanzees are specialists, and their brains compartmentalize functions more than human brains do. Games and playing (and narrating, which would include hunting) are separate from oral communication in chimpanzees (they do communicate during play, but they do not play with their communication, meaning the relationship is unidirectional and linear and not a bidirectional feedback loop, or nonlinear) and/or symbolic thinking. The nonlinear combination of these (the ability to play with communication and the mapping of communication onto narrative structures of the brain) is something you would expect to see in a nonspecialist’s brain. If grammar and syntax are nothing more than the application of rules – specifically, the rules of narrative, combined with the generative structure of music – to verbal communication, which has now entered the realm of play, we can see how language could arise in humans. The elements are all there, existing independently of humans, in pre-humans. Our linguistic abilities arose because, through neoteny, our brains became less specialized, causing overlap in specialized regions of the brain, allowing for more associations than are found in the brains of our pre-human ancestors. If language is a game, it needs rules. Fortunately, there was already a set of rules available in the rules of narrative that communication could be mapped onto. Those combined rules of narrative and of music are what we call grammar and syntax. Differences in grammar and syntax would arise as different groups settled on different rules with which to play their language games. Why else would adjectives come before nouns in English, while adjectives tend to go after nouns in French? It does not really matter where adjectives are located, so long as the rule is consistent. Some of the rules, including the association of particular sounds or series of sounds with particular objects, actions, or qualities, are arbitrary.

We would also expect some rules to be more stringent than others. While English adjectives precede the noun, English adverbs can be placed almost anywhere in a sentence. As in chess, we have different rules for different pieces, restricting some pieces more than others – and different rules for different languages, as we would see different rules for different, though similar, games (think of all the games we play with balls). This is what one would expect if language were a form of play, and grammar and syntax the rules our brains developed in order to play with words. As any good artist (and every game designer/inventor) knows, creating rules actually increases rather than restricts creativity and freedom. So when the brains of our ancestors evolved to connect narrative, play, and communication, which naturally led to rules for this communication, we should not be surprised to see a sudden “explosion” into language.

The only jump made in the evolution from languageless humans to languaging humans was when narrative mapped onto communication in the brain, and communication was thus given rules. Rules developed regarding what order sounds representing things or actions were to be placed. Give us a bunch of new objects – be they literal objects, or sounds – and we will play with them, associating new sounds with more objects. The rules of playing with communication are grammar and syntax. We were immature apes playing with a new toy – a toy created by our ability to make more sounds with our lowered, lengthened larynx, which were then mapped onto the narrative-creating structures in our brains. By playing with communication, we could have driven our brains to be better at it, pushing us into evolving language. If we started off as a singing ape, narrative could have created more complex songs, which could then have been sexually selected for, as more complex songs would have been a sign of intelligence, and intelligent mates would be better at finding food. Other than that, the foundations for each of the elements of language – symbolic thought, communication, rules, narrative, the generative structure of music – were all already present in our pre-linguistic ancestors.

Chapter 5: Language: I. An Introduction to the (Possible) Origins of Language

2008-02-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

If language is an instinct, it must have biological origins – or else we must attribute mystical origins to it. But language is so distinctly human that it is difficult for many to understand how this ability could have evolved. If there is any one thing uniquely human, it is language. So where did language come from? How are we to understand it as an instinctual, evolutionary phenomenon if only humans have it? I begin with the origins of language because some of the answers to these questions will help us to understand the origins of many of the other human universals. “Language paved the way for all the special human abilities that we so value – abilities such as self-awareness, higher emotion, and personal memories” (McCrone, 48). And these are all necessary for the level of culture we humans have developed (Bonner).

The problem appears to lie in the fact that apparently no other living organism currently has anything similar to language – not even our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. When we try to teach chimpanzees sign language, we certainly see in them an ability to think symbolically, to associate hand signals (or colored pieces of tape, or computer keys, or the recognition of human words they cannot produce) with other objects, and an ability to communicate using those symbols (I do no think anyone would deny chimpanzees communicate with each other, as all social species must), but we do not see any sort of grammar or syntax. As Gribbin and Cherfas point out in The Monkey Puzzle, chimpanzees seem to put the adjective before the noun just as often as they put it after the noun - not to mention the many other problems they have with stringing words together in a way we would consider grammatical (217-218). This may not matter among languages, as the example of English and French shows, but it certainly matters within any given language. Still, the use of “words” – even if given to them by humans – is an impressive feat. And if we look to nature, we discover that, to a great extent, other primates do use protowords - vervet monkeys, for example, have three different calls for leopards, eagles, and snakes, each of which results in different actions. Recordings made of these sounds, played back later, result in the same actions by the vervets, even when the predator is not around (Gribbin & Cherfas, 224). Humans still use this communication structure in our imperative “sentences.” If we yell “Look!” that is similar to what vervet monkeys are doing when making the eagle call. So many of the pieces from which language is made are already present in animals – particularly in primates and, especially, apes.

The human brain is designed to pattern communicative sounds onto narrative structures to create the basic structure of true language: the sentence. Each sentence has a subject verbing an object (even when the subject and/or object is only implied). This is how we learn language – through the mapping of specific instructions (words and the specific grammar and syntax of a particular language) upon a loose narrative structure that is genetically encoded for (Wilson calls this an “epigenetic effect,” and Chomsky and Pinker call this specific one “deep grammar”). This facilitates our learning a specific language during certain periods of our lives. The brain is particularly receptive to learning a language during the time of maximum plasticity – prior to puberty. For many years, as the brain continues to grow, soon after birth, and then begins to learn a great deal of what is immediately necessary to survive in its environment, the brain has a great many neurons. During this time, one is most capable of learning, particularly new languages. If one wants a child to truly learn a new language, the language should be taught prior to puberty. The child will be able to develop the language in a complete manner, even to the point of not having an accent. The child will truly know the language. But something happens when we hit puberty. This is the time when we get massive hard-wiring of the brain, including the loss of underused neural connections and a great many brain cells. This loss continues throughout puberty, ending with the end of puberty, when the brain becomes the most hard-wired, particularly in regards to language. During puberty, a child can still learn a second language, but it will be more difficult, and the child will always have an accent. And if the language is learned after puberty, one cannot truly learn a new language – there will be a strong accent, and there will be constant mistakes with grammar, such as the tendency of Russians and Japanese to drop English articles, since their languages do not have articles. What typically happens in these cases is massive memorization – of the particular narrative structure and vocabulary of the new language – rather than the deeper knowledge of the language each native speaker has. The exception is with those who have learned two or more languages when young – where general principles can be unconsciously extracted, and learning of another language is thus made easier – though still not without an accent.

Another element of language, narrative, is found not only in chimpanzees and other primates, but in all animals that hunt or play. Any animal that hunts has to figure out what the next move of the prey is going to be – meaning, they have to plan ahead. If they are planning, they are narrating. It is difficult for us humans, who narrate mostly through language, to think of how a nonlinguistic narrative would go. A lion stalking a wildebeest would be doing something like “wildebeest, need to get closer to run after it, I see the other lions are in place, he is looking away, that’s good. He is looking over here. Stop. Now he’s looking away again. Continue creeping toward the wildebeest,” though without any use of language whatsoever. Anyone who has hunted – or fished – knows you do not have to use language to narrate. Every time I cast a lure, I do not literally go, “push button, pull back rod, stretch out arm and release button, wait for plop of lure into water, reel in lure.” But I must be able to narrate in order to know that by going through this series of activities, that I will get my lure into the water, with the reasonable expectation of catching a fish. I have to believe each action will lead into the next one, that the universe is causal, to even consider doing these actions. And I do these actions, as I said, without using language. I suspect that every hunter would tell you that they do not linguistically narrate their actions when they hunt – they are too intent on paying attention to the prey to have to listen to a bunch of words running through their heads. However, while you do not need language to have narrative, you cannot have language without narrative. It is the very structure upon which language is built, as narrative and language both require the following thought process: subject-action-(object). This is the very nature of what we call a “thought process,” since thinking, as we understand it, and as mammals and birds (and some reptiles and insects – those that engage in hunting) do, it is impossible without narrative.

Ortony, Clore, and Collins, in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, connects each of these elements to emotions:

there are three major aspects of the world, or changes in the world, upon which one can focus, namely, events, agents, or objects. When one focuses on events one does so because one is interested in their consequences, when one focuses on agents, one does so because of their actions, and when one focuses on objects, one in interested in certain aspects of imputed properties of them qua objects. (18)

They further define events as “simply people’s construals about things that happen, considered independently of any beliefs they may have about actual or possible causes” (18). What we have here is an event-action-verb and subjects and objects (nouns, noun phrases) as agents or objects. Ortony, Clore, and Collins show that we make emotional connections to events, agents, and objects, meaning we connect emotions to narrative, and thus to sentences and the parts of those sentences, subjects, verbs, and objects. We can be pleased or displeased about events, approve or disapprove of agents, and like or dislike objects, with our reactions to events and agents coming from our concern for the consequences they will have on ourselves or on others (19). The connection to art and literature is also made, since for an object, liking and disliking “represent undifferentiated affective and aesthetic reactions to objects, for which love and hate are good examples” (24). This begins to explain how literature, how storytelling, can result in emotional reactions from the audience. And it explains why we cannot have an unemotional response to art or anything in language (including reason, logic, and much thought), since emotions are directly tied into the elements of narrative structure – without which, as grammar, language is impossible.

We have already begun the process of investigating the problem of the origin of language by breaking down what language is (taking an admittedly reductive approach) and then seeing if we can bring those pieces back together. We have already seen that language is narrative. Also, language is communicative, it makes use of symbols (auditory or written), and it has grammar and syntax. Chimpanzees can do the first two (except write and make the full range of human sounds), but not the last two. Certainly it is not fair to expect chimpanzees to make the full range of human sounds, since they do not have the same larynx structure we have. Our larynx has dropped and elongated because of the position of our heads in relation to our throats, giving the larynx room to grow. The larynx’s lowering and lengthening certainly gave us a much wider range of sounds, which increased as it lowered and lengthened. It is more likely the brain followed this movement of the larynx than the other way around, since you could not think of associating certain sounds with certain objects until you were able to make those sounds. A recent Random Sample (Science, 29 June 2001, 2429) gives further evidence to support the evolution of upright stance before the evolution of speech, since “when quadrupeds run they have to take a breath with every step, which makes it impossible to develop the sophisticated respiratory control necessary for speech” (Holden). An upright stance, resulting in both different “respiratory control” and the lowering of the larynx, is necessary for the creation of the large number of sounds necessary to develop a complex language. However, in some Old World primates, there was already a preliminary association of some sounds with some objects preceding the movement of the larynx in our more immediate ancestors. Our ancestors’ brains were already set up to associate sounds with objects, and so, when they were able to make more sounds, they could easily learn to associate them with more objects.

While this gets us to the stage of our teaching chimpanzees to communicate with sign language, since they share with us symbolic thought, it does not get us to syntax and grammar, which, as stated above, are outside the realm of a chimpanzee’s mental abilities. In order to answer the question of how syntax and grammar could have arisen in any way other than a mystical one, we will have to go off on what will appear to be several tangents, which will all be brought together to show how syntax and grammar could have arisen in humans and why it did not arise in chimpanzees and bonobos.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans are all closely related – there is about a 1% genetic difference between each of them, going from chimpanzee to bonobo to human. Genetically, this is a very tiny difference, especially if you consider the fact that most differences in the DNA are found in noncoding sections of the DNA, where mutations are not going to help, harm, or change an organism in any way. So the real differences, in genes, are going to be less than 1%. And if there is about a 1% difference between bonobos and chimpanzees, as there is between humans and bonobos, why do bonobos look so much more like chimpanzees than humans? Between being able to language and the differences in appearance, humans appear the odd species out. How do you get a species as apparently different as humans are in physical appearance and behavior (which are far less than we like to admit) from chimpanzees and bonobos from a common ancestor that probably looked more like a chimpanzee? With the striking similarities between chimpanzees and bonobos, we should be less surprised, then, at our similarities than at our differences. From whence could these differences come?

IV. Instincts and Culture

2008-01-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

In discussing various features of the human brain, I have not forgotten the destination I have set out for: the issue of human instincts/universals of human behavior. But it has to be established that our brains do have various structures that have definite effects on our behavior and in making us who we are before we can take the step into asserting the existence of human instincts. We have, according to E. O. Wilson (actually, George P. Murdock, whom Wilson is quoting), identified at least sixty-seven cultural universals so far:

age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control, and weaving. (Wilson, OHN, 160)

Each of these, in various forms, can be found in every culture, throughout history. My guess is there are many more than just these (again, the above calculation suggests around 250). In Natural Classicism, Frederick Turner adds combat, gifts, mime, friendship, lying, love, storytelling, murder taboos, and poetic meter to the list of sixty-seven. And in The Culture of Hope, and in Beauty, he gives a list of what he calls neurocharms (208-210), many of which could also be considered cultural universals, since they are found in every human culture. Many of these, such as narrative, selecting, classification, musical meter, tempo, rhythm, tone, melody, harmony, and pattern recognition can be found in other animals, including chimpanzees, gibbons, and birds. Others, such as giving meaning to certain color combinations, divination, hypothesis, metaphysical synthesis, collecting, metaphor, syntactical organization, gymnastics, the martial arts, mapping, the capacity for geometry and ideography, poetic meter, cuisine, and massage (which would be a development of mammalian and primate grooming rituals, which humans also engage in, as any couple can tell you), are uniquely human.

