Amos

You are right. We are looking for identity, rather, we are looking or the assurance of our identity with a universal truth and we can find this in poetic literature (or it would not be poetic). This universal truth is Love with a capital L and Romantic literature seems to be charged with this.

Supercharged, yes, it makes reference to those who claim to have a heigthened awareness of bible reading. They often talk about 'the veil has been lifted' and 'the grass is greener' and so on. No, I did not mean to extent this into literary analysis but I would not say that it is not impossible. I just do not 'know' but suspect that it can work against them because they seem to be troubled with telec vision (narrow-mindedness).

Ah Jung, I've heard of him. I don't know his theory so I really can't comment on his methodology. The archetypes do not have to be scoured because they usually stick out like a sore thumb. For example: "A River Merchants Wife: A Letter" or "The Convergence of the Twain" or, "We" is in "I, we four," are archetypal "Spires" that reflect upon the "Tempest" of life as we "Journey Along the Road-dust of the Sun." Did you not like my suggestion that Chapter 6 begins on the first day of Joyces evolutionary period?

Because of the harmonious explication I presented. He was leaning on "the Great Code" and got lost in it (next year it was dropped while I think it is a good beginning for such criticism). I think it would have been better if he would have just recognized my perspective but since he had claimed to be an authority on both it provoked some anger. It doesn't matter to me because I did my classes for my own personal enjoyment. I agree with you. If anything the Stoic mind would serve us best (but I love their always unique set and here especially Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain"). I like "A River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" because it is so damn Catholic. Are you familiar with this?

Edited to add a "not" that should have been there.

Amos

Very good and the text is both. It is a well delineated map of the jungle and almost always has a clearing in the end. It did for the Emporor Jones, Nietzsche (in his camel-lion allegory), for Siddharta, James De Mille, and most all the others (except Camus). This clearing suggest that they arrived at the 'end' of their searching and knew exactly how 'they got there' but never knew 'where' they were going 'while' they were going. So for them life itself was an uncharted jungle and wrote about their journey in retrospect. You are more than just a good rambler, you are not afraid and have nothing to be afraid of . . . but may I object?

The clearing in the jungle brings closure to the journey of life. It is where the Alpha meets the Omega and is the beginning of the new Life wherein Joyce would forge into the smithy of his own soul the un-created conscience of his race. The created conscience was the Alpha and the uncreated conscience was his contribution made between the Alpha and Omega now to be added to the Alpha so the beginning and the end may be one. To forge into the smithy of his own soul is to become one with the maker of his soul consciousness.

phaedrus

Hugo

After going through Olsen and fish’s comments…here are my thoughts…

The belief system in play determines how all evidence will be read (interpreted) and how an individual will then be able to turn around and justify a belief and corresponding evidence rhetorically. In other words, we each begin from a position, a conviction, and that conviction and the structure of beliefs to which it is attached will cause us to interpret evidence in such a way as to buttress that conviction and belief system and to repulse challenges to them. We cannot rise above or step outside of our belief system in order to assess evidence or arguments.

Don’t agree, granted most people in the world don’t like their views challenged, but making that a sweeping statement doesn’t make sense. An open-minded homo sapien, doesn’t do the above. An individual “interprets” evidence or information based on his/her current “web-of-beliefs” (rorty uses this as well). This web-of-belief is not an island but is connected to the individual webs-of-beliefs of other souls of the society. What this means is, all evidence which tends to challenge the current belief structure is viewed with obvious discomfort, but if this piece of “evidence” is deemed important by most of the individuals in the society, it alters the webs-of-beliefs of all individuals and also the “shared understanding” of the society. Given what we achieved (sic!) as a race through constant learning and re-learning, Olsen’s remarks seem to be out-of-touch with reality.

We justify a belief, then, by turning to the structure of beliefs from which the belief derives its intelligibility and within which it is coherent, and we then seek to express that intelligibility and coherence rhetorically, establishing a case for the belief.

