Before you thought, He was
Philosophy, Writing August 2nd, 2005Clark (to whom I have previously blogged, later to argue with his guests) at libertypages.com draws my attention to an article by one Josh at melbournephilosopher.com. Someday I will understand the references Clark makes. I may also only half grasp what Josh is saying, but I’ll respond to what I grasp.
Clark conscisely summarizes Josh’s argument:
..literature can not present an argument because the story has no guarantee of being consistent with the real world. Of course that avoids the question of whether any basic assertion does as well.
I think that Josh does overlook the question of whether our basic assertions hold with the real world, and I think that’s a great oversight.
Human beings do not know everything and so we must act without absolution, without certainty, without perfection. Yet we also have a built-in mandate to be objective beings (see The Relativist Contradiction, to which I often refer).
Being absolute creatures, we strive for objectives. To close upon objectives, we must rely on our concept of the world in order to bear upon the world for that objective. But being imperfect, we act on the world in flawed ways: our imagination has friction with the world’s objectives. Where the world’s objective disagrees with our imagination, we are, ourselves, imagination. Then every person is art, literature, music, reason, writing, thinking, dreaming; before obtaining an objective, every person is a fiction; nothing more than a dream. The only way in which a person cannot be a book is if we deny the need for imagination to bear on an objective; if we say that we are the objective, if we say there is no place for imagination to sort right from wrong, being that there isn’t any, which as demonstrated is impossible.
Any given human is a mix of objectives granted from the pool of dreams into reality; yet lacking: so comes imagination, to quest for what is lacking. The lot of us have no claim to a world that is always self-consistent. This is simply because none of us are yet perfectly self consistent - if we were, it would only be by perfect alignment to the objectivity we do not yet totally have. Then, insofar as we cannot place ourselves entirely within objectivity, we live by faith - all of us; and this is the mold in which we were fashioned. Shakespeare declared: “I think, therefore I am”, but Creation declared: “Before you thought, I was.” And Shakespeare was but one of Creation’s thoughts, just as we, creations, have thoughts - inconsistent thoughts - our process on reality is the same as our process on fiction: bridging the impossible to the objective. Fiction is one of the thousand tools of aligning creativity to reality.
August 19th, 2005 at 4:29 am
Josh is a contributor to my blog.
“I think that Josh does overlook the question of whether our basic assertions hold with the real world, and I think that’s a great oversight.”
Actually, he doesn’t. The important thing here is that the “claims” of literature are different to the claims of argument. Literature presents not simply an argument, but a scenario. The inductions from cause and effect within that world are limited by the scenario’s accuracy. This is the specific point he was making, and I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that his argument was weak because it did not cover other issues.
I agree that it’s *important* to consider where else our assumptions about the world are creeping in unawares. But it’s a particular feature of literature that the argument occurs through story, rather than explicit assertion.
To me, that’s a big difference. I would characterise your points about literature to be valid, but I think you are being somewhat unfair to Josh’s position by presenting them as being in conflict.
Cheers,
-MelbournePhilosopher
September 5th, 2005 at 9:11 am
You represent the possibility of fallacious views (inconsistencies) in the real world as important in order to contrast them with inconsistencies of fictional worlds as being less important inconsistencies.
Why would our inconsistent views of reality be more valid than our inconsistent views of unreality? We only point out that unreality has inconsistencies because they contrast with the consistencies in unreality, and consistency in any reality provides a basis of argument.
I will reiterate and expand on what I just said to Josh in a reply at your blog. In reality we arrive at the real by perusing so much of the unreal and observing where it does not connect with the real, and contrasting this with what seems very much to cause the real. But who is to say, arriving at our conclusion of any fact, that we have perused the infinity of possibilities that might indicate other causes of that fact? Then being incapable of exploring the multiplicities of the unreal to arrive with absolute certainty at the real, who can say with certainty that something we regard as true is indeed, and therefore may be regarded as a solid basis of deriving other truths - arguments? Since there is then, no certainty of there being only one cause of any given effect, the various arguments we rely on to constitute our picture of reality, insofar as they all rely on simply accepting unknown qauntities, admit the unknown. There are many places in supposedly mere logical modern thought where the uknown is not made for what it is, but a story or myth is superimposed upon it, presuming by our often profound arrogance to assert such-and-such imagination or irrationality not by intuition or feeling, but logic. So often where we project into the unknowns of science we truly conjure myth and present it as cold fact. The reality is that to subscribe to any idea - as indeed our human propensity is to subscribe to ideas, for we are creatures of meaning - we must in our assesment of matters defer to stories (among which are unproven theories) to explain what is not yet explained. The wise admit that they are deferring to story, but many are too proud to admit it is story, and not truly the unknown.
And what of fiction itself? If literature is fallacy, at a minimum it provides more fallacy for us to peruse in arriving closer to deducing what is true, which is an argument itself advancing on truth, so that the argument of literature not being an argument becomes moot. Literature has the profound benefit of contrasting towards what is by exploring what is not.
Our conceptions of reality are really no more consistent than good literature. Would this not be why so many self-help gurus recommend changing your view of the world, because - to quote from the Bible: as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Than who am I? Someone who dislikes an argument that demerits the arguments available through literature. To say fiction cannot be argument is itself a bad fiction - a self-inconsistent one: as Josh demonstrated in his reply post at your blog, it must head into impossible relativism. That people hold absolutely to contradictary morals is no proof that all morals are wrong. And that greatly self-inconsistent fictions exist does not mean all are demerited; again, we observe that some are self-inconsistent only because they are more so than others - but every argument both of fiction (imagination) and logic arrives at some point in self-inconsistency - where some unknown, unproven element must simply be believed for lack of proof. Trace back any theory, story, or logical proof to its origin, and there is always that underlying, unproven origin behind the observed origin - unprovable but manifest only in that the observed origin is manifest, and, having cause, must also have some cause behind it - unless we say that it is a cause in itself beyond which no precursury cause can exist; but whatever we say, there is no proof of cause behind the first observed cause. Anyone who believes otherwise will end up really dissapointed with life and its outrageous imbalances and horrible unexplainables. I suggest that science too often purports to explain the unexplainable, and I find that on the whole, such scientists are a very dissapointed, and dissapointing, lot.
I am not being unfair by presenting Josh’s argument as in conflict - I have clearly shown the internal conflicts of it. Your rebuttal is tantamount to saying it would be unfair if I might be right. Josh’s argument is that claims of literature - imagination - are inferior and unreliable in contrast to argument - logical, “real” reason. I have shown that the arguments of imagination and reason exist in the same domain; neither superior to the other. Both fiction and reality stand against themselves for the unknown and unprovable. Meanwhile, why argue against either? Take the good in both with your best reason and intuition. And why rail against the use of fiction? How very despairing and unimaginitive. How very like an adult to not see the glorious neverlands of fiction.
There is one last domain of Josh’s argument that I find very threatening. This is because it must ultimately rail against that hallowed Master teacher: Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ often transmitted truth through parables, fictions, stories. Then Josh’s reasoning must denounce these teachings of Jesus as not transmitting truth, which, apart from Josh’s argument simply being wrong, I find a deeply insulting consequence of the line of thought. But then, so many dismiss the whole Bible as one elaborate fairy tale: that is a sad loss.