The existence of these instincts has some implications for art and literature. When Turner points out that both humans and animals ritualize “mating, aggression, territory, home-building, bonding, ranking, sexual maturity, birth” while only humans ritualize “time and death” (9), it is as though he was equally pointing out all the themes one would expect to find in a great novel, play, or epic poem, and which very well may be a list of the themes of all the great works of literature. Turner himself points out that considering all of the cultural universals make it “tempting to propose that a work of literary art can be fairly accurately gauged for greatness of quality by the number of these items it contains, embodies, and thematizes” (26), since “it is the function of [literature] to preserve, integrate and continually renew this deep syntax and lexicon [of cultural universals], while using it to construct coherent world-hypotheses” (26).

In a more directly evolutionary sense we may wonder where these universals came from. How did these specific strange attractors – rules of human actions – arise to generate all of the world’s various cultures? And are they universal? And would these universals not restrict human action, giving us less freedom (do they not argue for our behaviors being determined)? Every culture in the world, throughout all of human history, has had religion. Does this restrict the expression of any culture or individual? Hardly. It has led to a very large number of expressions. The forms of religion have varied: various monotheisms, polytheisms, pantheisms, nature religions, the promises of various utopias, earthly and transcendent, not to mention individual interpretations of each religion, showing how much variety one can get in unity. I will deal with more specific issues of religion in a later chapter, but let me suffice it to say that even atheists have found religions to replace the transcendental ones: Marxism, Freudianism, etc. People like Sartre have given up Christianity only to embrace the secular religion of Marxism. One would be hard pressed to find a single individual who did not have faith in something or someone. And one simply cannot find a single example of a culture without some form of religion.

But where do these instincts, or deep behaviors, come from? The natural place to look should be in the way the mind works, meaning, how the brain is structured. The deep structures of our brains have given us language, culture, and, as I argue, art and literature. But where does the brain get this tendency to create deep structures? The mathematics I have shown are highly suggestive in general terms, but what about the specifics? Why would evolution create instincts? And what is the relation of all of this to culture? Why would I consider something called “cultural universals” to be instincts?

Wilson observes that “For (anthropologists), a culture is the total way of life of a discrete society - its religion, myths, art, technology, sports, and all the other systematic knowledge transmitted across generations” (Wilson, 141-142). If we take away the details, we can see this definition is true not just for humans, but for most social species with long life spans. Bonner uses this definition of culture when he says that “culture involves communication between individuals of the same species, and therefore culture and society go hand in hand” (159). In a sense we observe each other into the same culture. Elephants learn, in part, how to be an elephant by watching other elephants. The same is also true of cetaceans and primates. They gain information through observation, and “tradition means a repetition of following out the instructions of the information” (Bonner, 161-2). Culture is maintained through the teaching of tradition, and includes followers of and innovators within that tradition. In their Scientific American article, “The Culture of Chimpanzees,” primatologists Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch show different wild chimpanzee troops act in different ways that can only be explained through cultural transmission. Subsequent generations of chimpanzees learn how to do certain things – hammering nuts, pounding with a pestle, fishing for termites (including variations on how to fish), eating ants, removing bone marrow, sitting on leaves, fanning flies, tickling self, throwing objects, inspecting wounds, clipping leaves, squashing parasites on leaves versus using fingers, inspecting parasites, arm clasping, knocking knuckles, and rain dancing (64-65) – that can only be explained by learning, which is, cultural transmission. Indeed, we see behaviors being taught to the young in many species – so what once made humans special, our being taught different things in different tribes, regions, or countries, is now seen to have a parallel in chimpanzees and bonobos. Culture did not start with humans. It started millions of years before humans evolved, and was crucial to our evolving into humans.

One could argue that human culture is much richer than that of chimpanzees. But culture is not a matter of degree. Is a chicken any less a bird than a peregrine falcon? The latter is the fastest bird in the world, a champion flier. Chickens can barely get off the ground. Each one’s wings have evolved to fit their particular lifestyles. Chickens have no need to fly fast; peregrine falcons would starve to death if they did not. So, yes, human culture is richer than chimpanzee culture. But even if humans are completely determined by culture, that culture started in our pre-human ancestors, so if we want to understand who we are as humans, we have to understand how culture arose in chimpanzees and bonobos to see how culture arose in humans.

Chaos theory tells us that all the structures in the universe have deep structures which have universal features. The repeated self-similar patterns of fractals are the memories of those patterns. The patterns of spiral galaxies, snail shells, the layout of seed patterns in sunflowers, and the patterns of eyespots on the decorative feathers of peacocks all exhibit the same proportions as the Fibonacci spiral (Doczi). The Fibonacci spiral (along with the Fibonacci series, and the golden mean ratio – which is, by definition, an irrational ratio, since the golden mean is nonrepeating after the decimal, making it irrational; thus the golden mean is both rational, as a ratio, and irrational simultaneously) is the simplest fractal form in the universe, and repeats the same pattern and proportions regardless of scale. Anything that exhibits the proportions of the Fibonacci series is fractal – meaning all life and all living growth are fractal. One of the features of fractals is the necessary presence of strange attractors, which pull the fractal into shape, while providing enough freedom to result in an infinite number of variations on those shapes. It is these strange attractors that create the deep structures of the universe, from the movement of galaxies to the orbits of stellar globular clusters to every element of the weather to population dynamics to brain structures which, once they become complex enough, result in things such as complex human cultures and languages. Deep structures in the brain are strange attractors, creating both the rules we must go by, and the freedoms those rules give us. Deep grammar, seen as a (set of) strange attractor(s), shows us how we can get such a diverse range of languages, while sticking to the rules of deep grammar. Language is a fractal and a dissipative structure – each language has definite structures, but those structures give us an infinite number of possibilities.

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker points out that “human intelligence may depend on our having more innate instincts, not fewer” (243), and the calculations of complex systems supports this idea. One could easily say that anything one could call universal, in that all human cultures in all places at all times have had them, should rightly be understood as an instinct. This gives us quite a long list of human instincts.

Insofar as instincts are behaviors one must do (i.e., we must language, we must narrate, we must experience beauty), meaning instincts are rules, we find we have many more degrees of freedom by having these rules. More freedom of the mind is the same thing as saying there is more intelligence. More instincts develop because

when an environment is stable, there is a selective pressure for learned abilities to become increasingly innate. That is because if an ability is innate, it can be deployed earlier in the lifespan of the creature, and there is less of a chance that an unlucky creature will miss out on the experiences that would have been necessary to teach it. (Pinker, 244)

The creation of more instincts in humans would have made us more adaptive to our environment, since our being able to innately enter into language, for example, makes our learning language much easier (I would argue, possible at all) than it would be if our minds had to literally create everything tabula rasa. One may object that if we learn at all, what we learn cannot be an instinct. But lions, which everyone would agree have the instinct to hunt, must also be taught how to hunt well if they are to survive. The fact that they also have to be taught what they know (that they have to learn to become who they are) does not negate their already knowing it on a certain level. It is the details that have to be taught. All the instincts, as well as Turner’s

charms involve a cooperation between a biogenetic endowment and a cultural tradition that can activate and shape it. We all have neural organs adaptively designed for the purpose of language, but also require the environment of a specific natural language to awaken them. The same applies to the skills of melody and harmony, of poetic meter and visual representation, of theatrical performance and cookery. (Beauty, 67)

So we can see that there is a cooperation between the instincts built into the brain and the environment in which the owner of the brain finds himself. However, one may also wonder why, if as Pinker says, making behaviors innate is beneficial, that all elements of our behavior are not innate. Why should we have to be taught the details? Pinker points out that

evolution, having made the basic computational units of language innate, may have seen no need to replace every bit of learned information [words, surface grammar, syntax] with innate wiring. Computer simulations of evolution show that the pressure to replace learned neural connections with innate ones diminishes as more and more of the network becomes innate, because it becomes less and less likely that learning will fail for the rest. (244)

The formulas I used earlier suggest another reason: to have all elements of language, including all words, as instincts would require a system with a truly astronomical number of elements. If we have a vocabulary of 10,000 words (quite small), we would need a brain with 1016 elements (N1016 ), which is much more than the 60,000 gene products we find in humans. We would have to have brains over 5000 times larger than we have if our vocabularies were made into instincts. It is much easier and more efficient to have to learn our specific vocabularies. By having an instinct to engage in a larger activity while having to be taught many of the details, we are given new levels of freedom.

The question still remains where these cultural universals – these instincts, these universal rules for human behavior within their cultures – came from. Recent research has shown that not only chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), our closest living relatives, but orangutans too, have culture. Different groups have different ways of behaving, which are passed down, not by genetics, but by learning from watching others. If we take the above list of sixty-seven human cultural universals, I can identify in that list twenty-four which chimpanzees share with humans: bodily adornment, cleanliness training (in some), community organization, cooperative labor (i.e., when they hunt), courtship, division of labor, ethics (see Frans de Waals’ Good Natured), family feasting (a true ritual in chimpanzees), games/play, gestures, gift-giving, government (in a primitive form, see de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics), greetings, hygiene (in cleaning each other of parasites), incest taboos (admittedly a questionable one, since it is clear the Westermarck effect is in effect, but not yet clear that it is also socially transmitted), kin groups, medicine (de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, 254-255), postnatal care, property rights (chimpanzees are very territorial), ritual (see family feasting, above), status differentiation, tool-making, trade, and visiting. And this does not include the cultural differences found among chimpanzee troops (Whiten). I say there are only twenty four, but look at those twenty four. Are we really so much better because we have developed calendars when chimpanzees have developed medicine (albeit far more primitive than human medicine, to say the least, but quite impressive all the same)? Many of those uniquely human cultural traits can be genealogically traced from this pool of twenty four we share with our closest relatives. And I have not even included narrative, which humans also share with chimpanzees – as well as any animal that hunts, particularly with others of its social group. Government too would naturally arise in a species that has status differentiation and the need for rules. We could see religion arising in part from things such as status differentiation and narrative leading to language. The development of religion naturally leads to instincts such as divination and religious ritual (combining religion with feeding rituals could do this – as we see in the Christian Eucharist, eating bread and drinking wine). But rather than dwell on these generalities, I should go into more detail on several of these, particularly those uniquely human, and especially those most related to the arts and humanities. All of these emergent cultural universals are combinations of those cultural universals we inherited from the common ancestor we held with chimpanzees and bonobos. And many are specifically derived from combinations with language. Since language is generally considered uniquely human, we must first deal with how we humans came to language.

III. Beauty and the Brain

2008-01-11T18:45:00.000-08:00

The creation of patterns within patterns creates fractal depth, and unity among diversity, showing us that “knowledge of the structural principle of fractal images has led successfully to the discovery of uniformity in the variety of appearances” (Fischer, 67) in nature and, as art is a product of the brain, and the brain is part of nature, in art too. Nature has fractal geometry – the repetitious repetition of repetitions. Great works of art have fractal geometry too, and in the same way that nature is fractaline, not in the repetition of the same fractals, but of the superposition of different fractal geometries on top of each other. Again, uniformity in variety. We again see the use of repetition, of patterns, and therefore, of rhythm, at the most basic levels of nature. And it goes all the way down. Light is made of waves – they are repetitious and have a steady rhythm. Quantum particles (including strings) all vibrate – they have steady rhythms (this quality of vibrating at a steady rhythm is why we use Cesium – which vibrates at a known, constant rate – in our atomic clocks). Crystals all have patterns, planets all orbit in steady rhythms (as do stars in the galaxy) – nature is rhythmical, patterned, all the way down. It has fractal depth. So we should not be surprised to find the use of rhythm in the development of biological organisms, including humans – and our brains. Nor should we be surprised we find rhythms and patterns comforting – and beautiful. This suggests we would expect our art to be patterned, rhythmical, since both the creator and the audience finds patterned, rhythmic art beautiful. The problem of boredom keeps artists innovating, creating new patterns, suggesting new rhythms, that can potentially help us to see new things in the world, helping us to better adapt to and learn about the world.

Rhythms and patterns in animals are expressed not only within the body, but in many of our behaviors. Rhythmic behavior patterns are called rituals. Sexual selection has generated rituals in fish, birds, and mammals – and humans are not exempt. Turner goes so far as to say that art comes out of ritual, the differentiating feature being that art is more directly concerned with the beautiful than is ritual in and of itself (16). Ritual originated in sexual selection – particularly in mate selection – since sexual selection tends to create beauty, as we see in the peacock’s tail. This, and the oral tradition out of which literature evolved, have some implications regarding literature in particular. When Turner says ritual “is often . . . the place where society stands back from itself, considers its own value system, criticizes it, and engages in its profoundest philosophical and religious commerce with what lies outside it, whether divine, natural, or subconscious” (8), it is hard to imagine he could not be talking about literature in general, and the novel in particular – as any quick history of the novel and its societal effects shows.

Ritual also implies performance. “In ritual human beings decide what they are and stipulate that identity for themselves, thereby asserting the most fundamental freedom of all, the freedom to be what they choose” (Turner, 8). With art and literature, we engage in world-creation, participate in that created world to help us comprehend the natural world, and communicate this information to others. This is what works of art and literature do: communicate information about possibilities. This is the ethical role of art and literature (this is separate from, but inclusive of, the tragic role of art and literature). Art and literature play vital roles, since “communication [is] the basis of both a social existence and of culture” (Bonner, 97). The creation and appreciation of art and literature are fulfilling because “world creation is hard work, and must be richly rewarded” (Turner, 16) through our feeling of beauty.

The creation of particular structures in the brain, the way the brain processes information, and the loss of neural connections and massive numbers of brain cells, are all part and parcel of what constitutes human thinking, learning, and minding. Our brains are programmed to learn certain things at certain times, and in certain ways. The best, most effective way to learn something is to do it as early, and as rhythmically, as possible. If we want to have an effect on behavior and learning through nurture, we have to understand better our own nature. In order to know ourselves, which has been the constant cry of philosophy – and of the arts and humanities in general – we have to know our biological selves. In doing so, we can become aware of our limitations, and of the rules that govern our behavior, so we can make better use of those rules. If the brain makes use of rhythms to understand the world, is it not best to use this knowledge to better ourselves, to make ourselves more knowledgeable and wiser? Certainly, if, as Doczi says, knowledge is varied, but wisdom is unified – what would make for a more beautiful mind than one full of unified knowledge? We can best teach ourselves and our children more knowledge, and in a more unified manner, by making use of what we do now know about how the brain works and understands the world.

