Good heavens! I had no thought of erecting any barriers not articulated by science itself, in its heuristic method, criteria for truth, modes of description and denotation, and so on. Unless I misunderstand you, we have no real disagreement here about the whatness of things, but the oughtness as it were. By all means, let the great scientific beehive buzz away, but when that buzzing drowns out the whispers of our gods, and when the torrents of honey that pour out of it flood and bury even the tips of our sacred mountains, something--however true--is going wrong.
I've not the slightest interest in restricting or fencing-out such production; I merely wish to fence-in another space that <u>happens</u> to be disappearing, at least since the modernist problematic was exhausted.
I'll say one thing more: I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do).

[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 15, 2004).]

I would be inclined to agree with Brian's or Rorty's qualification, "scientific," about the reality science addresses. This is inevitably a matter of one's metaphysical bias. However one characterizes science, it would seem to be inherently inimical to ontological distinctions, any hierarchical differentiation of "levels of being" such as characterized pre-Enlightenment philosophy. Historically, science acquired its cultural prestige by demonstrating power over nature. It accomplished this by treating nature abstractly, as a manipulable system of substances. The discovery of power was represented as (or confused with) a discovery of reality. It blew away traditional (hierarchical) conceptions of reality. The metaphysical bias of science is that nothing is real outside the manipulable system of substances it deals with. Ontological distinctions are ruled out.

An ontological axiom is: "you cannot derive the greater from the lesser." You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, nor (for example) human consciousness out of a soup of randomly colliding manipulable substances. Deriving the greater from the lesser, like a rabbit out of a hat, like consciousness out of matter, is the great trick of science-driven philosophy & quasi-philosophical apologetics. The bigger the whopper, the more enthusiastically it is swallowed, when it comes to this.

Brian writes: "I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do)."

Right, but don't you think the "technical development" you refer to is itself a "sudden start" in historical perspective, the last 3 or 4 hundred years? And it puts a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on the moral/spiritual essence that would not otherwise be there. When you think of it, it's pretty amazing we haven't blown ourselves up yet, having possessed nuclear power for 50+ years. So, maybe there's hope for us. I in any case like the idea that it's an evolutionary process & that the one-sidedly technical development of modern science has a specific function within this process, like a risky bet. Not ignoble in that regard.

Brian writes: "I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do)."

Right, but don't you think the "technical development" you refer to is itself a "sudden start" in historical perspective, the last 3 or 4 hundred years?

Thanks, EA. I meant more the unpredictable irruption in history of a single part of a single life, as in the case of Luther's 'posting'. But I would certainly agree that the technical growth has been exponential, and further, inexorable and asymptotic by the look of it (although I hate to think of <u>that</u> axis). More than this, it's shown astonishing growth in its capability to domesticate and nourish itself on discontent, especially with itself. But it's leaving the religious evolution so far behind now, I think, that the latter has, as it were, disappeared and come back as a sort of technical holograph, whether it be Chris' "psychology", new-age religiosity, sales up on the Passion, whatever.[/b]

And it puts a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on the moral/spiritual essence that would not otherwise be there. When you think of it, it's pretty amazing we haven't blown ourselves up yet, having possessed nuclear power for 50+ years. So, maybe there's hope for us. I in any case like the idea that it's an evolutionary process & that the one-sidedly technical development of modern science has a specific function within this process, like a risky bet. Not ignoble in that regard.[/quote]

I think we have blown ourselves up, we just missed it. The joke's on us; all that gene-pool worrying about our bodies, when what distinguishes them from plant-life was left in little charred bits outside the movieplex.
You'll have to help me see the nobility in that "risky bet". All I've seen of high-risk gamblers--of that sort--is a pretty pathetic sight.

