Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

From: L. Manning Vines <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun Nov 10 2002 - 18:58:30 EST

Jim said:
<< I've found that what is considered a "great idea" tends to change
between different times and cultures. I'd say the change is usually one in
emphasis, and some cultures even tend to harp on one or two to the exclusion
of others. For example, "humility" is a virtue in, say, some Christian era
literature, but I don't see a hint of that valuation in the Odyssey (I could
be missing something, and this is just one example). >>

Different cultures shift in usually subtle ways their emphases, but
the very being of humanity has not changed sensibly since we began to write.
Socrates the Athenian asks Meno the Thessalian for a definition of virtue.
He gives one that Socrates doesn't agree with. But by asking the right
questions, by poking Meno in the right ways, Meno comes to recognize
that he was wrong, that he doesn't agree with his own stated opinion.
And I, more than two millennia later, can follow the argument and sense
what Socrates is doing, sense where's he going. Socrates and Meno and
even I share some understanding, however basic, of human virtue, and
through conversation can whittle away our misunderstandings of
ourselves and each other. Our very different cultures, my very different
time, does not appear to cause a substantial obstacle. And when
Aristotle ponders virtue in the Nichomachean Ethics, he sounds
exactly right to me, despite my growing up in a Christian culture that
values humility.

And besides all this, humility in the Christian tradition seems to be a
manifestation of piety. Pre-Christian Virgil wrote of "pious Aeneus."
Virgil has even been called an implicit Christian (so has Socrates,
actually). Piety, in various manifestations, appears in the earliest of
literature in the most varied cultures.

Some things do shift as you say, but they -- by definition -- are not what I
meant by "great ideas." These are those that do not shift, because they are
inseparable from humanity. Something of Homer is certainly lost in the
translation (cultural as well as linguistic); but something of him will
resonate with men so long as men they are. And this latter something is
what I have no doubt resonated the same with Homer himself. I can't imagine
it to be anything less than this that has kept him in print for nearly three
millennia while countless others have come and gone.

And:
<< Relatively few literary texts are devoted to telling people what they
should believe is right and wrong (in terms of abstract ethical judgments,
not specific applications of ethical judgments). The vast majority assume a
right and wrong and specific value system and assume their readers will read
the work with that in mind.

It is these Assumptions that we just can't take for granted -- we don't
necessarily always share them, and they do affect how we read.>>

I agree. But as you and John have appealed to experience, I here can only
appeal to experience in saying that the Greatest books -- I'm not quite
thinking of Salinger or Vonnegut, no disrespect intended -- tell the
sensitive
reader how they want to be read. The moral or ethical system of the
sensitive reader need not be anything at all like Homer's for him to sense
where Homer's sympathy lies, to see where it is an error to impose one's own
value system, to see where a different one informs the book.

Yes, I can almost hear already the bitter rebuttals: and no, we can't be
certain. But neither are we utterly blind to it.

And:
<< I don't know that this is really applicable to Shakespeare -- he wrote
for performance, had to please actors and directors, some lines were changed
in rehearsal, I suspect (we know we have different texts of "Hamlet"), and
I'm pretty sure he never envisioned his works being published in a mass
produced book. So, in a sense, every time we read Shakespeare, we don't
approach his work the way he envisioned we would. >>

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What is "this"? I can think of a few possibilities. Might one of them be
the poem?

The early- and pre-moderns are often accused of being simple. When people
don't go that far, they often accuse them of failing to see something that
is abundantly clear to US. I don't know how a close reading of, say,
Shakespeare's Sonnets can bear this out. I think Shakespeare knew a little
bit more than he's being given credit for, here. To put it another way, I
suspect very strongly that Shakespeare knew that he was Shakespeare. Maybe
not all along, granted, but I think he figured it out.

And:
<<
> I believe that when Socrates says that yesterday he went down to the
> Piraeus, it's always true, and he's always talking to me.

No, he's _never_ talking to you. He never even considered you, or was ever
capable of imagining you, or that his words would endure for so long. He
_spoke_ for his audience alone -- that was his sole intention (assuming
Socrates actually said these words and they weren't an invention of
Plato's). Is your reading of his words, then, according to his intent, when
he never intended an audience such as yourself? >>

I didn't actually mean, of course, that he had my name and face in mind. Of
course, you already knew that. And I have very little doubt that these
words were, indeed, invented by Plato.

I meant a different kind of true. A kind, I think, that you are neglecting
in this conversation.