For those in the arts, such knowledge can inform us as to both how to create more beautiful works, and why those methods work. For a work of art to be beautiful, it must have repeated repetitions of its visual elements. For a poem to be beautiful, it must be rhythmical, have repetition of sound and beat. For a work of fiction to be beautiful, it must have repetitions of images and theme-words. And each must have variations which have unity. Symmetry with asymmetry. Repetitive repetitions that are not perfectly repetitive – not identical, but self-similar, to avoid monotony, to avoid boredom, and therefore keep the attention of the audience. But they do have to have the repetitions for us to see them as meaningful – as it is the recognition of repetition, patterns, to which we attach meaning. And insofar as one of the purposes of art is to create new meaning and, thus, revalue all values (Nietzsche), the creation of rhythm, repetition, and, thus, patterns is vital to the creation of beautiful works of art.

A biological understanding of the brain, of how the brain is structured and programmed by regulatory genes, which are themselves affected by their environment, whether we understand that environment to be a direct chemical environment, or an indirect one, generated by interactions of the organism with the world (light hitting the retina, transmitting an image to the brain, which then processes the image, comparing it to other things in the brain it remembers and has meaningful and emotional connections to, so it can classify it and, thus, change the very structure of the brain, so the organism can better deal with the world and other things similar to the new thing it has seen), helps us understand our behavior, and how we can better interact with, and therefore learn from, the environment, so nurture can be better used, interacting with nature. Better understanding of how the brain is structured during fetal development, and later, in infancy, when the brain is still developing, can help us create a better learning environment – one that makes good use of the arts, and which sees the arts, not as mere decoration, but as a vital, indeed, integral part of how we learn and what makes us human.

This approach is further supported if we look at some of the general ways in which the brain functions. In Natural Classicism, Frederick Turner has an essay on the brain sciences. In it he points out that with the left-brain being the primary location of temporal sequencing and short-term memory, and the right-brain being the primary location for a spatial gestalt mode and a memory for “complex locations and images, and with some subjects, for instance dwelling-places, [where] our powers of recall and recognition of spacial patterns are astonishing” (19-20), and the fact that “it is the exchange of information between right-brain and left-brain modes which constitutes the human capacity to make sense of the world” (18), then

In such a perspective plot or story becomes crucially important. The “unity of action” . . . functions as a sort of connected series of rooms, containing places for memory storage. Plot, moreover, with its capacity to organize large units of time, extends the harmonious patterning of temporal periodicities that we find in poetic meter to larger and larger scales, organizing a voluminous body of material and broadening the temporal horizon of memory and expectation. (20-21)

However, I would like to suggest that in longer works fractally-distributed patterns of words could also create a “harmonious patterning of temporal periodicties” over a large scale that works in a similar way to that of poetic meter, the difference being that the music of poetry is rhythmic and expected, while this music of novelistic prose would be chaotically rhythmic and unpredictably predictable. Either way, Turner’s claim does support the idea of plot as something novels should have (and, so students can better learn them, history and science should have too), whether artificial or not, because they are something the brain finds optimally pleasurable and creative of meaning.

Plot not only unites right-brain pattern recognition with the left-brain capacity to deal with large units of time, it also connects those cortical functions in turn with the limbic system and its powerful rewards. It does this by the process of identification. ... Identification makes us feel the character’s emotions as if they were our own. Thus plot promotes and exercises the relations between cortical world construction and limbic reward. (21)

We will soon see that insofar as plot is a form of narrative, we are also programmed to find plot pleasurable, since narrative is the very basis of language, and plots are created by language. Which suggests that plot is not artificial – though artificiality is hardly an argument against its use in art. Turner also points out that symbols work in a similar way, relating “pleasurable emotion or sensation with the higher values” (22). Any work of art or literature should match the different expectations of the brain. The same is true of education, further strengthening the connection between the arts and education.

Since the brain is habituative, “That is, it tends to ignore repeated and expected stimuli, and to respond only to the new and unexpected” (64), a work of art or literature should constantly present new and unexpected things to the reader. Since the brain is synthetic, a work of art or literature must create a complete, new world. Since the brain is “active rather than passive, it constructs scenarios to be tested by reality, vigorously seeks confirmation of them, and painfully reconstructs them if they are deconfirmed” (64), the work of art or literature must construct the kinds of realities that act as tests (of reality, of moral choices, etc.) for the reader. Since the brain is predictive, a work of art or literature must have a certain element of predictability – a novel’s characters, for example, must act in expected ways, and/or a work must have patterns and/or rhythms. Combine this with the habituative, and you get the kind of tension necessary for a work of art or literature to really work well. Further, if a long work of literature, such as a novel, has chaotic word patterns, such a work would be both predictive and habituative too. Since the brain is hierarchical, a work of art or literature must itself be hierarchical – which, in a work of literature, we can see in the emergent meaning from phonemes up through plot. Since the brain is rhythmic, the work of art or literature should be rhythmic, which, again, we see in the fractal patterns of a good work of art, as well as in stylized prose and rhythmic poetry. Since the brain is self-rewarding, it “reward[s] itself for certain activities which are, presumably, preferred for their adaptive utility” (68) and is able to be fine-tuned through external means to increase “mental efficiency,” which “underlies the whole realm of human values, ultimate purposes, and ideas such as truth, beauty, and goodness” (68), the plot/story of a work of art or literature should be one that can both fine-tune the mind and be a source of truth, beauty, and goodness. Since the brain is reflexive, which is how it calibrates itself, a work of art or literature should be repetitive, such as on the word-level for novels, on the sound-level of poems, and on the visual level for art. We see this reflexivity in the very structure of language, such as in our ‘if-then” statements:

The grammar or syntax of human language is certainly unique. Like an onion or Russian doll, it is recursive: One instance of an item is embedded in another instance of the same item. Recursion makes it possible for the words in a sentence to be widely separated and yet dependet on one another “If-then” is a classic example. “In the sentence “If Jack does not turn up the thermostat in his house this winter, then Madge and I are not coming over,” “if” and “then” are dependent on each other even though they are separated by a variable number of words. (Premack, David, “Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence?” Science 16 Jan 2004, 318)

Since the brain is social, the work of art or literature should be about social things, about human social interactions. Since the brain is hemispherically specialized, in order to create “a sort of stereoscopic depth-cognition” (Turner, 70), a work of art or literature should deal with space and time. Since the brain is kalogenetic, from the Greek “kalos” for “beauty, goodness, rightness,” and “genesis” for “begetting, productive, cause, origin, source” (71), a work of art or literature should be a source or producer of beauty and goodness. Since the brain is generative, the work of art or literature should be rule-bound, since “the rules must be followed, or the freedom, the limitlessness, the generativeness, will not come about. And those rules include not only the grammar of language, but also the classical laws of harmony, melody, color, proportion, poetic meter, narrative, rhythm, and balance” (222). Which means a work of art or literature should also include each of these. In short,
the human nervous system has a strong drive to construct affirmative, plausible, coherent, consistent, parsimonious, and predictively powerful models of the world, in which all events are explained by and take their place in a system which is at once rich in implications beyond its existing data and at the same time governed by as few principles or axioms as possible. (71)

Which is a good definition of both a chaotic system and a great work of art or literature.

To take up something I disagree with Turner on, Turner claims that “ordinary prose comes to us in a “mono” mode, so to speak, affecting the left brain predominantly” while “metered language comes to us in “stereo” mode – or even a quadraphonic one – simultaneously calling on the verbal resources of the left and the musical potentials of the right, the fronto-limbic sensitivity to rhythms and cycles, and the sensory-motor specializations of the posterior cortex” (95). While this may be a good definition of much “ordinary” nonfiction prose, it does not necessarily hold true for fiction (and other literary) prose – especially any kind of prose that paints vivid pictures for the reader. The right-brain holism (for plot) and visuals (scenes, imagery) shows us good fiction-prose also uses both sides of the brain, though in different ways. One could bring up the rhythm argument, but if a novel has fractally-distributed-word-patterns, which we would expect from a fractal system, these would be the natural rhythms and cycles found in good fiction that parallel the more standard forms of poetic rhythms and cycles. Also, while poetry may make good use of short-term memory (Turner and Pöppel have shown the optimally three-second lines of poems fit nicely in the three-second short-term memory window), the novel makes use of the right-brain’s long-term memory abilities, as well as its tendency to conceptualize. One must have a good memory to read and understand a novel, so it could be argued that reading novels also helps increase long-term memory.

II. Instincts, Education, and the Human Brain

2008-01-10T17:22:00.000-08:00

We have discussed complex systems in general through much of this work, but we need to look at one particular system, the human brain, in much greater detail if we are to understand art and literature. There has been a great deal of debate, particularly among philosophers, regarding whether or not humans have a basic nature. This argument has historically been religious in nature, and, in the European tradition the argument has been used to justify both the creation of rigid social hierarchies and the inherent superiority of the rulers of the time. Princes often inherited their kingdoms from their fathers, so they and the church that supported them made a connection between ability to rule and genetic inheritance (not to mention the creation of such ideas as the divine right of kings). Rulers were seen as having heritable intelligence, heritable traits that made them inherently better able to rule. This is why John Locke, in arguing for government by, of, and for the people, made the argument for the blank slate – tabula rasa. This would eliminate the argument that one has any inherent ability to rule. If, Locke argued, we were born blank slates, it was the facts of our social situation and education that made us who we are, meaning anybody could be educated into becoming a good ruler. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, does raise the question of how literal Locke meant us to take his tabula rasa model, but there is little question about how seriously we can take Rousseau when he advocates the blank slate – or of subsequent thinkers, including many postmodernists, when they advocate it. Although Locke saw the blank slate theory as a way to eliminate any argument for tyranny, since Rousseau the argument has been made that if we are blank slates, we are infinitely malleable. And if we are completely constructed by our society, culture, language, and/or history, we can simply educate the people to accept any form of government we want – including tyranny. But whether it is used as a way to argue for or against tyranny, the question still remains as to whether or not it is an accurate model for how the human mind works.

More recent arguments for a blank slate view have taken the brain into consideration, and have involved the idea of neural plasticity. The idea is that neurons can wire and rewire to such an extent that the brain is effectively a blank slate. However, recent research by Kawakami et al shows differences in the subunits (1, 1, and 2) of NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors affect neural plasticity. “Because the four  subunits differ in distribution and development in the brain, the subunit compositions of the NMDA receptors also differ depending on the brain regions and developmental states,” which is important since “NMDA receptors with distinct subunit combinations differ in physiological and pharmacological properties. Recent studies suggested the possibility that NMDA receptors with distinct properties are distributed to the synapses in an input-selective manner” (Science 9 May 2003, 990).

In early postnatal animals . . . the expression of 1 subunits in the hippocampus is still absent or low, whereas the 2 and 1 subunits are already expressed at a high level. In this case, the asymmetrical allocation of 2 subunits may produce distinct numbers of NMDA receptors in these synapses, resulting in differential ability to express synaptic plasticity. Hippocampal pyramidal neurons, thus, might regulate the development of synaptic plasticity in a side-selective manner by controlling the synaptic allocation of 2 subunits.

The left-right asymmetry is a fundamental concept of brain science. . . . the brian can involve asymmetries not only at a microscopic level of left and right hemispheres but also at microscopic levels of neurons and synapses. (994)
Relative levels of plasticity exist in the brain in different regions, for particular neurons, and even particular sides of neurons. That being the case, plasticity is no argument for a blank slate. Plasticity simply allows for relative levels of flexibility around our strange-attractor instincts – as opposed to the relative rigidity of instincts in most other animals.

Animals have instincts; they allow animals to rapidly adapt in their behavior to the world. If there is a blank slate, one has to learn about the world starting from nothing. It would be like giving someone who has never played or even seen a game of chess – or a similar board, as we have in checkers – all the pieces and the board and telling them to play chess. This person may do any number of things with the board and the pieces – but playing a game of chess will not be one of them. But if we were to tell him the rules of chess (which, while certainly man-made, do now exist independent of any particular human being, as a meme), and show him how, and train him in the proper way to play chess, the best ways to play chess, etc., what we will get will be a person who is capable of playing a truly astronomical number of games of chess. The same would be true of any instinct. No two lions hunt in exactly the same way – but they all hunt.

Consider language (which Pinker argues is an instinct in the appropriately titled The Language Instinct). Without some sort of inherent, inherited brain structure for grammar, all we could have at best is a series of disconnected words. We could not have language. And we certainly could not have children who learn language as quickly as they do. If we took the most optimistic approach, what we would have to do is explain to our children each element of grammar, how sentences are put together, what words mean – before they would be able to use them. But then, how could we explain these things, since we would have to explain it in language, and they would not be able to understand what we were saying to them until they knew language? Perhaps, one could argue, we simply have prodigious memories. But then, how would we be able to generate new sentences? Or understand a sentence’s meaning? If it were just memory, all we could do is mindlessly regurgitate what we heard. Any proposed mechanism to derive general principles from learned language would suggest an inherent trait, and the blank slate model would have to be discarded anyway – and a less accurate model adopted. So the blank slate simply cannot work for learning language. What we have instead are children whose brains have structures that create the ability to map vocally-produced sounds onto narrative structure (something I will get into in much greater detail in the chapter on language). The brain has structures already built into it to accept information from the environment. The environment provides information to the brain, which is able to fine-tune the language centers of the brain so the child learning the new language will be able to use the language being used around him or her. As the child uses the language correctly, they will receive encouragement from the environment (in smiles from relatives, in getting exactly what they want, etc.), further reinforcing those particular language structures in the child’s brain.