AE,
I would be interested in understanding a little more fully what you mean by the traditional (hierarchical) conceptions of reality.
If I understand what we are talking about, it seems to be the issue of "reductionism". If I say that everything is MADE OF atoms, does that commit me to the claim that everything JUST IS atoms -- that there aren't really animals and human beings and societies (or beliefs and desires or justice and injustice) but only atoms. On this reductionist view the only things that really exist are the fundamental constituents of things -- talk of human beings and all the rest is just short-hand for more complicated but more true talk of atoms.
On a non-reductionist view, to say that animals and humans are made of atoms is not to say that everything just is atoms. On this view, reality is hierarchical in a way: there is a physical level of reality, but this level does not exhaust reality. Above this level (perhaps a few rungs above) is the biological level. Organisms are just as real as the atoms which compose them, and the laws governing them cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the laws governing atoms (though organisms do depend for their powers on the atoms that make them up. This non-reductionist view is closely related to Aristotle's distinction between material cause and formal cause.

If the non-reductionist view is what you have in mind, then I think science is actually perfectly compatible with it -- in fact, (I would argue) reductionism is a very poor match for the actual results of modern science. A hierarchical view of nature, which leaves room for emergent properties and emergent entities (substances) is actually a much better fit.
Even such a less restrictive view limits us in certain ways: there is no room for a vitalism, for instance -- the view that emergence of life involves a wholly new fundamental "life force" -- nor does it leave room for an immaterial human soul. But, unlike reductionism, it does seem to leave room for organisms and even conscious organisms (and self-conscious organisms like us). I'm inclined to think it leaves enough room for ethics and even for a conception of a "meaningful life."
If Kantian positions like Rorty's are really the only way to save the human and spiritual realm, then I might join you there -- but it looks like a last resort to me. I'd much rather see whether the perceived threat from science was really such a threat before I retreated so far.

Two questions about your other remarks:
1. You say we can't make human consciousness out of matter because you can't make the greater out of the lesser. If we assume reductionism, I agree. But if not, then your argument seems to commit you to things you might not want to say. Can living organisms be made out of matter? On your principle, no -- you seem to be committed, not only to dualism, but to vitalism.
2. If science did not have knowledge of reality, what accounts for science's ability to manipulate it? If science is not learning about mind-independent reality, its ability to manipulate nature seems nothing short of miraculous. Is it such a confusion to suppose that understanding that gives us power is (a part of) the true understanding of reality?

Quick note to Brian: By 'psychology' I certainly didn't mean pop-psychology or new age psychology -- nor did I mean Freudian or Jungian psychology. I meant only to point to a particular field of study (the study of the human psyche -- emotions, intellect, sensations, beliefs, desires etc.) without making too many presuppositions about what the correct theory in psychology would be. Plato regards the virtues as "the health of the soul" -- and I agree with him. A study of virtue will then be a part of the study of the soul (psychology). That's all I had in mind. You may disagree with Plato on this, but surely he isn't a New Age thinker.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 15, 2004).]

Quick note to Brian: By 'psychology' I certainly didn't mean pop-psychology or new age psychology -- nor did I mean Freudian or Jungian psychology. I meant only to point to a particular field of study (the study of the human psyche -- emotions, intellect, sensations, beliefs, desires etc.) without making too many presuppositions about what the correct theory in psychology would be. Plato regards the virtues as "the health of the soul" -- and I agree with him. A study of virtue will then be a part of the study of the soul (psychology). That's all I had in mind. You may disagree with Plato on this, but surely he isn't a New Age thinker.
[/quote]