But are we establishing a case for the belief to the external audience or to one’s own belief system? And why are trying to express this rhetorically? Why not just express the beliefs? Is he trying to get in the usual, whenever we open our mouths, we are trying to sell something?

This is not to say that our beliefs are supported by nothing, but that they are supported by others of our beliefs in a structure that is not so much a ladder - with underlying rungs providing a base for higher rungs - as it is a lattice or web whose component parts are mutually constitutive.

Yup sounds like the web of belief…..but what could be the underlying rungs and higher rungs, what is the basis for classification of beliefs in this way?

by the left, because there is some hope that if we can only be persuaded that our beliefs are unsupported by foundations independent of them, we will hold them less fiercely or do fewer terrible things in their names, and in general become kinder, gentler persons.

How does this amount to resistance by the left?

In short, beliefs emerge historically and in relation to the other beliefs that are already the content of our consciousness. This does not mean that beliefs or the actions that follow from them are irrational but that rationality - the marshaling of evidence, the giving of reasons, the posing of objections, the uncovering and correction of mistakes - is what takes place in the light of our beliefs. Belief is prior to rationality; rationality can only unfold in the context of convictions and commitments it neither chooses nor approves.

Umm…this boils down to one thing…things are dependent on ours' or society’s definitions / referential framework.

How do you read Fish?

Need I say more? If rhetoric is all there is, then why will I get persuaded by fish? What has he got to offer to us, except reduce everything to “rhetoric”….does he offer any different structure in its place for the society to work with. The way he goes about in the book saying Politics is all there is……..Principles and abstractions don’t exist except as the rhetorical accompaniments of practices in search of good public relations.... The assertion of interest is always what’s going on even when, and especially when, interest wraps itself in high-sounding abstractions. How is this different from Foucault’s notion of power play? Is fish indulging in PR here and I am supposed to be persuaded by his PR or is he making a truth statement? If it’s the latter then is he validating it?

If anyone says their understanding of rhetoric is based on Protagoras and his two statements – a) “About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not,” b) “Man is the measure of all things.” are getting into a logical inconsistency.

We've been over this in the relativism thread, but my response (and i'd guess Putnam's too...) would be that a God's-eye view isn't necessary to make the statement in the first place

Elaborate my friend……..

With regard to language and communication….

Dear all

Saussure's notion of syntagma can offer one some help here in understanding how words mean or the whole communication process. Its communication not public relations and that communication can be explained through gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” or lets say it’s a dynamic process (a hermeneutic circle?) where there are no points of origin, it’s a continuous process where there is not just a linear “encoding and decoding”, but a two-way flow and interplay between thought, expression and meaning. Let me see….think of it as a continuous and dissoluble unity of forms, there is no cause and effect, everything is integral.

What do you guys think of the following?

Merleau-Ponty's first point is that words, even when they finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of "affective" meaning which is not translatable into their conceptual definitions. There is, he argues, an affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves, which is contained in the words just insofar as they are patterned sounds, as just the sounds which this particular aistorical language uniquely uses, and which are much more like a melody--a "singing of the world"--than fully translatable, conceptual thought.

and this ……

The integration: of perception, action and language, resulting in the underlying isomorphism of all languages, combined with the true knowledge of the external world which the evolution of the cognitive and visual apparatus has made possible, opens the way to a new pursuit of philosophical truth through language. We need no longer distrust our own reasoning or our belief in the reality of causation in the external world. The intellectual development of mankind can proceed, as it is doing, but on a philosophically more secure basis and in the knowledge that language, as a flexible instrument designed to match the open-endedness of human experience (perception and action), can be a reliable medium for exploring, recording and developing man's knowledge of the external world and of his own nature

Hugo Holbling

I'm afraid i don't follow you here, jp. How does your Kuhnian exposition discount what Olsen said? His comments and Kuhn's work don't seem mutually exclusive to me. Until you clear up my confusion, i'm left thinking you have, shall we say, an optimistic reading of intellectual history.

The latter; i thought this was kinda obvious...



Take a look at that Derrida passage; is that how you read it?