If the brain is not a blank slate, we must raise the question of how the human brain is structured, and how the genes and the environment work together to create the brain’s minding function. The latter is an important issue, as those who believe in the blank slate believe we are created by our environment alone – and they tend to accuse those who believe there is a genetic element to behavior of believing behavior is 100% genetically determined. But genes do not act in a vacuum. They must act in an environment every bit as much as the environment needs structures (including genes) to influence. What we actually have with the genes’ relation to the brain is:

one information processing machine (the genome) has spawned another (the brain). Furthermore it has created a machine that can process information in new and different ways, the most striking of which is the difference in the rate of processing. The slow genome has, over millions of years, given birth to the rapid brain. (Bonner, 30)

There is a parallel between the two in that they are both dynamic parallel-processing systems:

The brain processes thoughts, movements, immediate reactions to the environment, in sum all the activities we associate with animals. The genome processes genes by replication, and the genes are responsible for making specific proteins that in turn are required to build the structure of the organism through its entire life cycle. The basic similarity between the two is that they both take in, store, and give out information; the difference between the two is not only that the information differs, but that they are on a different time scale. Reactions of the brain and the nervous system are rapid, while those of the genome are, by comparison, exceedingly slow. (Bonner, 30)

It is the rapidity of the brain’s work relative to the work done by genome that has perhaps led people to consider the brain a system which could not possibly be related to the genome that coded for it. Thus such ideas as mind-body dualism and the blank slate. But both the genetic system and the brain are closely related in that both are dissipative systems, and all dissipative systems “take in, store, and give out information.”
Genes affect the brain in two directly related ways: one is by brain structure and the other is by the direct inheritance of patterns of behavior. These structure-based patterns are sometimes called instinctive or innate; they stand in clear contrast to those behavior patterns that are flexible and, as one goes up the scale of organisms of increasing brain capacity, ultimately lead to learning and inventing. (Bonner, 34)

If we are to understand the minding functions of the brain, including the production and appreciation of art, we need to learn more about how the brain itself works, its biological foundations, how it is structured, and how it is educatable. To understand this, we have to understand how the brain develops, the interactions between genes and environment – with the environment understood both as the chemical environment of the brain and as the organisms’ external environment, which, if we look at the environment in the most basic way, is really nothing more than molecules, light waves, sound waves, temperature differences, and textures. These are what our senses (our sensory nerves) take in (detect) and pass on, through nerve transmissions, to the brain for processing. So we can take appropriate action. “The brain [is] the obligatory intermediate between genotype and behavior” (Dean Hamer, Science 4 Oct 2002, 71). If we are to begin to understand all of this, we have to start with early brain development, how the brain cells are first laid out, influenced by regulatory genes such as the homeobox genes.

The homeobox is a section of many regulatory proteins, sixty amino acids in length, which is strongly conserved among animals, from fruit flies to worms to mice and people. The proteins with the homeobox are used to lay out the animal’s segmented regions as it develops. This is clearest in fruit flies, which are clearly segmented, and which express the homeobox genes in clearly segmented ways. In vertebrates, where the segmentation is less obvious, we see more overlap between and among segments. A good example is in the expression of homeobox genes in the human brain. Deacon shows on 186 how four homeobox genes are expressed over the brain. The Otx1 gene is expressed over the entirety of the brain, Otx2 is expressed over a slightly less extensive area, excluding the hindbrain, Emx2 is expressed over much of the cortex, excluding the midbrain, and Emx1 is expressed exclusively in the frontal cortex.

We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, including the genes coding for our brain. However, the genes for the human brain are five times more active than the same genes in chimpanzees. It is likely this regulatory increase was either generated by a change in Emx1, which could generate rapid growth in the human frontal cortex, or in regulatory genes that affect Emx1 and other genes important for brain-gene regulation. Since it is generally known that 1/3 of our genes code for proteins expressed exclusively in the brain, there are a wide variety of possibilities regarding which gene(s) were changed. The regulatory genes are easily manipulable (McCrone). If longer legs are needed, animals with longer legs rapidly evolve. In a population of giraffes, there will be a natural variation in genes regulating leg length – some in the population will have slightly longer legs than others. If there is some environmental pressure – leaves lower down being eaten by other animals, for example – then those with more active regulatory genes, resulting in longer legs, will receive more nourishment, survive longer, be healthier, and give birth to more offspring, passing on those more active and therefore longer-leg regulatory genes. While the gene-binding regions of the homeobox and other regulatory genes are highly conserved, the regions that interact with other proteins, with regulatory chemicals, and/or are sensitive to ion concentrations are somewhat more variable and more sensitive to the environment – and it is these sections that are most important for evolution, as they are responsible for truly regulating gene expression, due to changes in structure, which make them more or less effective at binding the DNA, thus regulating the genes they are responsible for regulating.

Most homeobox genes are responsible for broader elements of development, including length and shape of limbs, and broad sections of the brain, such as Emx1's regulation of the frontal cortex, the stimulation of which could be responsible for the massive size of the human frontal cortex, making possible the processing of language, and thus of the full development of more complex culture and of the minding function of the brain. But such broad regulatory effects, while interesting as a way of understanding how the human brain developed as it did beyond those of its more chimpanzee-like ancestors, really do not help us to understand the more nuanced elements of how the brain works, for it to give us such complex behaviors as advanced culture, including the production and appreciation of literature and the arts.

Part of the answer lies in our understanding the rest of the estimated 10,000 or so genes that code for brain proteins – which means there is still a great deal of work to be done by developmental and neuro-geneticists – and their interactions with their environments. Let me give an example of a complex behavior and how it is affected by the brain: left-handedness. This is something I have been interested in for a long time, being a left-handed person. Handedness is not taught – exclusively. Certainly, one’s natural tendency to use one hand over another can be overcome, as history shows us. For centuries, left-handers were seen as “sinister,” and children who used their left hands to write were often punished. Typically teachers would tie their left hand behind their backs in order to force them to use their right hand. As we can see, through behaviorist methods, one’s behavior can be changed – but both the abusive methods used and the unintended consequences (forcing a child to switch hands has been shown to slow learning and further brain development) show us the negative consequences of doing so. But how does this tendency to use a certain hand arise in the first place? Right-handedness appears to be associated with the general uneven distribution of functions in the brain, with language much more localized in the left side than in the right. Since a great deal of the way we think is through language, this would create a tendency to favor the right hand when acting, beyond even the limited handedness seen in some primates -- who we should not be surprised to find handedness in considering the parallels between purposeful sequential action and purposeful sequential language. After the development of writing, such language-affected handedness as which hand to write with would certainly favor the right hand. So where does left-handedness come from? There appears to be two sources of left-handedness – both environmental. One way one can get left-handedness is through birth trauma affecting the brain. As a child is born, the head has to squeeze through an opening slightly smaller than the head. Evolution has solved this problem by making the skull soft and not entirely closed together. During birth, the skull presses in on the brain, increasing the probability that brain damage can occur. Fortunately, the human brain is highly plastic while developing, so the brain can, upon registering damage, redirect brain functions to other areas for further development there, since brain development is incomplete at birth anyway. An easy way to do this is to switch the most important brain functions – including language functions – to the other side of the brain, transmitting this information across the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres. Both the brain damage itself and the switching can generate problems, so there is a high percentage of left-handers with learning disabilities and who are mentally disabled. It is approximated that 10% of all births are traumatic in this way, and if the genetic propensity for left-handedness affects 10% of the population, and birth trauma generates switching in 10%, we would expect 18% of the population to be left handed – which we do find.

These percentages do raise a question about genetics and behavior. How can something inherited only have an expression of 10%? We learn in basic biology that we get a gene from each parent, that one gene tends to be dominant, the other recessive, and that, if there is not something specifically selecting against left-handers, we should expect 25% of the population to be genetic left-handers. That is a simplified version that works for only very few traits, and not at all with behavior (or most other inherited traits). Our behavior is affected by the interaction of literally thousands of genes, creating tendencies in behavior, not 100% certainty. We get genetic left-handers not because there is a gene for handedness, but because the development of the brain is affected by the levels of certain hormones – including testosterone. If there is a surge of testosterone production during certain stages of the fetus’ development, the growth of the left hemisphere of the brain will be temporarily arrested. The brain’s right hemisphere, whose growth is somehow unaffected by testosterone levels (perhaps due to a hemispheric difference in testosterone receptors), continues growing, sometimes to the same size (which could create ambidexterity), but more often surpassing the left hemisphere in size, creating more space for brain functions, including language, to develop in. Once the testosterone levels subside, the left hemisphere gets back on track, and continues growing until it reaches its appropriate size. This switch in dominant hemispheres causes the redistribution of functions, and this information must pass across the corpus callosum. This increased activity across the corpus callosum results in it being 50% larger in left-handers than in right-handers, since active neurons are selected for, and inactive neurons are selected against, and die off. In men, this ironically creates brains more closely resembling, proportionally, women’s brains, as women’s brains are more even in size and have a larger corpus callosum. So there is a chemical-environmental cue for left-handedness, though the tendency to create this chemical environment during fetal development is itself inherited – as the high percentage of left-handers in my own family shows.

In developmental terms, the fetus is programmed to create higher-than-average levels of testosterone. The testosterone enters the fetus’ blood stream and is transported to the brain. The brain has testosterone-binding proteins which result in other genes being turned on and off. Many of these genes regulate growth (testosterone is known to regulate growth and affect behavior later in development, especially during male puberty). In this case some brain development pauses for a short period, while other parts (in this case, a whole hemisphere) continue to develop. In a species with hemispheric specialization and an emphasis on one particular brain function found in the larger hemisphere, with more even, or a hemispheric switch in, development, one would expect a redistribution in brain function. If redistribution from one hemisphere to the other occurs, one would expect the retention of a large corpus callosum, since the continued use of brain cells results in their retention (lack of use results in massive cell death in the brain, of those cells not used during brain development, typically after the first five or six years, strongly suggesting when most learning does and should occur). This is indeed what we see, both in women, who already have more evenly developed brains, and in left-handed men. Our brain has structures built into it – especially at certain stages of development – but it is also plastic enough to develop these structures in alternative locations if necessary. What we do not get is the complete loss of a function or tendency. We would expect the necessity of moving functions around to also change the brain’s structures. And if there is a difference in brain structure, one would then expect it to affect behavior. With the stronger connection between the brain hemispheres, and the more even distribution of behaviors between both hemispheres, one would expect to see a tendency among left-handers to be better able to integrate the specializations of each hemisphere – logic with emotion, verbal with visual, etc. In other words, one would expect to see a large percentage of artists, creative writers, and scientists among left-handers. As it turns out, while only 18% of the population is left-handed, about 40% of artists, writers, and scientists are left-handed. In The Left-Hander’s Syndrome, Cohen sites a study that found that among art majors at Boston University, “47 percent were left-handed or mixed-handed, while only 22 percent of the more general students were” (131). He also cites a study that found there was a high percentage of left-handers among players of chess and the Asian game go, as well as among musicians.

Now, nearly half of the art students in an art department being left-handed when only 18% of the general population is left-handed certainly suggests a connection between handedness and behavior – and we have seen the connection between handedness and brain development. This suggests, then, that the propensity for creating art has a neurological basis (though we cannot make the inverse claim that artistic or scientific genius is found only or even primarily in lefties – genius has other elements as well). The increased hemispheric connectivity would make the person more able to perceive the interconnectedness of things in the world, which is precisely the skill needed to be a poet, to create music, or to develop scientific experiments. Left-handers are also known to have better spatial skills (which explains the increased skills in art and chess). These increased abilities would result in increased praise by their parents, teachers, and peers for those abilities, resulting in a feedback loop of encouragement. The natural abilities would get praise, which would make them practice more, making them better, getting them more praise, etc. This is the soul of education.

Education helps us increase our own brain’s complexity. If each student has genetically-based propensities for certain abilities and skills, the best thing for these students is to have the teachers be able to identify these abilities, and encourage them. Let us say we have a student with good spatial abilities. They love to draw. Many teachers discourage their students from “wasting their time” drawing or being creative. Instead, teachers should be encouraging a student’s natural abilities and interests, which could be transferred to other areas. There is a spatial element to music one could transfer from the visual to the audio realm. So the teacher could encourage the student to learn a musical instrument. It is well-established that students who learn to play a musical instrument do better in math. By having a student who likes to draw (because they have good spatial skills) learn a musical instrument, we have indirectly helped them with their math skills too. There is no reason to think this could not also work in the opposite direction, with good math skills leading to better spatial skills through learning a musical instrument. One could also teach students how to read better using these same skill-transfer methods. By emphasizing music, one could transfer this musical skill to the reading of poetry, which has musicality in its rhythmicity. These same skills then get transferred into language skills, as rhythmic poetry could lead to less rhythmic poetry, and, then, to reading prose. If we have a student who has good language skills, the teacher can introduce the student to poetry, and, again, move the student through music, into math and artistic/spatial skills.

Once we have down the basic skills of math, art, and reading, the rest of education becomes much easier, as it is all learned through reading, visuals, and mathematical/abstract thinking. It may seem strange to suggest music is the gateway to learning, until we realize that much of what humans do has a certain musicality to it, specifically in rhythm. Music, poetry, dance, and rituals (both the most profoundly sacred, and the most mundane, as our daily morning rituals) all are rhythmical. Our brains, too, contain rhythms, including circadian rhythms, which affect the daily cycles of most (perhaps all) animals, including us. Our rhythmic brains are designed to pick up rhythms – the rhythms of the seasons, of migrations, of the cycles of the moon, of day passing into night, of menstruation, etc. Any brain thus designed to be rhythmical and to pick up rhythms would be better adapted than one that does not. Further, the harmonies of music approach the Golden Ratio (1:1.618), meaning they are fractals (Doczi, 8-9), since the Golden Ratio is the simplest fractal (as we see in the Fibonacci spiral). Harmonies join (harmony comes from the Greek harmos, to join), and one must join facts to truly have knowledge – and one must join knowledge to have wisdom. All art too should be harmonious – the parts unified. By learning musical harmony, students would become more in tune with the fractal geometry of the universe, and would therefore be more capable of picking up on the fractal geometry of the universe – meaning they would be better able to learn.

