Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

From: L. Manning Vines <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 01:59:53 EST

Jim said: "What exactly do you mean by 'the very substance'? See, I think
part of our disagreement has to do with what we mean by 'interpreting' a
text. Again, I believe you can understand Achilles' rage, but does that
mean you understand the entire Iliad? I believe we can both understand,
say, Hamlet's distrust of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, but does that mean we
understand 'Hamlet'?

"What is this 'very substance' what you're talking about?"

It's hard to define, of course, but I know it when I see it. It depends to
some degree on the specific text in question, too. I think in general it's
something big, something human, something beautiful, something important
enough for men (in any time or culture) to be concerned with. With certain
books by certain authors, there can be several things, sometimes very
different and hardly related, which can all apply. Whether a girl in a
short story has a certain surname is not the very substance. Whether
Shakespeare was a royalist is not the very substance.

When reading Hamlet, madness and being seem to be pretty important. Other
things too, no doubt. Shakespeare is Damn Good.

This is probably largely because I'm at a school where nearly every class
begins with an "opening question" about a book, which leads into discussion,
but when reading books I try to ask myself questions about them. Some
questions are harder to find than others, and some seem to be plainly and
inescapably suggested by the author when we're sensitive in the right ways.
Some questions seem to get down to the very heart of a book, seem to shed
light on the book, and nearly every part of the book seems to say something
about them. These are the ones that are most important to me, that seem to
involve the "very substance" and which are far too serious and complex and
profound to have been absent from the author. The concerns that these
questions face are the ones that Great authors write about, and they are
unchanged after millennia.

Certainly the details are interesting and worthwhile to study and research.
If I didn't think so I wouldn't have spent thousands of hours (and counting)
studying dead languages. But it seems to me that the most worthwhile and
important things in literature are timeless. So long as men can breath or
eyes can see, so long will Shakespeare be read and loved; and, yes,
understood -- not entirely and with certainty, but understood as men
understand things, which is given to fumbling and mistakes and uncertainty.
No cultural or historical research is necessary for this, any more than
historical or cultural research is necessary to understand the very stuff we
define ourselves by.

It is important to say, too, that I never said that I understand the Iliad
entirely. Nor do I understand rage entirely, but the Iliad helps me
understand rage without any historical or cultural research. What Homer has
to say about rage, whether we with our Christian morals agree with it or
not, stands quite outside of time and culture, because it is tied to the
very stuff of humanity. And by reading Homer, unaided by that research, we
can hear Homer -- Living Breathing Singing Homer! -- talking to us about
rage.

This, in the plainest and simplest words, is all I mean to say in this
conversation.

You went on to say: "In a very real, very practical sense, it always is just
all up to the reader, in that the reader is generally left alone with the
text when he/she is reading it - -- the author isn't sitting at his/her
shoulder saying, 'this is what I meant by that.'

"If you counter, of course the author is, through the text -- you'd just be
begging the question again."

I still don't follow this "begging the question" argument. An author
produced the text that the reader reads, just as I produce my sentences in
conversation. The reader can try to figure out what the author MEANS by
those words by reading them carefully, just as an interlocutor can try to
figure out what I MEAN by those words in conversation. Shakespeare is not
there to smooth out misunderstandings in Hamlet like I am in conversation,
but thankfully, Shakespeare was much more thoughtful and careful than I am
(not to mention his staggering, breath-taking brilliance).

There are still misunderstandings with Shakespeare, but see below:

"But you'll still say there are 'bad' readings (as you do below). This
means you have to appeal to something _outside the text itself_ in order to
mediate between contradictory readings."

My agreement that there are bad readings does not require appeal to
extra-textual authorities. It appeals to the text. Bad readings can be
argued against on textual grounds. If they seem ridiculous and absurd
despite the difficulty in finding textual grounds to argue against them, it
is usually because they seem to us childish or simple or unworthy of the
quality of mind that obviously produced the text.

And: "These judgments exist outside the text -- a society that believes it's
always wrong for a young girl to go against the will of her father will
produce this kind of reading. And legitimately. A society that doesn't
take that for granted will produce other readings. I suspect Shakespeare
was more on Desdemona's side than Iago's or Othello's. I can't begin to
prove it. But, again, these contradictory readings are all equally in
there -- depending on what you bring to the text to begin with."