Thanks, Chris, and of course you're right to extricate the term this way--I spoke too loosely--, but do you not think we should try to find another, then, given this one's absorbtion into 20th century pseudo-science?
And something else: I think, and argued at Cambridge (indeed, argued my way out of Cambridge thereby), that Plato's, and even the Master's ethics are floating on top of imagination, of an ultimately counterfactual vision of man, as begins and ends the Nichomachean Ethics for example, and thoroughly infects its critical definition of man early on (as in Book X's:"we must not, being human, think of human things, but must, insofar as we are able..."). Any such "study of virtue", then, will indeed reach down to some description of the essential contours of the human soul; but those contours, I would argue, are like a fence, shaped mostly from the <u>other</u> side, by the dreams of Pythagoras or Bach's music, for example.
And if that soul is sick, we must--somehow or other--get behind the fence to heal it. In other words, by the time Greek "psychology" had a soul to map, the dreaming had all been done (with Socrates the waking bridge).
I find philosophers oddly resistant to this seemingly obvious fact. But as long as they look to psychologists for their soul, I think they're bound to embarrass themselves.
(Psychology looks in a mirror and--surprise--always finds itself.)
On the other hand, when the soul is finally good and dead, there is no other side of that fence to alter its shape anymore; and then psychologists will finally get it right.




[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 16, 2004).]

Chris,

"If the non-reductionist view is what you have in mind, then I think science is actually perfectly compatible with it -- in fact, (I would argue) reductionism is a very poor match for the actual results of modern science. A hierarchical view of nature, which leaves room for emergent properties and emergent entities (substances) is actually a much better fit."

I agree with your account of the non-reductionist view & this is indeed more or less what I was getting at, but I would question whether science is ultimately compatible with it. In fact I had the idea of "emergence" specifically in mind with my "rabbit out of the hat" metaphor. Isn't "emergence" just a fancy term for "presto!"? There is, say, a science of physics (in principle encompassing chemistry), and a science of biology. The science of physics works systematically & with increasingly powerful results towards defining the "laws" of physics, and likewise the science of biology towards the "laws" of biology. But neither the science of physics nor the science of biology provides any possible explanation for the "emergence" of life out of matter. That belongs, rather, to the new science of Chaos. But is Chaos really a science? Isn't it just a way of saying: we don't know what the fuck is going on here, but man, it's really cool!

In short, perhaps, science operates competently at each level, but has no competence in grasping the relationships between levels. It works horizontally, not vertically. In this sense it is inherently reductionist even if it pragmatically allows for multiple levels, multiple sciences.

"If science did not have knowledge of reality, what accounts for science's ability to manipulate it?"

My point was not that the manipulable is unreal, rather that science mistakes the manipulable for the whole of reality. This plays directly into the "ontological" point of view, insofar as non-manipulable reality, such as, say, the being of one's beloved, is "more real" to oneself than any manipulable reality. The manipulable is a rather low grade of reality, from a human point of view. Such distinctions are ontological distinctions, which science has no idea of.

Brian,

"Thanks, EA."

No problem, JB.

"But I would certainly agree that the technical growth has been exponential, and further, inexorable and asymptotic by the look of it (although I hate to think of that axis). More than this, it's shown astonishing growth in its capability to domesticate and nourish itself on discontent, especially with itself. But it's leaving the religious evolution so far behind now, I think, that the latter has, as it were, disappeared and come back as a sort of technical holograph, whether it be Chris' "psychology", new-age religiosity, sales up on the Passion, whatever."

I see your point, & if I were arguing with a flagrant optimist I might mount similar arguments. But I have an abiding intuition that the whole picture outwits me. Arguments either way are just a way of keeping one's ignorance in balance, keeping oneself open to what happens next. There is always the need to counteract onesidedness & naivety, & the rhetoric is ready-to-hand. Maybe that becomes a vocation. But then, it's a kind of giving-up, too, a falling-off from four-square facing of reality, which has no rhetoric, nothing to fall back on, no pillow, no club-house, no special vocabulary. It's just out there.

At least, that's my opinion!

I'm way out of my league here, honestly. I'm just a not-so-humble poet/photographer who occasionally looks up and says, wtf is going on?

But it occurs to me that this entire discussion is being run on a very narrowly-constructed, peculiarly "Western" set of axioms. No Buddhist, say, would even have this discussion with you, I don't think.