The development of rituals, music, and dance (not to mention the combination of these three) work to emphasize our brain’s rhythms, and our ability to pick up patterns and rhythms – and, just as importantly, to notice when rhythms are broken. A breeze causing the grass to wave in beautiful rhythmic (fractal) patterns is comforting. But if there is something breaking that rhythm – such as, say, a large cat that could eat us – we notice it, and focus on where the rhythm has been broken, making it more likely we will see the predator attempting to stalk us. Those who are more in tune with noticing rhythms will be more likely to notice a break in the rhythm, and notice predators soon enough to escape them. Rhythmic rituals, dance, and music are evolutionarily adaptive, as they heighten our ability to notice patterns. So those who create patterns, especially fractal patterns, through the creation of new rituals, dance, and music, would be very useful to a society, as they would add more rhythms to the society, and keeping the rhythms new and fresh, avoid boredom, which could lead to the abandonment of the rituals that were keeping the members of the group alive. The rhythms of poetry and the patterns in paintings would act in the same way. This is one of the reasons artists, musicians and poets arose in the first place – they would have given any tribe they were members of a distinct adaptive advantage. This advantage has not left us, though we have left the savannahs. The world we live in now is full of patterns and rhythms, which art, music, and literature could help us recognize – and help us recognize when those patterns are broken. There are economic patterns – stock trends, business cycles, etc. There are political patterns, behavior patterns – the universe, including the human universe, is full of patterns. The arts help us see the patterns of the universe, by condensing them, emphasizing them, and thus acting as a microcosm (self-similar and scalar) of the universe. By being trained to recognize patterns, we will also be better able to notice things that do not fit into patterns. Art, then, should also emphasize pattern-breaking. This emphasis is why Marquez’ magical realist images, which break the familiar patterns, are so effective and memorable. But they can only do so in the context of art’s pattern-emphasizing qualities.

Anything that emphasizes rhythms is more easily learned, since it patterns on the natural rhythms of the brain. A “rhythmic” education would be the best education we could give a child – the information would be more easily learned and more easily retained (it is easier to remember a song than a piece of prose information one read in a book, particularly as a whole). This is precisely why and how music acts as the gateway to the rest of education.

But these conclusions can only be reached and understood if we have an understanding of the humanities as a product of the human brain and its functions. A strong grounding in the arts and humanities can help us learn better and easier things such as math and, through better reading skills, things like history, philosophy, and the sciences. But this information is itself only understood through a scientific understanding of how the brain works and learns and thinks, of the genetic basis of this, and the various interactions it has with the environment. The issue is not nature or nurture, but nature and environment, in the broadest sense of the word. The brain is genetically programmed to create and notice rhythms – which makes us behave in rhythms – which, because repeated, create memory and meaning – which feeds back into the brain to emphasize the rhythmicity of the brain itself. This natural rhythmicity ends up in a feedback loop. An environment that emphasized rhythm would create more rhythms in the brain, encouraging the production of more rhythmical activity, while an environment with fewer rhythmical elements would act to dampen the brain’s rhythmicity, creating a more “prosaic” culture from the interactions of more prosaic brains.

This brain rhythmicity is a higher-order reflection of the rhythmicity of genetic regulation. I already noted that homeobox genes are segmentally expressed (i.e., in patterns). But they are also rhythmically expressed. Regulatory proteins have to be expressed, not just in the right place, but at the right time. There is a rhythm of development. This helps to create the segmentedness of the body plan – including bones and joints, but also of the brain. The brain itself is segmentally laid out – with a spinal cord leading to a hindbrain, on top of which is built a midbrain, on top of which is built the cerebral cortex, giving us different, hierarchically nested, brain functions. And each of these segments is coded for by very particular combinations (or lack of combinations) of homeobox genes. We get increasing separation – in a literal, physical sense – from our deepest drives (which are found in the hindbrain) and emotions, as more and more is added to the cortex. Language is processed in one location, emotions in another – but the overall processing of a piece of information gets distributed throughout the brain, to make sure it matches up with everything it can match up with, including emotions and memories, making it easier for the brain to remember and create meaning for the new piece of information, if it has something related to it the brain can relate it to. This, again, is suggestive of how one can best learn – through the building of mental networks, emphasizing commonality, and building on emotional connections to what is learned. Learning is facilitated by associating pleasure and other positive emotions to learning, and negative emotions to not learning – a carrot and stick approach. To do this, praise and other forms of positive reinforcement should be used to encourage learning. This is different from many current approaches to make learning “fun,” but which in fact amount to little more than frivolity, and often try to increase “self-esteem,” even when no self has been developed to esteem.

If the brain too fits into this (meta)physical model I have been developing, being hierarchical and scalar, with fractal geometry created by strange attractors, which act as rules for the brain’s layout and functions, and deeply interconnected, then a model of education is suggested. Emphasizing connectivity among information helps us retain knowledge, and creates more triggers for the access of that knowledge, including emotional triggers. What we teach should be hierarchical. One has to build a solid foundation before one can erect the remaining edifices of knowledge. One has to build on first principles, on the way the brain works, on the way we think and believe (we cannot just ignore faith and belief, discarding them as simply irrational, as such disdain for one of the ways our brains mind only cuts us off from educating ourselves). Thus the emphasis on music, on a rhythmic education. But this education must also be scalar. Which is more important: poetry or math, science or music, history or art? What ridiculous questions! Each of these, and many more, including language – foreign and native – philosophy, government, comparative religion and culture, psychology, sociology, economics, business, etc. are vital if we are to have truly educated children and adults. If this seems a great deal to teach our children, you are right – and wrong. Students can learn all of these things, “it is only a question of degrees and quantities. All men [and women] are artistic, philosophical, scientific, etc.” (Nietzsche, PT 65). In the United States, children’s abilities are constantly and grossly underestimated, leading to legions of bored (not to mention undereducated) children, who then get into trouble because they are bored (or find themselves embarrassed as adults on Jaywalking). Children’s abilities are underestimated because of ill-informed theories of child mental development, supported by an education system made up of grossly undereducated teachers, who could not actually teach students what is required if we actually challenged students. The first step in granting children real educations would be to abolish education as a college major. Majoring in weaving would provide a person with more relevant skills to teach children than does an education major. Rather than having future teachers major in education, they should be given a thorough general education so they can actually know something in order to actually teach children something. One cannot teach if one is ignorant.

While this may seem off-topic, it is not. This theory of education through emphasis on rhythm would require a complete deconstruction of our educational system – reconstructed on what we have learned about how the brain thinks and learns. It is time we gave children and adults both fully human educations. To do this, we have to show that what we teach is relevant. It is not uncommon for children to blow off entire subjects because they see them as “irrelevant.” As a grade school student, I blew off math as irrelevant. I saw no reason to learn it, no connection of math to anything I was interested in, no connection of it to the real world. This from a child who was interested in science. The fault was both my teachers’ and my textbooks’. Neither could show me what use there was for math. What did I care about trains going north and south at different speeds? So, despite the fact that 8th grade math taught me nothing new, I failed it (one has to do homework to pass a class). It was not until I took Introduction to Chemistry in high school that I learned the relevance of math. And it was in this class where I was finally able to understand fractions – since they were connected to something real. The problem was that math was taught first as an abstract, then connected (but never in a math class) to the real world. We may be born with an innate sense of counting, and in this sense, number, and of relationships among elements, but we are not born knowing specific arithmetic, geometry, algebra, etc. We cannot go too far in our attributing innate understandings of certain aspects of the world or we will make the mistake of believing in a full repertoire of Platonic Forms (not Plato’s idea of the Forms – the Platonic idea of the Forms – since it seems increasingly unlikely Plato himself believed in Forms, which he certainly undermines in both the Socratic method, where the Form of the thing cannot be found, and in the structure of Phaedrus, while it is the Platonists after him who believed in the Forms). It seems the Platonic idea of the idea giving rise to the perceived world is still in force in elementary education. This is how out of date our educational system is. Since concepts are formed subsequent to observing many similar objects, and remembering the similarities while forgetting the dissimilarities, we can see that this approach is backwards. Perceiving a series of tables gives rise to the concept of table, not vice versa.

Issues of relevance are connected to the issue of perception and concept formation. This is why in my Freshman Rhetoric classes I have my students write an essay in the first few days of class explaining to me the relevance of rhetoric to their majors. Once they see the connection – bringing us to the issue of the interconnectedness of knowledge – they are more interested in the class. Interested students are educatable students. I can then teach my students a wide variety of things relevant to rhetoric, but not always entirely relevant to their major per se, and they will remain interested and educatable. Since I began having my students write this one essay, interest in the class has noticeably increased.

But what about starting with music? We see the relevance as educators, but can we really explain this sort of thing to five- and six-year-olds? Of course not. But fortunately, music provides us with the other element that should be present in education: pleasure. Everyone finds pleasure in music – in rhythms and patterns in general – and the pleasure in music is the draw it has for students. Not only can music lead us into other disciplines, it can also introduce us to different cultures and subcultures. It is the gateway to both knowledge and understanding – if properly used and taught. Combining the fact that knowing music makes math easier to learn with showing students the relevance of math would drastically reverse the terrible situation we find in American students’ math education.

If we can connect the sort of pleasure we get from music and the other arts to learning other subjects, we will see considerably more eagerness from students to learn. We remember well those things with which we have positive associations. “Whether thinking proceeds with pleasure or with displeasure is an essential distinction: the person who finds thinking genuinely difficult is certainly less likely to apply himself to it and will also probably not get as far. He forces himself, which is useless in this realm” (Nietzsche, PT 67). Memory is connected to emotion, and thus learning is connected to memory (but not memorization – memorization is not learning, but the ability to regurgitate equally the meaningless with the meaningful). If we have negative emotions connected to learning, we will avoid it. If we have positive emotions connected to learning, we will seek it out. If we see emotions as strange attractors, memories as strange attractors, and the purpose of education as making the connections which create the complex fractal system around these strange attractors, the issue becomes what kind of complex fractal system we want to create in our children’s minds – if we want to create one that is simple or complex, that has negative or positive emotional associations. One of the roles of the arts – music, art, and literature – would be to create more complex fractal learning systems, with positive emotional connections, from the pleasure we get from rhythm, and the other pleasures afforded us by art. Art, music, and literature should provide us with much of our emotional educations. And things that are rhythmic and fractal would also be much easier to learn, being as they are patterned on the way the brain itself works. One may wonder if this means our elementary school science and history textbooks should be written in something like blank verse. It does only if we want to truly maximize learning.

We can still learn the world’s rhythms through receiving a thorough education in art and literature, which are rooted in rhythmicity (being products of the brain, and the brain, as stated, being rhythmical, one would expect the creations of the brain to also be rhythmical). An arts education will both give us emotional educations – something we have lost in the past century – and help us to see the rhythms and patterns of the world, and thus become more in tune with the world as a whole. Patterns are very important in the composition of a work of art, as they help to bring together the visual elements of the visual art piece, bringing them together in a beautiful harmonious whole. Education should strive to do the same thing. Education should strive to be beautiful, and to create beautiful minds.

Chapter 4: Games and Human Behavior (Universals as Instincts): I. Rules of the Game(s)

2008-01-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Complex systems are made orderly through strange attractors. These strange attractors are the rules by which complex systems are ordered. Each system, to be a system, must have governing rules – though for any particular system the number and kind of rules changes. We get new, emergent kinds of rules with each new, emergent system. A small number of rules create all the atoms, which combine to generate the rules of chemistry. The rules of quantum physics still hold at the quantum atomic level, but the interaction of atoms with each other generates new rules to emerge. One does not get ions in quantum physics – one gets them only from chemical interactions between atoms, whose interactions are able to make use of unstable electron orbits and stabilize them through the chemical interaction, transferring the single unstable electron from the donor (often metal) atom to the electron shell of the acceptor (nonmetal) atom, whose outer electron shell is stabilized by having the optimal number of electrons. A sodium atom is stabilized through its chemical interaction with chlorine by donating its outer electron to the chlorine atom, stabilizing it. If one merely knew of quantum physics, and not chemistry, could one predict such an interaction? Quantum physics predicts the creation of neutral atoms through the combination of electrons, protons, and neutrons. But it also predicts, in conflict with this rule, the increased stability of a full electron shell – with decreasing stability the fewer the electrons in the shell. But how could an atom missing an electron, giving it a positive charge, be more stable? Obviously it cannot, unless it is combined with chlorine, to create a neutral chemical combination, each atom oppositely charged, each with more stable outer electron shells. Chlorine is so much more stable as an ion that chlorine ions are smaller than chlorine atoms, as the addition of the extra electron to the outer shell to complete it makes the electrons orbit closer to the nucleus, in a more stable state. One gets an emergent chemical rule as chemistry makes use of this agonal conflict between maintaining charge neutrality and electron shell stability.