If the judgments exist outside the text, then the text does not directly
support the judgment -- it might support the judgment given a certain system
of analysis, but it does not necessarily support that system of analysis.

We can apply different systems of morality to the text and come to different
judgments on the characters (or we could psychoanalyze them, perhaps by
using different methods of analysis, and come to different results). But if
the text doesn't seem to be favoring one system, then the judgments are
aside from the text. We can analyze the characters legitimately through
different systems of analysis, perhaps many the author had never heard of.
But we are still understanding the SAME characters, the same things about
them, that the author understood. We can run their attributes through
different processing machines, but the attributes remain unchanged. And it
is those that, it seems to me, are the ultimate concern, and they do not
require historical or cultural research.

It seems to me that the best texts very often do suggest some way of
reading. It's not always easy to see, of course, and there's no certainty
that you're right when you think you see it.

Also: "The idea that we read in a complete vacuum is a bit of a myth. We
fill in subtext, we readers, every time we read. We fill in the blanks left
by the author (left quite deliberately, actually, and necessarily). But we
don't fill them in the same way every time. Good, enduring works, in fact,
tend to be those with the most interesting blanks, so to speak, that people
can keep filling in again and again with different stuff."

It seems to me that the best books leave blanks that we all can fill in
fundamentally similar ways, using stuff we all share, across times and
cultures. This is the only way to guarantee that when I read a book from a
radically different place, it will be sensible and important to me. If the
blanks are overwhelmingly culture-specific, it seems just as likely that
they'll just puzzle me and be uninteresting.

And: "So how does reference to the author help us?"

I don't think that it does. Denying that the author had his artful fingers
in every crafted word just seems artificial and ridiculous to me. As I said
to John, reading books as if they were authors speaking to me just seems to
me more true and honest.

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.

You said in another message with the same subject line: "I will say I do
benefit from older criticism as well, but not always in the way the critic
may have meant me to :)."

But before you said: "I don't think there's any out there [lit. crit.]
that's good for more than 50 years -- perhaps the closest is Aristotle's
Poetics, but that's the sole example I can think of."

That sounds like -- it explicitly states, in fact -- you didn't think any is
good for more than 50 years. But that the Poetics comes closer than
anything else.

So you've changed your mind?

And when a very old piece of criticism or interpretation seems right to me,
to say that the author of that criticism intended it in a wholly different
way seems like an enormity of a stretch. It makes me wonder what the hell
criticism you're talking about.

You said: "1. Not all authors are perfect, and do not actually and
consistently SAY what they INTEND. You run into this problem a good bit in
poetry and philosophy. You feel like the author doesn't quite know how to
say what they want to say, or is not quite sure what they intend."

I do not frequently encounter that problem. Perhaps this is because most of
what I read is very old and very influential, and I thus use the great
filter of time to my advantage (most of what survives intact for centuries
or millennia, for some reason or other, DESERVED to survive). My little
experience with modern philosophy is quite like you say.

I do believe that the greatest of writers, at least while they are at their
greatest, DO consistently say what they intend. They are hard because they
challenge us, while lesser writers are hard for the reason that you say.

And: "2. I myself believe that the author's reading of his/her own text is
usually at
least one valid reading -- in other words, I think the author usually has a
legitimate understanding of his or her own text.

"HOWEVER,

"this is Seldom or Never the _only_ legitimate understanding of his or her
own
text. The text can mean beyond or in addition to the 'author's intent,' and
legitimately.

"To think, again, that a single author can conceive of every potential
reading of
his or her text is to expect more out of an author than is fair to expect."

It surprises me that you can accuse me of making undefended assertions and
then drop this on my lap.

Then: "I think you're not fully aware of how many radically different
readings can
'legitimately' be drawn from most literary texts."

I think I am. Perhaps you are willing to accept as a legitimate reading
something that I am not.

If it is so that serious and meaningful substance (however you want to take
that) can be in a text without the author of the text being aware of it,
explain to me why such substance would not be found in the result of a
computer program randomly generating grammatically valid sentences.

In still another message: "No, really, Robbie, a book is literally made up
of paper and ink. Or papyrus. Or chisled stone. And it's nothing more than
that, get this... until someone, somewhere, sometime, reads it :)."

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.

And: "When I said a book was a 'non-human artifact' I meant that it itself,
of course, was not human. Again, your reading did not match my intent, but
I'm not blaming you for that."