A thing "is" what it is: we know it, if at all, by what it "seems". We comminicate, if at all, through codes: the codes have no "objective reality" but that's ok because, at any ontological level, even if there is such a thing as an objective reality, it exists outside our codes. In this sense, to discuss the "nature of reality", no matter how much we dress it up with scientific terminology, is so close a kin og discussing how many angels can dance.. etc... as to render the differences between "theological" and "scientific" thought as no more than a difference in coding.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me to posit (as some have) that the whole of human knowledge — nay, the whole of human existence — is an example of mass hysteria and that in a very real sense "reality itself" morphs to reflect/embody what the perceiver chooses to perceive.

Gawd help me. I'm sinking fast. I'll just go write a pome, I think, until myhead stops aching...

(robt)

Brian,
I personally do not believe that science is merely instrumental. Pure physicists do not seem motivated primarily by a desire for technological manipulation, but rather by a desire for understanding. And I find the understanding of nature to be itself a spiritual thing. If there is a Creator, wouldn't understanding His creation be a way of getting to know Him? Even if there is not a creator, surely understanding the world beyond human beings would be part of the theoretical reason Aristotle thinks is the ultimate point of practical reason.
I'm also suspicious of religious or spiritual objections to the instrumental (technological) side of science.
Before science, religion claimed instrumental value for itself. The OT prophets told the Israelites that they were conquered because they had slipped into idolatry. Jesus didn't just tell us about spiritual things -- he healed the sick (and the dead). I gather that many of the American Indians converted to Christianity when plagues were wiping them out and leaving the Europeans unscathed. And the Christians of the time agreed with them that this was evidence for their own religion. People still pray for health. It's only once science radically outperformed prayer alone that religion started to dismiss the instrumental value of being able to produce health that religion regarded it as irrelevant. (At any rate, we should at least realize that health and the greater leisure that technology allow us could be valuable for spiritual purposes. Yes, technology also produces time wasting video games, but in the middle ages, very few could afford a book, whether religious or secular. It's too easy to pretend that technology brings us only the cineplex and the video game -- and even the cineplex sometimes brings us a real work of art.)

Robt,
The view that language doesn't really refer outside itself (a position you share with the structuralists and post-structuralists) is a particular theory of language (or group of theories). Such non-referential theories of language are not the only ones, and indeed not the kind that a realist would accept. (A realist on my view is someone who believes that rocks and stones and trees and tigers and genes and most of the other things we confidently believe in really do exist independent of our perceptions and beliefs about them -- they existed before humans came along to believe in them, for instance.) Therefore, to assume such theories in an argument for anti-realism is to beg the question against the realist.
I raised a problem above for such non-referential theories -- that they seem to have problems accounting for how language could arise in the first place or how they could be learned by any individual child.
I did not explain the alternative views because I'd already written too much and because I was afraid no one would be interested -- I can explain them if it would help.

As for Buddhism, I'm not knowledgeable about it, but I am told that there is much Buddhist philosophy which looks a fair amount like Western philosophy -- engaging in rational debates on subjects that would be recognizable to Western philosophers, though naturally phrased in a different vocabulary. And in fact, even the view you describe is one which roughly corresponds to some form of Kantianism -- and Kant is surely a Western philsopher. Actually, in its linguistic focus it is more closely related to the views of the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, the structuralists, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science and "analytic" anti-realists like Michael Dummett -- all very much within the Western tradition (and all ultimately indebted to Kant).

AE, I'll respond to you in a separate post since this one's already pretty long.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 17, 2004).]

AE,
Cars are unproblematically physical objects, they are made of matter and their powers all derive from the powers of their constituents. But a car is not identical with its matter. Disassemble it or melt it down and you no longer have a car. But replace each piece of the car gradually, and arguably you have the same car. Try to describe the laws of auto-mechanics in purely physical terms, and you have a problem, because cars can be realized in multiple materials. From the engineer's point of view, a Ford Taurus made of metal and one made of hard plastics whose physical properties approximated metal would be very slight -- the same laws of automechanics would apply. But from a purely physical point of view, the difference between two cars will seem vast.
Cars and the laws of auto mechanics emerge at a level above that of particle physics, yet there is surely nothing mysterious about this emergence -- since as I said, the powers that cars have can be fully explained in terms of the powers of their constituents when those constituents are organized in a certain way (though they are not identical with those constituents).