We find the same situation as we move from chemistry into a certain arrangement of organic chemical systems – life. The creation of ions, hydrogen bonds, chemical bonds, and van der Waals forces in chemical interactions generate, in certain kinds of organic chemicals, the ability to self-replicate. Stuart Kauffman goes into great detail in The Origins of Order, particularly Part II of that book, and I recommend this book for those readers who wish to go into the emergence of life from prebiotic chemicals in much greater detail than is allowed by the scope of this work. I, however, shall skip ahead considerably, and only say that while Kauffman is generally correct, considerable work on RNA has been done since 1993 that strengthens the case for RNA or an RNA-like precursor, in combination with small polypeptides, since it has since been shown that it is the rRNA of the ribosome which catalyzes the peptide bonds, not the proteins. So we can talk more strongly about an RNA world as at least a precursor to life as we now know it. In chemical polymers such as self-replicative RNA, the ability to self-replicate is determined by the order of the constituent parts (in this case, ribonucleotides). Any alteration of the sequence pattern affects the polymers’ ability to reproduce themselves. Most were dead ends, but a few could reproduce themselves better. This self-replicative ability was an emergent property of a particular polymer sequence – and abided by its own particular rules, rules which emerged from, yet were still a part of, the rules of chemistry.

Genes provide a template for the rules that give rise to complete cellular systems. Gene combinations and alternative forms of regulation give rise to different cell types (S. Kauffman identifies different cell types as different strange attractors (202) – identifying each and every cell as a fractal). The combination of cell types gives rise to different kinds of organisms, which are structured using rules different from those which organize the cells themselves. Neurons are a kind of cell which are capable, due to their complex structures, of complex interactions with other neurons. In sufficient numbers and concentrations (i.e., in a brain), these interacting neurons lead to complex behaviors (more emergent rules), including the ability to language and be self-aware. We get the accumulation of more and more rules, from more and more complex interactions from more and more constituent parts. The remarkable thing is that though the number of parts increases dramatically, the number of rules increases at a much slower rate. S. Kauffman gives us a set of equations that help us see the relationship between the number of types of parts of a system and the number of rules (strange attractors) generated by those parts, as well as the number of possible expressions a system can generate from those rules. Using these very simple equations, we can see how we can get the level of complexity we find in the universe, starting from perfect symmetry (nothing), and what this suggests for art and literature.

Kauffman shows that for any system with a certain number of components (N), that system will have 2n/2 possible states within the system, but only N/e number of cycles, or possible basins of attraction, where e is the inverse natural logarithm (e=2.718281828449...)

Thus a system containing 200 elements would have only about 74 alternative asymptotic patterns of behavior. More strikingly, a system containing 10,000 elements and chaotic attractors with median lengths on the order of 25000 would harbor only about 3700 alternative attractors. This is already an interesting intimation of order even in extremely complex disordered systems. (S. Kauffman, 194)

Kauffman then shows that such systems are even more organized, since for a complex system:

The expected median state cycle length is about N. That is, the number of states on an attractor scales as the square root of the number of elements. A Boolean network with 10,000 elements which was utterly random within the constraint that each element is regulated by only two elements would therefore have a state space of 210,000 = 103000 but would settle down and cycle recurrently among a mere 10,000 = 100 states. . . . A system of 10,000 elements which localizes its dynamical behavior to 100 states has restricted itself to 10-2998 parts of its entire state space. Here is spontaneous order indeed. . . . The number of state cycle attractors is also about N. Therefore, a random Boolean network with 10,000 elements would be expected to have on the order of 100 alternative attractors. A system with 100,000 elements, comparable to the human genome, would have about 317 alternative asymptotic attractors (201).

And this is about how many kinds of cells one finds in the human body. But more importantly, systems with very large numbers of elements can and do have a very small number of ways of organizing themselves, though the number of ways of expressing those rules may be astronomical. For a system with N=200, the median cycle length, or possible states per system, is 2100 1030, “At a microsecond per state transition, it would require about a billion times the age of the universe to traverse the attractor” (Kauffman, 194). And that is for a tiny system with only 200 elements. Yet the actual different ways such a system would be expressed would be only 47. There would be 47 general forms, with 1030 specific forms. One could see strange attractors (though not these specific numbers I have used as examples, of course) as the different species of animals the “zoological system” could create, and the median cycle length as the number of particular individuals that could be generated.

But let us now use these equations as promised. If I am correct in identifying the universe and everything in the universe as complex fractal systems of these sorts, then Kauffman’s equations should be able to give us the complexity found in the universe, starting with nothing.

With:

N = dimensions = elements of a system
2N/2 = median cycle length (MCL) = possible states per system
N/e = number of attractors
N = median state cycle (MSC) = local dynamic behavior

And, for each new emergent system, constituting all the elements of the previous system:

Nnext = MCL + number of attractors, as MCL and attractors constitute the combination of elements, both the physical components and the rules that made that system.

For those systems that do not use all of the elements from a previous system, such as biology, which only uses certain kinds of chemicals (thought admittedly at least trace amount of most), and emergent human intelligence, which does not use all organisms, but only uses its own cells (and not all of them; though, like all organisms, it needs a full body in which to function, and whose body need a full ecosystem in which to live), N would necessarily be smaller than suggested above. Nnext would work starting from the big bang, up through the creation of strings, while N would have to be derived in other ways for life, human intelligence, and the arts and humanities. But let us see if we can get to either 10 or 11 dimensional strings from N = 0, at the big bang.

For N = 0,
MCL = 20/2 = 1 = singularity of the big bang (so far so good)
# attractors = 0/e = 0

N= 1
MCL = 21/2 = 2 1.41
# attractors = 1/e 0.37 (a fraction, which we would expect in a fractal)
MSC = 1 = 1

N = MCL + # attractors = 1.4 + 0.37 = 1.78
MCL = 21.77/2 1.85
# attractors = 1.78/e 0.65
MSC = 1.77 1.3

N = 1.85 + 0.65 2.50
MCL = 22.5/2 2.38
# attractors = 2.5/e 0.92
MSC = 2.5 1.58

N 3.30
MCL = 23.3/2 = 3.14
# attractors = 3.3/e 1.21
MSC = 3.3 1.82

N 4.35
MCL = 24.35/2 = 4.52
# attractors = 4.35/e 1.61
MSC = 4.35 2.09

N 6.12 = 4-D space, time, matter-energy
MCL  26.12/2 8.34
# attractors  6/e 2.25 = creation of gravity and GUT
MSC  6 2.47

N 10.59 = fractal strings between 10 and 11 dimensions, containing 4-D space, time, matter-energy, gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, (speed of light?)

MCL  210.59/2 39.26 number of potential string combinations (strange quarks, etc.)
# attractors  10/e 3.9 actual string types (quarks, electron, photon)
MSC  10 3.16

(the  means "about" or "about equal to")

By this point, not all possible states are realized, as they become increasingly unstable at increasing distance from the stabilizing attractors. Starting with only these very simple equations, we get emergence all the way to strings having between ten and eleven dimensions. We can reconcile the 10-D and the 11-D theories, since we see using these calculations that strings have fractal dimensions – which we would expect in a fractal universe. Theories that see dimensions as whole numbers would naturally give us either ten or eleven dimensions. This latter aspect of strings has given people a great deal of trouble. But here we see those dimensions arising naturally from these calculations, once one sees a dimension as being an interactive element of a system. A system with 100 different elements is a system with 100 dimensions. This suggests that one could see quantum strings as systems containing around eleven elements – with these elements being such things as length, width, height, time, and, as I have suggested, various constants, including the speed of light (c). And one might also include other constants, including Planck’s constant (h=6.6 x 10-34 joule second = a constant action, making it a good candidate) bringing us up to ten, and, if I may be so bold as to go further out on this limb, perhaps pi, since in quantum physics h-cross = h/2, or the Golden Mean = 1.618, since we see this function expressed at all scales, including the Fibonacci spirals of spiral galaxies, to bring it up to eleven. But determining what constitutes the dimensions of strings goes far beyond the bounds of this work. I propose these hoping someone more able than I am with the mathematics of quantum physics will investigate the dimensions of strings along these lines, as elements in a system.

J.T. Fraser, in Time, Conflict, and Human Values, proposes that there have been 101000 number of organisms through the history of life on earth (he also suggests we would get a complexity of 10 at the quantum level, which we have shown to be the case in the above calculations, suggesting his numbers may have at least some rough validity). This would mean the MCL for biology would be (to use these very rough numbers) 101000  23000. N 6000, which would be about the number of kinds of generic genes, giving rise to 6000/e patterns of behavior, or over 2000 different kinds of organism, which would itself be contained within MSC  6000 80 different types. Naturally, at this point, we are being highly approximate. However, if we further use Fraser’s numbers, where the MCL for humans = 1010,000, for the number of possible brain states, we get N  60,000, # of strange attractors  2200, which would include all the elements that constitute human behavior, including the number of emotions, universals of human behavior, etc., and MSC  250, which appears to be approximately the number of human cultural universals. These numbers perhaps would not surprise many scientists, but there is still some controversy among – primarily postmodernist – scholars in the humanities. For this reason, we should take a closer look at this step, at the issue of cultural universals, or human instincts. Only if humans have instincts can there be such a thing as an evolutionary approach to art and literature applicable to humans. The existence of such instincts could also explain the very content of our art and literature.

III. Two Individualisms – The Noetic Dangers of the Digital-Only World-View

2007-12-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

The exclusively digital approach to aesthetics, ethics, and politics is better known as postmodernism, pluralism, and multiculturalism. While this approach has been a necessary corrective to the analogical world view, if we take the digital view to its logical conclusion, and reject the analogical as a constituent part of the world, all it can do is create alienation – among different races, different cultures, between men and women, and, if we take Quine’s view that we never actually understand one another, among each and every individual. If we take what Quine says in a very limited way, he has a point, but an extreme view makes the mistake of thinking that if there is any noise – ambiguity – in communication, we cannot communicate; whereas information theory says we need noise if we are going to have any communication at all. An analogical view may lead us to collectivism, including communism, but an exclusively digital view leads to the alienation found in postmodern radical individualism. The consequence of this digital world view is postmodernists telling us we cannot understand one another. Men cannot understand women, and vice versa. Different races and cultures cannot understand each other, we cannot understand anything that happened in the past (this anti-historicism is related to the idea of breaking with the past, the consequences of which we have already investigated in our analysis of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and there is the suggestion that we cannot really understand each other. The consequence of this is an increasing fragmentation of society, creating warring factions (men vs. women, minorities vs. majorities, secular vs. religion), and increasing distrust among people. Many postmodern theorists have observed that one of the features of modern Western culture is its increasing fragmentation and alienation, a favorite theme of many Marxists. It is ironic that some of these same critics are the very people making the problem worse. If we cannot understand one another, we are incapable of projecting ourselves into another’s situation. While this is literally true in a factual sense, it is in another sense not true at all. We can and do have empathy for others, basing that empathy on related experiences. While I may not understand perfectly an intellectual woman’s complaint that most men do not take her seriously as a thinker, I do understand the sting of not being taken seriously, especially when I know I know more about a subject than the person who is not taking me seriously as a thinker. Only if we can place ourselves in another person’s situation can we develop the empathy needed to effect any sort of positive social change. Though most postmodernists would consider themselves Leftists – even Marxists – this rejection of empathy makes postmodernism act what they would typically characterize as extremely Right-wing, since they typically see the Right as being against free speech.

Studies have been done which show orangutans, a distant cousin, are capable of putting themselves into the minds of others. If food is placed out of reach of a caged orangutan, and a person is brought in with a bucket on his head and placed near the orangutan’s cage, without hesitation the orangutan will take the bucket off the person’s head, then physically point the person in the direction of the food. This shows the orangutan knows the person cannot see the food if the person has a bucket on his head. How could the orangutan know this if it could not project itself into the mind of the person with the bucket on his head? This is a cognitive feature only of the great apes, including humans, whose ability to do this developed even more with the advent of language. “One of the common ancestor species of all the living great apes and humans was the first in which individuals realized that others had viewpoints and knowledge different from their own, and could build up novel sequences of actions” (Richard W. Byrne, Tree of Origin, 169). This ability is why were are capable of telling stories – including fiction. To say we cannot (or should not) do this is to say we are (or should be) cognitively less complex than the other great apes. It is to place us on the cognitive level of monkeys. This attitude goes beyond being merely anti-human, to being anti-great ape. It is anti-language insofar as “Evolution of language would be impossible in a species in which individuals could not imagine that other individuals know things that they do not know themselves” (Byrne, 172). The consequence of this anti-theory of mind view for literature has been the creation of a shallow sort of minimalism that avoids letting the reader know about anything more than the actions of the characters, on this theory that we cannot know what others think – so the author should not bother to tell us what his characters think, since he cannot know what they think. If they think at all.

Postmodernism creates social ruptures, which means it is anti-social in nature. Barriers are put up between men and women. The radical individualism of postmodernism says there is an abyss of difference between men and women, while the collectivism inherent in the Franco-German individualist tradition, whose egalitarian individualism attempts to eliminate all difference, suggests there is no difference between men and women. Specifically, women have been told they should try to be more like men. This has created an identity crisis in many women. They are told by their culture (which has been influenced by the pro-masculinizing gender feminists) they should be one thing, and by their biology and psychology they should be something else. I fear American women will soon face a tragic crisis, one which can only be headed off if women are allowed by this culture to be women in the fullest sense, and not made into either men or relegated into some sort of submissive role, as we had in the past, and as we still find in many cultures around the world. Postmodernism, far from being a solution to this potential crisis, is only making the problem worse, in its own particular way. And gender feminism, by insisting that there are no fundamental differences in behavior between men and women, is only working to reinforce the prejudice that differences are inherently unequal – if not bad. Ironically, it is those feminists who perpetuate the belief that femininity is inferior. Despite what they think, it is not. American culture in particular is sorely lacking in femininity – not the cultural myths we once held about how women should act, but natural femininity, which can come about in a more inclusive, open culture – and this lack is primarily the fault of the gender feminists, who insist that men and women are fundamentally identical in behavior, that our genetic differences make no difference. This is creating the groundwork for a tragic situation, where women are pushed by culture to go beyond their own physis wihtout even trying to understand their physis (versus what we are told is their physis). One hopes we learn the outcome through works of literature, including plays and film, rather than within society itself.