Plato wrote the words, and my very imperfect understanding of the text is
enough for me to suspect very strongly that, contrary to what you say, Plato
wrote them for an audience quite exactly like me. Not with my name or
features or language or Internet-access, of course, but quite exactly like
me in a much more important way than these trifles.

And insofar as this is so, the words are always true.

And:
<< No -- again, I said I benefited from older criticism, but "not
necessarily in ways the author intended me to benefit." I benefit from it
as revealing of the attitudes in the author's culture, but not as personally
illuminating to me for the work.

The example from Shakespeare's "Othello" illustrates this. >>

Then I still say that your suggestion -- that no criticism is good for more
than fifty years -- is false. Your example for Othello cannot be taken as
an indication of the whole, or even of the majority. Criticism that is
hundreds and even thousands of years old can still be personally
illuminating. I say this because such old criticism has illuminated books
for me. A citation of bad criticism from the 19th century doesn't
invalidate this.

And:
<< Actually, there have been experiments conducted with computer generated
modern
free verse that have yielded some pretty interesting results.

I think it's significant that we're talking Free Verse and not extended
narrative. I'm pretty sure there are programs out there that can write
narrative as well.

If this feels obscene to you, I agree. >>

"Interesting" results, maybe, but not good ones. It feels obscene to you
because it's absurd.

If you know of some work to this end that I am ignorant of, I would be very
happy to hear of it. I spent several years enthralled with programming and
theory, and pursued AI and such things quite ardently. I know of some such
things as you say, but without exception the signal-to-noise ratio renders
the whole project worthless. One must wade through hundreds or even
thousands of randomly-generated and utterly insensible haiku before finding
one that is even distantly comprehensible. Even then it's more obscure and
empty than the weirdest of its man-made counterparts. (I use the example of
haiku because its rigid and very brief form is easier for a computer to
handle than any alternative)

In the best situations, the sentences can make sense for the same reasons
that "mad libs" can make sense. But taken together, they are nonetheless
empty.

And:
<<
> A book IS made up of paper and ink. And it seems hard to argue that a
book
> on the shelf is the same as a book being read. But it seems unforgivably
> reductive to say so plainly that a book is paper and ink. It takes
> something much more than that to transform so magically when someone takes
> it off the shelf.

It takes a reader :). >>

It takes much more than a reader. If a reader were all it took, the
computer-generated gobbledy-gook would be in no way inferior.

And:
<< Language is an inherently slippery thing. Words change meaning over
time. Even worse, they keep the same meaning but carry different, unspoken,
connotations. >>

I, of course, must agree. But I think it is far more likely that a shift in
meaning or tone will render a text baffling or insensible than that it would
merely change the meaning to another wholly unrelated but still equally
profound one.

And:
<< I honestly didn't consider Tim's reading until he explained it to me,
but once he did, it made perfect sense.

How do you explain this? The knowledge was in my head but not in my
immediate consciousness? We could continue to discuss and possibly come to
a point of agreement, yes, but it's more important to this conversation to
note that, initially, our different experiences led to different readings.

See, when I'm reading Shakespeare, I can't argue or discuss with him to get
to a single meaning. >>

True, but you CAN argue and discuss him with Tim. And just as in this other
case, Tim can show you a different way of seeing it that makes clear to you
that you had previously misread (or at least that suggests that you might
have misread, making you less sure of what you thought).

And:
<< Freud was as dismissive of religious texts as you say I am about his
texts -- what do you think of him now? >>

If what you say is true, that he probably wasn't a great reader of religious
texts.

And:
<< I recognize Freud's genius (and have said so on this list), recognize his
lasting status as the father of modern psychology (and have said so on this
list), and recognize the explanatory power of his theories (and have said so
on this list). >>

I don't recall seeing any of these. Whenever you said things like these
about Freud, I probably didn't remember because my knowledge of Freud is
very limited and I thus kept right on reading and didn't react in a way to
make the sentences memorable to myself. It's when you've sounded brazenly
dismissive that I've quite involuntarily cringed (with the "right" or
without it).

And:
<< I don't think that's very realistic for an Intro to Philosophy course,
esp. at a community college or as a lower division 4 year university course.
That's a Plato class, not an Intro to Phil class. Students don't need _all_
of Plato and do need to learn about other philosophers. Some of these
people will take Philosophy only at the Intro To level -- it would be
cheating them to have them only read Plato and not touch Aristotle,
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc. >>

I agree. But it does seem to me that without a very firm encounter with,
say, the Meno, one is at a great disadvantage in all further study of
philosophy.

Hyperbole though it is, it does not seem in any way absurd to me when it is
said that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato.