I knew what you meant; you wrote it well enough to make your intent clear.
I was just poking fun at you for saying it (I gave my thoughts on it above).

>From the Esme post: "What you fail to see is that words, in context, tend to
have only one appropriate meaning, but in actual use (and by intention),
usually only have one.

The reader has to select, then, the most appropriate definition, because all
are implied but only one is 'intended.' This leads to ambiguity, multiple
readings, etc."

You keep making the assertion that all these meanings are implied but only
one intended, that the author only means one simple non-contradictory thing.
I keep denying it, seeing no reason why it ought to be so, and you just
assert it again.

Why doesn't the thoughtful and artful author intend to imply all of the
applicable meanings? Is it impossible for Shakespeare to have been so
careful with his words? I expect that he was much cleverer and subtler than
either of the two of us.

And: "As a result, I didn't quite understand Tim's response to me. Again,
though, we understood the same sentence differently because we were coming
to it with different contexts, different assumptions -- both about what
'housewives' were and about who Seymour's wife was. Neither of these were
'inherent in' the original text, but brought to it by each reader."

Knowing English as well as both of you do, you each can see the
possibilities for the word. Maybe you favored one and he the other, but
neither option was shocking and foreign to either of you (if you say it was,
I'll call you a liar). You can discuss the text and come to decide that one
reading makes more sense, or that it's ambiguous (and likely deliberately
so, for the careful author could have chosen less ambiguous words).

And in any case, the difference does not alter some profundity or pressing
issue in the text.

>From yet another message: "Robbie...talk about presumption. The primary
difference between us is that I've actually read Freud, and you haven't --
so when I say that he is quite capable of contradicting himself from
sentence to sentence, I could plausibly be right in this -- but you have no
plausible reason to cringe. When I say he invented a myth, that the
physical structures of the mind he envisioned simply aren't there, a
neurosurgeon (for example) would agree with me. But you cringe...without
even having read Freud. [. . .]I have the right to my opinion. You have no
right to cringe."

I cringe not because I know you're wrong, but because you speak so
dismissively of him. You treat Freud as though he were plainly an imbecile
(and ostensibly presuming that you, of course, are much smarter). I have
not read Freud, and do not yet know what I'll think of him, but his status
as a thinker is such that I will do my damndest not to be so dismissive of
him. Aristotle said that falling objects continuously accelerate, Ptolemy
said that the earth was the center of the universe -- both of these things I
know to be inaccurate. I see people scoff at their mistakes and treat them
as though they were obviously village idiots. Those wacky ancients! If
only they were so aware as WE are. These people invariably acquire enough
information about Aristotle and Ptolemy to get degrees and impress people at
cocktail parties, but they don't learn much from them. By not being so
dismissive and by reading sensitively, by trying to figure out why such a
clearly intelligent person would say a thing that doesn't seem right to me
rather than merely pushing it off the table as incorrect, I have found that
the depth and profundity of genius and insight to be found in Aristotle and
Ptolemy are staggering.

I did not mean to offend you. It's possible that I will think so little of
Freud as you seem to think of him. But hearing a person dismiss the
thoughts of such a well-established thinker -- no matter how familiar with
those thoughts -- always makes me cringe. Freud was no doubt wrong about
very many things, perhaps more things than not. I really don't know. But I
trust that dismissing him is a mistake.

I did not tell you that you are wrong, because I don't know that you are.
But I do have the right to cringe.

You said: "Good Lord, Robbie, what universe are you living in? :) What
you've just described is THE quintessential humanities/liberal arts
educational paradigm."

I don't understand how these two sentences connect. Is the second one
sarcastic? If not, you either misunderstood me or the "what universe"
remark doesn't make sense to me.

I described THE quintessential humanities/liberal arts educational paradigm
as I thought it IS. I was complaining about it as far less than ideal,
though.

You said: "And you expect this in an _Introduction to Philosophy_ class
taught at the undergrad level? You've obviously _never_ taught, Robbie, or
don't really know what first year undergrads in, say, community colleges or
your average four year state u. can handle."

The best Introduction to Philosophy textbook can be purchased in a thick
volume with "The Complete Works of Plato" written on the cover. To bypass
this in order to listen to somebody explain Kant is not to know philosophy.