This anti-social element is found not only in relations among men and women, but among races and cultures too. While I welcome the emphasis on multiculturalism, as it creates the potential for a much richer, more complex American (and world) culture, the way postmodernism practices it creates a number of problems. What, for example, are we to do with a culture that practices clitorectomy? Or oppresses women? Or practices genocide? Are we to just consider these a legitimate part of the rich tapestry of humanity? Postmodernism’s insistence that we cannot judge anyone – particularly other cultures – puts us in a serious dilemma in considering these situations. I think there are few out there who support genocide, but how can one come to say genocide is wrong if one does not make some sort of judgement, or insist there is some sort of universal we should be guided by? I asked Cynthia Haynes (a self-identified postmodernist) this question, and she told me the only thing she does not tolerate is intolerance. But isn’t the intolerance of intolerance itself a universalizing view? One assumes she (and other postmodernists) wishes everyone was intolerant of intolerance. But if one wishes for such an overarching view, one’s entire postmodern world view would collapse (of course, the very fact that postmodernism is a world view and, thus, a grand narrative, makes it collapse, imploded by its own hypocrisy). So it seems postmodern multiculturalism will not work. But I do not think we should return to a “melting pot” view either. Why could there not be a mixture of the two, maintaining cultural identity while at the same time integrating everyone into, for example, the American (or, better, world) culture? This view presumes, though, that there are more than two levels to society – the individual and the culture/state – which goes against the Franco-German philosophical tradition that has culminated in postmodernism. It is possible – I would go so far as to say preferable – that there be more than just the individual and her culture. Why can’t a person simultaneously be an individual, a member of a family (nuclear and extended), a member of a community, a member of a subculture, a member of some sort of organization (if not several), including churches, clubs, schools, etc., a member of an overarching culture, a citizen of a state, a citizen of a country, and a citizen of the world? If there are this many levels between an individual and the government, the government’s power over that individual is greatly weakened, and the influence of that government (and of any who wish to influence that government, the culture of a country through their influence on the government, etc.), is greatly weakened – which may explain why many pro-statist postmodernists oppose this view.

Aside from this, postmodernism’s anti-social view of humanity makes it very anti-human. Humans are a social species, as are all the species of great apes (even the apparently solitary orangutan will socialize when food is abundant), most monkeys, lions, elephants, dolphins, and wolves. A social species is different from a herd or schooling species, like antelope, sheep, or sardines, in that there is little to no bonding among the members of the herd. Individual members are less likely to come to the aid of unrelated or distantly related members of the herd, like social animals will. Social animals engage in much more complex behavior than herd animals. It seems postmodernists wish to make us less human by making us act more like herd than social animals.

In Individualism and Economic Order, F. A. Hayek points out the dangers found in the exclusively digital view – showing that it can and usually does lead to the analogical view (too fine a texture looks like a solid color). Hayek shows that taking the exclusively digital view leads to bad games (social systems, economic systems, government), since no information can be shared among players. A good game-system is one where communication – and, thus, community – is possible. Hayek suggests that there are two kinds of individualism, one based on rational philosophy, which started with Descartes and was further developed by Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and by the existentialists, including Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir (though I am sure the last three would object to being considered in the “rationalist” tradition, their ideas did not really deviate much from those of Kant), and which I will call Cartesian Individualism (which is also the digital-exclusive view), and the other based on the Scottish philosophical tradition of David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Locke, and further developed by Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton (which is the digital-analog agonal view). Cartesian Individualism is based on the idea that man is rational, while the Scottish tradition does not see man as being fully rational, but also, perhaps primarily, influenced by his drives and wants and needs of the moment. These quite different views give rise to quite different forms of individualism. Perhaps the best way of explaining the differences would be to put the two traditions of individualism side by side in a table showing what Hayek sees as the difference between the two traditions, and the consequences of each of these traditions:

* Scottish (Digital-Analog) Individualism

the individual is found within the social, leading to free markets

man is not always rational, or even capable of always being rational – man also has impulses and instincts

since man is not rational, he cannot design or plan something like a society or economy

the individual participates in the social (cooperates) through being selfish

“If left free, men will often achieve more than individual human reason could design or foresee” (11).

It is not necessary to find good men to run the society, meaning anyone can play

it is not necessary for us to become better than we already are, making it easy to enter the game to play it

freedom is granted to all

no one group never always wins, which keeps people playing

reason is seen “as an interpersonal process in which anyone’s contribution is tested and corrected by others” (15)

inherently unequal people are treated equally

inherent inequality allows diversity

hierarchical – intermediates encouraged

* Cartesian (Digital-Exclusive) Individualism

radical individualism, leading (ironically (?)) to socialism

man is rational and has no instincts and can always control his impulses

since man is rational, he can create through planning the ideal society or economy

individual vs. the social – i.e., selfishness vs. cooperation – therefore need coercion

“social processes can be made to serve human ends only if they are subjected to the control of individual human reason” (10)

only the best can or should run society and make economic decisions – few can play

men need to be improved (presumably made more rational) before a good economy or society can be created – hard to play

freedom granted only to the good and wise

the “good and wise,” “rational” rulers always win – no reason to play the game

reason found in the individual, especially in certain “good and wise” individuals

people are made equal in actuality – thus, have to arbitrarily assign tasks

only State and Individual, thus flattening society – intermediates suppressed

We can see in this comparison that the Scottish form of individualism, by being digital-analogical, provides us with a much broader, more inclusive set of game rules. Anybody can be involved in the social and economic games – making these systems more complex, containing as they do more constituent parts acting in coordination and cooperation. Man does not have to be “improved” for the kinds of systems that would be set up using Scottish principles as he does using Cartesian principles (historical examples of attempts to “improve” man to make him more suitable for “rationally” designed societies include the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the Terror of Revolutionary France, and the slaughters of millions in the Marxist states of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Cambodia, just to name a few). In the Cartesian view, there is only one rationality, but in the Scottish view, there are many rationalities, which can often come into conflict. In At War With Time, Craig Eisendrath points out that

The field in which we operate is our democratic society. The ideal democratic system includes, of course, the various levels of government, but it also encompasses every other organized part of society, including the neighborhood, family, workplace, political party, voluntary or nongovermnental organization, transnational corporation, Internet, and a variety of multilateral organizations. Operating within such a spectrum of responsibility progressively demands the most that individuals can give. Instead of requiring full mastery at the outset, this system establishes conditions under which human beings can achieve their full potential, through their participation, their education, and their receipt of the benefits which the system can produce. (277)

One can make a rational decision about an immediate individualistic concern, one about a long-term individualistic concern, one regarding one’s family, one for one’s social organizations (i.e., churches, schools, businesses), one about one’s city, county, state, and/or country, one about one’s friends, one about strangers, etc. – all of which could come into conflict (something could be rational for the individual, but not for the family, etc.). This recognizes that individual decisions can and often do effect and affect others through the different levels of society between the individual and the state.

Scottish philosophy gives us far more complex social game rules than does the (analog-exclusive) rationalist philosophical tradition. One may think the rationalist approach would allow a given individual’s influence to extend throughout a society and create a more interesting game, but what it actually does is flatten out society, making it less complex, less interactive. A digital-exclusive world view leads, ironically, to an analogical outcome. “All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation: no differently than a human community is a unity – as opposed to an atomistic anarchy; it is a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity” (Nietzsche WP 561). And Nietzsche’s perspectivism fits well into the Scottish philosophers’ opposition to the Cartesian view of the world, as

Nietzsche tells us that every interpretation and perspective is oriented toward the preservation and enhancement of a specific level of organization in life, from the individual to the group, the species, and life as a whole. Are the “subjects” of perspectivism, then, perhaps just these particular levels of life? In a sense, the answer is yes; for a particular perspective does represent the “point of view” of a particular type, group, culture, people, and so forth. Yet, once again, these perspectives are never encountered in isolation. That is, we never come across these perspectives independent of the individual human beings to whom they are attributed. And each individual cuts across all the various levels of life: human beings are individuals as well as members of communities, cultures, subcultures, races, classes, genders, nationalities, religions, political parties, and other groups. Thus, on the one hand, we always encounter perspectives within individual subjects, while, on the other hand, individual subjects are aggregates of these perspectives and their forms of life. (Christoph Cox, 130)

The postmodernists have taken up Nietzsche’s idea of perspectivism to further justify Cartesian individualism – but as we can see here, Nietzsche’s notion of perspectivism (“Insight: all estimation of value involves a certain perspective: that of the maintenance of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture” (WP 259).) is much closer to the Scottish view of individualism than it is to the Cartesian view.

If we take the Scottish view that a person’s knowledge and interests are limited, making our actions limited to a tiny sphere of influence – our family and friends, our churches and schools and businesses, the intermediate social groups the rationalists suppress and the Scottish encourage – we see a highly complex society emerging, with the individual influencing the small social groups, the small social groups influencing the individual, and both interacting to influence larger social groups, which themselves feed back to the smaller groups. We have a series of nested hierarchies where each person acts as a digital element, acting in a digital-analogical way through the communication of information to other digital elements to create smaller cultural subsystems – the digital elements – of the larger culture. The same individual can have an effect on a school, a church, a business, and a local government, each of which will have larger effects on society at large. More people have more influence over society. And man does not have to be “improved” because the worst among us can be canceled out by the best. In what other country than the United States and other Western-style democratic republics does it really not matter who the President or Prime Minister is, since any mischief the American President may want to make is more often than not counterbalanced by two houses of Congress, a Supreme Court, and the voters’ opinions (these same voters who can vote the President out after four years if worse comes to worse, or vote in a different party during midterm elections)? These principles, upon which the free market is based, are “an effective way of making man take part in a process more complex and extended than he could comprehend” (Hayek, 14-5). One does not have to have perfect knowledge to participate. One can participate while having a considerable amount of uncertainty, and still do well. Which is good, since no man is omniscient. We can reduce uncertainty through education, increasing our own individual knowledge, but we will still be left with a plethora of things which we will never have the time to learn.

There needs to be a way for individuals, with their limited information, knowledge, etc., to enter into a highly complex game, to be able to participate in the game itself. The way to allow someone into a highly complex game is by simply not having barriers to their entering and playing the game in the first place. And, if you do choose to play, and to take large risks while playing, you should be able to reap a correspondingly larger reward. To have a good game,

any workable individualist order must be so framed not only so that the relative remunerations the individual can expect from the different uses of his abilities and resources correspond to the relative utility of the result of his efforts to others but also that these remunerations correspond to the objective results of his efforts rather than to their subjective merits. (21)

And the game must not be constructed of iron-clad laws, but of more flexible rules (though not too flexible, as those of pragmatism, nor too rigid, such as those of absolute principles, both of which, as opposed to the idea of general principles, would be unable to create a system, since principles are the strange attractors, and neither pragmatism nor iron-clad absolutes provide any sort of attractor). These are also good guidelines for creating works of art and literature, and for writing works of philosophy, theory, and criticism.

An example of good game rules are our “traditions and conventions . . . [which] evolve in a free society and . . . , without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally deserved rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree” (Hayek, 23). Most social rules should be those agreed upon and practiced by most of the people most of the time, enforced by subtle social pressures, not the use and threat of physical force. “In the social sciences the things are what people think they are. Money is money, a word is a word, a cosmetic is a cosmetic, if and because somebody thinks they are” (Hayek 60). They are rules because we agree they are – they are socially constructed. With these kinds of rules, those we find in the free market, we have various choices – while with orders or iron-clad laws, we get no real choices. This is what Nietzsche is getting at in “On Truth and Lies” when he says words are metaphors we have forgotten are metaphors, not Truth (words are not congruent with things – they are not attached to things through iron clad laws). Any choice is better than none. “It is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one” (Hayek 24).

A word of caution: just because the world has a socially constructed element, it does not follow that all the world is socially constructed. To claim it is brings us to the problems with pragmatism, where no system at all can be constructed. Hayek says pragmatism is “the preference for proceeding from particular instance to particular instance,” where the rule-maker “decides each question “on its merits””(1). With pragmatism, expediency and compromise lead us “to a system in which order is created by direct commands” (1). “Without principles we drift,” and we are led “to a state of affairs which nobody wanted” (2). Pragmatism makes it possible to change the rules with each move in the game – one could imagine some game master watching a game being played between two people, and changing the rules whenever he wished. This would lead to the game players in each move trying to gain the game master’s favor. They would end up trying to bribe the game master rather than paying attention to playing the game at hand. If this sounds like how too much business is conducted, with the government as the game master, we can see why. How much money do businesses waste trying to influence “pragmatic” government officials? With the use of basic principles, everyone is clear what the rules are and that they cannot – or, at the very least, are very difficult to – change. The game players concentrate on the playing of the game itself rather than coming up with strategies to influence some game master. With the use of general principles, the game master can all but be done away with.

As I have shown throughout this work, there are a set of “basic principles” as such that are not socially constructed, a reality that exists even if we are not around to observe it which we have to deal with (though our attitude toward it, meaning our perspectives on it, are certainly socially constructed and thus inherited and modified based upon that inheritance). This is physis. On this world we have increasingly superimposed, with the introduction of such technologies as money and writing, a socially constructed reality. This is nomos. This social reality, these social facts “are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other peoples’ intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind” (75). We have this socially constructed reality because “we all constantly act on the assumption that we can . . . interpret other people’s actions on the analogy of our own mind and that in the great majority of instances this procedure works. The trouble is that we can never be sure” (64). Which is what makes it all a game in the first place. But if we want this socially-constructed reality to work best, we need to structure it scalarly as the rest of the world is structured – as a complex, dynamic emergent system. Physis, logos, nomos unified, self-similar, in agon.