In any case, I was really meaning only to endorse the reading of original
and great books by students, rather than their listening to explanations
from Jay Q. GraduateStudent. If they won't understand anything of the book,
the explanation is worthless to them anyway.

And:
<< I think you'll find your University has admissions requirements much
more exclusive than the local community college. >>

(It's not a university, but a single college, and I only point out the minor
distinction because St. John's University is an entirely different and
entirely dissimilar institution.)

What you say is true because the local community college has essentially no
admissions requirements. But I have classes with National Merit Scholars
and former D-students alike. The primary admission requirement is the
readiness (as judged by the admissions people) to benefit from the Program,
and the primary vehicle for determining this is a series of essays
(significantly more than required at most institutions).

Very close to the premise of the institution is that any sincere and
diligent person who has the capacity to translate sufficiently from words to
ideas and ideas to words can benefit, to varying degrees, from this approach
to education.

And:
<< > If ten sentences are arranged one after another into a paragraph, and
some
> meaning is extracted from that paragraph as a whole, that meaning was
> intended by the paragraph's author. If we assemble randomly-generated
> grammatically-valid sentences all day, the number that will have sensible
> meaning will demonstrate this to us Linguistic substance is too complex to
> routinely be anything but deliberate.
>

If it's that complex, Robbie, isn't it possible that it can generate
meanings beyond the two or three or five or ten initially envisioned by the
author? >>

I didn't mean complex to resemble magical. The complexity of the residence
of significant meaning in language indicates to me that its wholly
unintentional existence is improbable.

And:
<<
> [. . .] it appeared to me that some of
> my comments should be less surprising coming from me than from someone who
> is more of a modernist.
>

Robbie, not all classicists feel the same way. Barthes wrote a good bit in
this
field, to use one example. Derrida used Plato and others. >>

I didn't mean to suggest that all classicists did.

Then:
<<
> You're grasping for straws, Jim. I deleted it in the quotation because it
> was not relevant to what I was doing with the quotation. I do not need to
> delete it to defend my reading.
>
> "The degree of sensibility is so great that . . ."
> "The degree of sensibility is so great that I believe it . . ."
> "The degree of sensibility is so great that I believe it anyway."
>

The grammar of the sentence is the same, yes, because the word "anyway"
doesn't
affect the grammatical structure. "Anyway" is a disclaimer, Robbie. How
else
am I supposed to understand it? What does the presence of that disclaimer
signify? >>

You understood it exactly right. That wasn't the issue. You pointed out --
correctly -- that the "anyway" means that I believe in spite of some
previously specified thing. You were exactly and precisely right about
that.

But you then asked me why I believe it, when the sentence itself -- the very
one you quoted in your original response -- answered that question plainly.
As I said before, it would have made sense to ask me to elaborate, or to
explain what's so convincing about the thing I find convincing.

But the question you asked betrayed a misunderstanding of what I said.
That's perfectly okay, but it's not okay then to insist continually that _I_
made the mistake or to insist that this is evidence that authorial intent is
invisible or irrelevant.

Then:
<<
> This means that you cannot rightfully
> treat me like a child or an imbecile, that you cannot condescend to me or
> pull rank. This is precisely what it appears you keep trying to do, to me
> and to others you disagree with on this list.

Other people can speak for themselves -- a bit presumptious of you to do
this
for them.

I haven't treated you, at any point, like a "child or imbecile" in my
opinion.>>

Other people HAVE spoken for themselves, on-list and off. Somewhere on my
harddrive, in a great mess of old bananafish-related messages (I seldom
delete anything but spam) I still have I'm sure nearly half a dozen messages
from different people on the list (some now gone) concerning an argument we
were in nearly three years ago, all telling me, in different words, "Don't
let Jim get to you."

I do believe that where we have disagreed you have been demeaning to me,
over several years, and I'm not, in case you're suggesting it, the only one
to have noticed.

And finally:
<< Robbie, you should listen to yourself sometimes too :). [. . .]
Honestly, the two people here who have taken issue with my "condescension"
can be pretty condescending themselves sometimes. [. . .] I'm sorry you feel
this way. Again, if I sound this way to you, this is partly, I know, my
fault (I know what I'm like).

But I think it's partly what I'm responding to as well. >>

I am sincerely sorry if I've ever been rude to you unprovoked. But I do
think that where I've been rude to you I have at least usually been
provoked.

-robbie
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Sun Nov 10 19:00:06 2002

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sun Aug 10 2003 - 21:52:10 EDT