In the case of life, I believe we are also able to see the emergence of life from the matter that makes it up as non-mysterious. The operation of DNA is well understood at a chemical level -- no extra vital force enters into the replication of DNA or in DNA's synthesis of proteins. And once you have a self-replicating complex molecule like DNA, natural selection explains how eyes and wings, birds and humans could arise without the intervention of any non-physical forces or beings.
Consciousness is a far more difficult matter. In my view, Daniel Dennet's title "Consciousness Explained" is very premature. Still, the dualist who would erect an explanatory wall between human consciousness and the rest of the world has a problem too: animal consciousness. Which side of the wall does it go on? Descartes consistently denies that animals have consciousness, but this is just obviously false. We seem to face something of a continuum of consciousness among animals -- if there is a dualist wall between matter and consciousness, where does it go?
In any case, I think the desire to erect walls is premature. I think the existence of minds (and of moral truths for that matter) is as clear as the existence of physical objects. A science that dismisses mind seems to be undercutting its own basis in experience. Physics has to find a way to leave room for the existence of minds and for the manifestations of mind we see in the world, or it will be undercutting itself. Just as physics seems to put some constraints on psychology, so psychology puts constraints on physics. Until we have a theory that reconciles physics and psychology, we should go on with both -- as physicisst themselves go on with Relativity and Quantum theory, even though the two cannot be employed together (unless superstring theory turns out to reconcile them).


[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 18, 2004).]

AE: "In short, perhaps, science operates competently at each level, but has no competence in grasping the relationships between levels. It works horizontally, not vertically."

As ChrisW says, there need be nothing very mysterious about emergence (after all, this message is merely dots on a screen). And I think science does try to stretch vertically, and does try to study action in that dimension.
In Complexity Theory they say "More is Different" - a slogan confirmed by AI simulations and termites. It's not always easy to "explain" the observed emergent behaviour, but progress is being made. However especially if the different layers share a common code one risks Hofstadter's strange loops, tangled hierarchies, and hierarchy violation.

On the issue of whether we should believe in the external world or in our ability to find author's intentions in a book, I think I've made things more complicated than they need to be.

A. Structuralists and others present us with a theory of language which make knowledge of a mind-independent reality impossible. Others present us with a theory of knowledge (Cartesian foundationalism) which also make such knowledge impossible.

B. On the other hand, we all believe that there are trees and rocks and stars and cats and eggs and that these things are the way they are independently of what we call them or think about them. When you're in the tiger's cage, it doesn't do any good to try to think of him as a pussycat or call him 'kitty'. Turning your back on him doesn't make him disappear. When he crouches in a certain way, you can tell his intention is to leap. We know a lot about what other people think and intend and feel and desire -- both from what they say and from how they act. We know it is safer to leave by a first floor door than by a 30th story window. We know there was a time before we each individually existed, and we know there was a time when no humans existed, but there were still trees and rocks and other animals.

What do you have more confidence in? The claims of the philosophical theory of language or the philosophical theory of knowledge in A or the experientially based beliefs in B? Even the person who claims to be a skeptic about our knowledge of the external world or of our ability to predict the future on the basis of past events, leaves by way of the first floor door.

If we have so much more confidence in the kind of beliefs I talked about in B, then why throw them all out for the sake of some theory of language we have no particular reason to accept? It seems better to start from those beliefs and try to develop a theory of language and a theory of knowledge that permits us to talk about and know the kinds of facts I mentioned in B. Such theories of language and of knowledge are available, so there seems to be no reason to dismiss or even suspend the beliefs in B.