Kundera and Hayek have given us strong evidence against taking an analog-exclusive (unity-only) or a digital-exclusive (pluralist-only) view. Hayek gives an alternative in his argument for a combination of digital and analog, of individual and social – and even of a naturalistic and a socially constructed reality – that create a hierarchy of social interactions. What he argues for is a social-economic system that is in fact a system – a dissipative-structure system scalarly similar to every other system found in the universe, with the principles/game rules as the strange attractors of that system. It is a social system that reflects Hutcheson’s definition of beauty – which should not be surprising. “Unity in plurality is a cultural outlook that fosters friendship and avoids wars and armed conflicts. It is an essentially peaceful worldview” (Fuchs, 45).

II. Angels and Demons – The Noetic Dangers of the Analog-Only World-View

2007-12-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera gives an excellent explanation of the tragic aesthetic-ethical-political ramifications of having an analogical view of the world, seeing the world as either continuous meaning or continuous nihilism, in his discussion of the different forms of laughter, demonic and angelic, in “Part 3 – The Angels, Chapter 4 (On Two Kinds of Laughter)”, which simply must be quoted at length to be fully understood:

To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.
Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world.
Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils . . . but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels’ power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils’ reign), we could not live either.
Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things . . ., make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).
The first time an angel heard the devil’s laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil’s laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range . . . , but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil’s laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.
Thus the angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, but each one’s noise expressed the absolute opposite of the other’s. And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.
Laughable laughter is disastrous. Even so, the angels have gained something from it. They have tricked us with a semantic imposture. Their imitation of laughter and (the devil’s) original laughter are both called by the same name. Nowadays we don’t even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other (85-87).

Refer to “angel” as “Apollo” and “devil” as “Dionysus,” and one can see (if one did not already see) the connection between this idea and Nietzsche’s idea of physis being an agonal combination of Apollonian form and Dionysian formlessness. To be more accurate, the angelic are those who give preference to the Apollonian, neglecting the Dionysian, while the demonic are those who give preference to the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian. Each is trying to create an analogical world – the angels are trying to create a world of pure, featureless meaning, while the demons are trying to create a world of pure, featureless nihilism. Please note Kundera speaks of angels and the devil – not of God. A careful study of the Hebrew of Job shows that God and the adversary are referred to as being the same (God actually inquirers of himself about why Job loves Him). Perhaps, then, God is both Apollonian and Dionysian – physis, or Heraclitus’ logos, which is nomos as physis, the two mapped on each other without nomos extending itself beyond physis (In the beginning was the Logos – John 1:1).

In Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Eagleton has a chapter titled “Demons,” where he discusses Kundera’s idea of the demonic. Eagleton is a Marxist, which should put him on the side of the Marxist ethical-analogical Angels, but we find him criticizing the left’s “revolt against . . . brutal hierarchies by keeling spectacularly over into nihilism. The liberal belief in the sympathetic self, pressed too far, becomes an ‘Oriental’ scepticism of the very concept of selfhood. Leveling of this kind . . . is akin to what Milan Kundera calls the demonic” (198). We again hear echos of the Dionysian in Eagleton’s reference to the ‘Oriental,’ since Dionysus came to Greece from the East. “The demonic, or annihilating desire, is indifferent to the sensuous particular, which it seizes upon only to hollow out and surge on to the next” (247) – which one can see in Nietszche’s Twilight of the Idols, or, Doing Philosophy With a Hammer, – doing philosophy with a tuning fork, showing the hollowness of received ideas. But one does not leave the world hollowed-out. The Dionysian is only half of physis – or, if we accept that the Apollonian is itself divided up as we divided it up in chapter 2, the Dionysian is only the lowest fourth of physis.

Echoing Kundera, Eagleton points out that, “revolted by the over-stuffed meaning of the angelic, the demonic keels over into nihilism, leveling all values to an amorphous shit” (261). If the angels go too far with meaning, creating a shitless world of kitsch (which Kundera discusses at length in both The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Art of the Novel), the demons go too far in insisting that everything is nothing but shit.

In much of his fiction, Milan Kundera sees the angelic as a bland, ‘shitless’ discourse of wide-eyed idealism and high-sounding sentiment. The angelic is full of moralistic rhetoric and edifying kitsch, allergic to doubt or irony. The angelic for Kundera are those who troop merrily forward into the future shouting ‘Long live life!’, all grins and cheers, beaming and cart-wheeling. (Eagleton, 258)

The angels are, for Kundera, those who would create utopia – the Communists in particular. “Throughout the world the angels had occupied all positions of authority, all the general staffs, had taken over the left and the right, the Arabs and the Jews, and Russian generals and the Russian dissidents” (Kundera, BLF, 99-100), whose “hygienic disavowal of the unacceptable,” things that are “negative, ironic, debunking or unhygienic” (Schmidt, 259), lead directly to the gulag, especially among those who have within them a bit of demonic laughter, meaning those who wish to be in the world as a child playing. For the angelic, meaning is everywhere, in every thing. Eagleton points out that

Kundera also sees the angelic as a sphere in which there is too much meaning rather than too little. The kingdom of the angels is one in which everything is instantly, oppressively meaningful, in which no shadow of ambiguity can be tolerated. It is the up-beat world of official ideology, in which language comes to assume an authoritarian over-ripeness and everything is drearily legible and transparent. Kundera is thinking here mostly of the neo-Stalinism with which he grew up. Yet this world in which everything is glaringly on view, flattened and two-dimensional, is also one awash with rumour and innuendo, tell-tale traces, whispered treacheries. Nothing is ever quite what it appears to be, and calls for a constant labour of decipherment. (259)

The overly-angelic, by being overly ethical and thus purely analogical, manages to turn itself into the demonic. This is why angelic laughter is indistinguishable from demonic laughter.

In life, as in art, one can have so much fine detail that what you end up with is seeing nothing. It is this nothing that the demonic is about: “If the angelic is too solemn about meaning, the demonic is too cynical” (Eagleton, 259). We can see this historically if we accept Kundera’s premise that the Communists were angelic, and Eagleton’s premise in the chapter on Demons that the Nazis were demonic, insofar as both were utopian and socialistic, albeit one international, the other national, and in Eagleton’s suggestion that the capitalist United States is angelic (I do think Eagleton is overstating things more than a bit here, but I would agree to include most conservative culture critics, such as former New York mayor Giuliani, in this category), and the postmodernists/poststructuralists (including most leftist/avant garde artists and critics – the demonic is about seeing the world as shit, and much postmodern art reflects this view) are demonic, while both encourage rapid change. Both sides, the angelic and the demonic, are far too serious for the playful, novelistic Kundera. Not everything can have meaning – we cannot remember everything. Nor does nothing have meaning – we cannot (and should not) constantly forget everything. We have to forget the small things so we can remember those things that should have meaning for it. In order to have any meaning at all, not everything can have meaning.

If meaning is found everywhere, in every little thing, then the very word “meaning” itself loses meaning – the overly angelic leads us once again into the demonic. An analog world is featureless. But “things are more complicated than that.” And works of art and literature should be. To be able to see the details in something, there has to be space between the details, between the objects, for there to be any kind of individuality at all. To have Apollonian individuality (the “something” in Heidegger’s question in Introduction to Metaphysics, or the digital world I have been discussing), one has to simultaneously agonally have the Dionysian, or “nothing,” allowing things to be separated out, to dissolve into and emerge out of. This continuous flux, between meaning and meaninglessness, nonetheless allows us to keep laughing, since things we thought were meaningful can still turn out to be meaningless (this is demonic laughter), while at the same time, we can take apparently meaningless things or experiences, and fill them with meaning (bringing us angelic laughter). The former is what we get with comedy – the latter is what we get with satire. Of course, what brings laughter to some can be tragic for others – especially if something once considered extremely valuable and meaningful turns out to have no value or meaning whatsoever. It very much depends on your attitude toward the Apollonian element of physis, whether or not you are one of the angelic (where dissolving any of Apollonian physis into the Dionysian is tragic), or, instead, of a more novelistic, playful mindset (Kundera himself provides an example of this world view), where the Appolonian dissolves into and emerges from the Dionysian in tragic-comic art, such as the novel.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera investigates the tragic situation created by those who take the most extreme sides regarding the “true nature” of physis, the angelic and the demonic, further expanding on this idea first formulated by Nietzsche. Kundera, being a novelist, does not come to any sort of “conclusion” regarding the tragic nature of physis and our relations with it any more than Nietzsche had – he instead, and in Nietzsche’s spirit, only deepened the discussion in ways exemplified by his characters and the fictional and historical situations he develops. The Dionysian is problematized as much as is the Apollonian. The angelic may impose meaning on too many things, but Kundera’s complaints in his novel about the perpetual presence of music wherever one goes – when shopping, eating out, etc. – show that the Dionysian is also beginning to make itself felt a little too strongly. We remain under the constant and more immediate threat of dissolution into the Dionysian – and this can be just as dangerous (as Eagleton points out with the Nazi’s insistence on the exclusively Dionysian) as perpetually insisting on the Apollonian – of insisting that the world is exclusively analog. These are the ramifications of the old view of “universalism,” a view I oppose on the grounds that it is not an accurate view of the world, and that it was never really properly universal in the first place – since not everyone in the world should act like Europeans of the Modern Era.

The universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in the universal. We are all human beings but the fact of our being human does not manifest itself in its abstraction but in the particularity of real living human beings of different climes and races. We can talk of the human capacity for languages but that capacity manifests itself in real concrete languages as spoken by different peoples of the earth. In other words, we realise language as a universal human phenomenon not in its abstract universality but in its particularity as the different languages of the earth. (Ngg Wa Thiong’o, 26)
If we are going to adopt a universalism, it should be something more like a natural classicism, founded in what is universal in every culture, past and present.

Chapter 3: A Digital-Analog Universe: I. A Likely Story II – Through A Glass, Darkly

2007-12-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

Complex dynamic dissipative systems consist of discrete elements acting in a continuous fashion through parallel processing. As systems containing discrete elements, they are digital (from the Latin digitus, for finger – that is, countable and separable, connected to the idea of a digit as a number). As continuous systems, they are analog (from “analogous,” alike; Greek ana, “complete” and logos “explanation”, “collection”, “discourse”, or “account”). We again have an agonal unity of opposites, a complete account simultaneously explainable only as parts, giving rise to greater complexity in the dynamic system arising out of their interaction. It is important to understand that the world is neither merely digital/fragmented nor merely analog/continuous in order to both have a clearer, more accurate understanding of the scientifically explainable parts of the world, and for aesthetic, ethical, and political reasons. There are important consequences for our aesthetics, ethics, and politics if we hold to this (or any) particular (meta)physical view.

If the world is merely digital, the parts cannot interact. If the world is merely analog, it is completely indistinct. If it is both simultaneously – analog-unified and digital-plural – it has communication, coordination, cooperation, and co-action among its parts. It has unity in variety, and is thus beautiful. But the question still remains as to whether or not the world really is beautiful in this way. So let us reconsider our likely story in these terms, ending this chapter by expanding it into the noetic realm of the arts and humanities.

Complex dynamic dissipative systems have the following features: they consist of discrete components which provide information to each other to communicate as they engage in Boolean (on/off, and/or) parallel processing, continually updating each other, creating a continuous system with more complex emergent properties than are discernable from understanding the parts of the system alone (S. Kauffman). On the level of quantum physics, packets of energy densify to high frequencies to interact with each other in more complex ways. Every interaction with its environment is a calculation – the packets of energy process the information in parallel (they do not merely take turns, as that would definitely take too long, considering the amount of matter and energy in the universe). Energy-matter would act Boolean – on/off, and/or – to give rise to atoms and other particles. One could imagine matter as being “on” and energy as being “off” – with every interaction, matter and matter, energy and energy, and matter and energy, having their own binomial choices (attraction/repulsion, amplification/dampening, etc.).

This approach can be applied to the level of chemistry, with each atom as parallel-processor and binomial (ions are either positive or negative, van der Waals forces act in and/or fashion). And Stuart Kauffman, in The Origins of Order, goes into great detail on the level of biology. Each biochemical is a parallel processor communicating with other biochemicals acting in parallel to create biochemical systems/cycles, which act in communicative parallel to keep each cell alive, which act in communicative parallel in multicellular organisms to create tissues and organs, which act in communicative parallel to keep the organism as a whole alive, which acts in communicative parallel with other organisms to create ecosystems. And each obeys the rules of its own emergent games. Thinking – and the minding function of the brain – is the consequence of the communicative parallel processing of the neurons of the brain. The more neurons, and the more complex the interactions and interconnections of those neurons, the more complex the minding of that brain will be. Human brains act in communicative parallel to create culture, technology, and the arts and humanities. Each level consists of distinct, discrete parts less complex than the emergent system they are a part of, and each system is the continuous processing of those parts in communicative parallel. If this were not the case, we would either have an analogical perfect symmetry, or a digital discrete world incapable of creating systems. “The impact, the influence of one atom upon another is likewise something which presupposes sensation. Something which is intrinsically alien can have no effect upon anything else. . . . Whether larger of smaller, these sensation complexes would be called “will”” (Nietzsche, “The Philosopher”, PT 96). Nietzsche’s “will” is what we would now call “strange attractors.” The consequences of this digital-analog view are not just profound for a scientific view of the world. As Nietzsche pointed out,

Individuals are the bridges upon which becoming depends. All qualities are originally only solitary activities, which are then frequently repeated in similar situations and finally become habits. The entire being of an individual takes part in every activity. Everything in an individual, right down to the smallest cells, is individual – which means that it has a part in all the individual’s experiences and past. Hence the possibility of procreation. (“The Philosopher,” PT 153)

Because the world is scalar, this applies to noetic concerns too. Politically this means we should be both communitarian and libertarian – personally communitarian and politically libertarian, desiring and working for community without wanting or trying to force people to do things.