I have never been paid to lead a class, it's true (get back to me in a few
years). But I have given first-year undergrads in community colleges and
four-year state universities copies of Plato's Meno, and had very serious
discussions with them (including serious discussions about Kant, frequently
involving my trying to convince them that their professor misrepresented the
man). I do know what they can handle.

There IS a college still in the world conceived in and dedicated to the
proposition that -- so long as you have the right attitude and aren't
utterly stupid -- you CAN handle it. You can read about it here:
http://www.sjca.edu In recent decades other schools have been springing up
with similar curricula -- usually with the help of the faculty here -- and
they are sometimes collectively referred to as the Great Books schools.
This one is often called THE Great Books School.

And: "My students at the community college I'm now teaching at need it spoon
fed to them - -- this is the first time they've read this kind of material."

If you spoon feed it, they're just memorizing, not learning. They acquire
True Opinion, perhaps, but very little Knowledge. Have them read the Meno.
It's probably not forty pages, it doesn't feel particularly dense, but they
can talk about it and read it again and mull over it for the rest of their
lives. It sheds light on all philosophy. If they need philosophy
spoon-fed, they are in no way prepared for Kant.

And: "But you _know_ what these kids need without ever having taught an
intro course, right?
"Who's being presumptuous?"

I do have some idea of what learning philosophy ought to be like. You don't
need to agree with me, but it's not presumptuous of me to state what is a
well-informed and well-considered opinion.

This isn't higher math. Nearly anyone with the right attitude can learn
from this stuff.

Also: "I can guarantee that some of them [ideas/substance/whatever in
literature] were not intended by the author, but are legitimately there."

You can guarantee? I guess I should just take your word for it.

And: "There's a difference between saying that a 'thinking mind intended the
book,' and, 'a thinking mind intended every possible meaning generated by
the book.'

"You seem to be arguing one, then the other, at different times."

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.

The closer an interpretation is to the text the more likely the author was
behind it, one way or another.

And: "Again, you're confusing _any_ understanding of a person with _total_
understanding of a person."

Considering that I have not once in the discussion made any claim to total
understanding or absolute certainty concerning ANYTHING, it does not seem
likely that _I_ am the one making that particular misunderstanding.

And:
"> 'The degree of sensibility is so great that. . .'
>

"It's interesting that in your original reply, as in your second reply, you
delete the word 'anyway.'

"I read it because you put it there, but to defend your reading you need to
delete it?"

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."

No matter which of these I quote, the grammar of the sentence is
unambiguous, and the sentence plainly answers the question that you asked me
after quoting it. In all three of these, the belief is a result of the
greatness of the degree of sensibility. You could have asked me to expand
on what I meant by the degree of sensibility, or you could have asked me to
explain why it was convincing to me, but quoting any one of those sentences
and then asking my why I believe it is a mistake. You made a mistake. You
did.

There's no way out. You can admit it or you can ignore it, but you can't
keep telling me that _I_ made the mistake, or that this is a perfect example
of authorial intent being invisible or irrelevant.

You said: "Who you are is irrelevant to this discussion -- I'm not impressed
with your qualifications, because people more qualified than you disagree
with you."

Who I am is perfectly relevant to this discussion. I am an intelligent,
reasonable, thoughtful man with well-informed and well-considered and -- I
hope -- well-elucidated opinions. 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.

If this does not accurately describe your intent or character, then you
ought to be more careful with your words, keeping this in mind. Don't give
me any nonsense about intent being somehow disconnected from interpretation.
This is the effect that your words consistently suggest (I'm not by any
means the only one on the list to have felt it), and if you don't mean to be
expressing it then you're using the wrong words.

The atrociously inappropriate and plainly rude comment I quoted above was
responding to my self-identification as an ardent classicist. This
self-identification was not to impress you with my qualifications, Jim -- it
wasn't a qualification of any sort at all, in fact. It was merely to give
an indication of where I was coming from, as 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.

Whenever in other cases I have said things to give suggestions of my
qualifications, they were solely to inspire YOU (never anyone else) to treat
me with a bit more respect and dignity, and usually in direct response to
your treating me like a wee little'un who busted into the grown-up's
conversation. I have acutely felt on innumerable occasions over many years
on this list that you have being trying to convince me of my inferiority to
you. I don't buy it, and it becomes harder to stomach every time.

-robbie
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Received on Wed Oct 30 02:13:01 2002

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