Tim,
Although I do think reductionism makes understanding consciousness unnecessarily hard, and though I agree with you that the sciences do explain how they are related to each other, I'm somewhat sympathetic to AE's problems concerning consciousness. Although there seems to have been progress in understanding intentionality or representation in terms of functional states mediating inputs of sense-information and outputs of behavior, there seems not to have been much progress in accounting for consciousness if we understand it from the inside -- {i]what it is like[/i] (in Thomas Nagel's phrase) to be a bat or to be a human or to look at the color blue or be hungry.
Dennett in _Consciousness Explained_ eliminates phenomenal qualities. To some at least, this looks like dismissing the very thing that he is supposedly explaining.
I think what Dennett does is rash -- who says we have to be able to explain consciousness completely right now? Don't we have less reason to be sure we can explain it right now than to believe that there is something it's like to feel angry or hungry or see the color blue? At the same time, we have every reason to believe in physics and biology and that somehow consciousness arises out of them in some natural way (because we do not find any great gap between fully conscious humans and the rest of animate nature).
At this point I wouldn't adopt either dualism or a Dennett-like eliminativism -- I just don't think we're in a position to make the judgment. I think we should just go along accepting phenomenal qualities (which some take to be the heart of consciousness) and at the same time expect that, as we come to understand matter better, we will come to a better understanding of how the two are related.




[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 19, 2004).]

Re: Consciousness — the core issue here is whether we're engaging in a phenomenological or philological debate.

To exit the house from a second-floor door is foolish either away. I'm not aware of anyone who's evever denied the "functional reality" of a 12-foot fall-to-earth in order to bolster a semantic distinction regarding the nature of that fall.

The issue is not "Is that tiger real?"; the issue is, and always has been, "Does our perception of that tiger align with its 'reality'?"

"Reality" at this level is a "construct" of perception. Is perception "consciousness" in any meaningful sense? This brings us back, unfortunately, to Julian Jaynes. Nobody's denying that "what we perceive" is "real" to us; the argument is about the alingnment of perceived reality with "true" reality, or whether "true" reality even exists in any meaningful sense.

In a very meaningful way, poetry can be the answer to that question.

(robt)

Hi Robt,
I don't get your comment on "consciousness", but I'll respond to the other part.

The constructivist position you want to advocate (we partly create reality-- or anyway the reality we know) is based upon skepticism about the possibility of knowing a reality which we do not construct. This skepticism can be based either on a foundationalist (Cartesian) theory of knowledge or various theories of language.
My main point about the tiger was that we believe we know things about tigers, not just as they appear to us or as we conceive of them, but as they are in the world independent of our beliefs about them. Tigers and other commonsense beings seem to impinge on our experience as though they were creatures whose nature is quite independent of what we think about them. Why not accept this as our starting point rather than some radical theory of language or of knowledge which denies this?

Hume provides a skeptical argument against reasoning from past to future. Yes, leaving from the first floor door has always worked in the past, but what guarantee do we have that it will work in the future? Why should we assume that the future will conform itself to the past? Why then do we leave by the door rather than the 30th story window? The only reason on Hume's view is "habit." This is only an explanation of why we keep doing it, not in any sense a justification. So on Hume's view, it is actually NOT foolish (irrational) to leave by the 30th floor window -- because reason really has nothing to say about the matter. Next time we leave by the door, we could find ourselves falling up into outerspace, while if that time we had left by the window, we might have gently floated to earth.

Kant, in a sense, the first constructivist, was responding to Hume's problem when he suggested that we impose causality onto things in themselves thus creating the "constructed" empirical reality we all know. The trouble is, I can't see how this constructivist "solution" really helps. If we were gods and could decree the laws of nature (really literal construction of reality), then we could guarantee by force of will that the future would resemble the past. But clearly we are not in this position. If we are not almighty, then how do our concepts influence even the reality we know? If future experience suddenly decided not to resemble past experience in the radical ways Hume imagines, could we stop it by thinking very hard "principles of causality hold -- this is not happening"? (Note that this problem arises within experience itself -- it compares past and future experience rather than experience with the outside world.)
Constructivism seems to add nothing to the skeptical problems from which it derives.
We seem to live in a world in which we are not all that important, and what we think of things doesn't affect what happens (except in the special case of our own actions). And we seem to know a lot about how that world behaves. The realist explanation is that we really live in such a world and do know a lot about how this world behaves.
The constructivist explanation is that our beliefs about the world somehow constrain the laws governing our experience (they somehow make future experiences resemble past experiences, for instance). But how could our concepts affect our experience in this way? I don't think the constructivist can supply much of an answer. (The clear answer -- that our concepts affect the world causally, that we have godlike powers is obviously not intended, but in what other way can our thoughts or our concepts constrain our experience?)

In any case, the question remains, why should we accept the claim that we can't really know about cats or dogs or trees or other people as they really are in themselves? The abstract arguments for this conclusion seem infinitely less certain than our actual knowledge of (mind-independent) cats and dogs and other people. Doesn't it make more sense to develop an explanation of how we can know what we feel so certain we really know rather than start from the assumption that we don't really know about it?

I don't get what you are saying about poetry at the end, but from a poetic point of view, constructivism looks rather self-absorbed -- a hall of mirrors. Isn't the writer's challenge to reach beyond himself -- to really understand others, not just what those others mean to us?



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 26, 2004).]

There is a couple of paragraphs in the current London Review of Books which addresses the "death of the author" issue quite sensibly, I think. As follows (the author, James Wood, is differentiating "writers" from academic critics):

"Most writers I know treat an author's intentions - or their understanding of them - with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called 'the second life of art' with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are often suspicious of the way academic criticism confounds or even nullifies authorial intention in pursuit of the symptomatic. In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem.' It's a caricature - theoretical Eagleton turns out to be fonder of crude binarisms than the crustiest old clubman - but a writer would be very wary of a criticism that only wanted to read The Waste Land symptomatically. Not to attend to a plausible reconstruction of the author's aesthetic intentions is not to attend to the made-ness, the constructedness, of the artwork; and writers, sensibly enough, have a great deal invested in such matters.

Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question."

Note how Wood correlates interest in "intention" (what the author was trying to do) with interest in "value" (how skillfully he did it). Postmodernist academic ideology discredits both interests; the "death of the author" evidently entails or is entailed by the death of aesthetic value judgements. Hence its irrelevance to practicing writers struggling to improve their craft.

The whole article, an unfavorable review of "The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England?" by Randall Stevenson, is here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n10/wood02_.html


[This message has been edited by AE (edited May 30, 2004).]

I find AE's comments here very useful, as they explain, from a theoretical perspective, why so many post-modern critics are not interested in aesthetics, or even craft.

I would add only, in my usual manner, imploring people that one should nonetheless take postmodern theory seriously, that the suspicion of intention and value is simply one element of the complex of theories that have lead various critics for various reasons to speak of the death of the author. We explored some of the others in the other "death of the author" thread.

Whenever I read comments like AE's, I am utterly persuaded by them, and yet I continue to be persuaded that I cannot, as a rigorous critic, give too much weight to an author's intentions. Such irreconcilable conflicts are typical of the post-modern condition.

epigone

Value follows intention - one way to assess value is to state what you think an author is trying to do then assess how well the author does it. If the author's trying to write a sad piece but produces a successful comedy, the piece is a success but the author has in some way failed. That failure may matter to the author (e.g. William McGonnigal) but I don't know why the readers should care. Such cases aren't that common though one sometimes hears of books written for children that succeed better with adults. Sometimes these are marketing mistakes rather than mistakes by the author.

[i]The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good?</> - what? authors have big egos and are always seeing how they measure up compared to the competition. Surely not.