What rungs? Fish was arguing for a different model of the belief structure.

Resistance to Fish's claim, that a belief about belief doesn't have "general rather than merely local consequences".

Is that the basis of your complaint? Do you want any criticism to offer a replacement for the critiqued?

I very much doubt that the irony of this particular aspect of his work has escaped Fish. Still, i'm struggling to see the parellel with Foucault - perhaps you can enlighten me?

I think not, my friend. I've been over this in the relativism thread so i suggest you take a look there. I got jumped on then and i'm not about to call in the clowns again; if you want to discuss this, pick apart my comments in that thread and we'll start anew here. Okay?

Still selling Gadamer, eh? How about expanding on your comments, so as we can see what you're offering before we buy?

Ah... i remember reading it in the Square du Vert Galant in Paris a few summers ago. Perhaps you'll set us off, with Amos responding and the rest of us joining in or looking on as appropriate?

No - i gave up on that one. The question was one of those i posted at the start of this thread; i want to tie it in with the idea that PoMo goes too far - further than we "should" allow - and therefore should be discounted. I've heard this a good deal, often implicitly, and i want to discuss it aside from dismissals based on actual criticisms. Does that make it clearer?

I guess it depends on the perspective: to the reader it may seem like a chaotic maze, while the author can wander with his eyes closed. What if the urge to write is similar to or influenced by the desire to show someone else something that it seems only you can see?

I'd have said the comments about lying were as important; isn't it strangely beautiful how he laughs at himself?

Reach, or grasp?

IIRC, Derrida considers this reaching to be of great importance, especially politically, and doesn't want to kill it. Thanks for your explication, which, alas, is too close to mine to provide any controversy.

Abrupt

I'm kind of pressed for time, but I'll just quickly reply to a couple of question that came up earlier.

I think Rorty is on to something when he notes that contintental philosophers are more prone to historicism and metaphilosophy, which many analytic students today have not the time, patience, or interest for. They would much rather rush into the problems - as those problems are presented to them - and try to offer some kind of solution.

This is reminiscent, of course, of science, and the ambition of analytic philosophy can be generally though of as trying endow philosophy with some kind of scientific rigor and systematicity that would, presumably, allow philosophy to make knowledge claims as authoritative as those made by science. Continental philosophers have no such aspirations, so when analytic philosophers look at continental writings, they are prone to see them as more "literary" than philosophical. There's an amusing statement by Ted Honderich that sums up this attitude rather well:

"One thinks of French philosophy that it aspires to the condition of literature or the condition of art, and that English and American philosophy aspires to the condition of science. French philosophy, one thinks of as picking up an idea and running with it, possibly into a nearby brick wall or over a local cliff, or something like that."

Well, when you trace the tradition on which Rorty draws, you ought to see that there really are acceptable answers, and I think Rorty sees that now more than before, as well. The pragmatists had an answer, and Witty had an answer, and Sellars had an answer and all the neopragmatists writing post-Quine now have answers, too. None of them have to do with trying to raise philosophical knowledge claims to an ahistorical Archimedean plateau. They just view philosophy as problem-solving, or as drawing new connections between different language games, or something like that. Blackburn, I think, uses the term "conceptual engineering", which appeals to me for so many reasons that I'm surprised no one else has picked up on that way of speaking yet.

Hugo Holbling

I guess i didn't make this clear enough. I'm asking this question with reference to those who reject Rorty and Derrida on the basis of what they (the former) think of their (the latter's) conclusions, at least according to their (the former's) - usually shoddy - reading; i.e. i'm lamenting the knee-jerk rejection (of anything, really...).

What about Derrida, in any case?

Abrupt

I wouldn't know.

Ok, then I'm confused. You asked, "where does philosophy go post-Derrida or Rorty?" My answer to this was that philosophy is a species of "conceptual engineering" (as opposed to "fact finding"), and among the things that postfoundational philosophers can do is reflexive generalizing and connection-drawing (cf. Sellars, Putnam) as well as dissolving illusory pseudo-problems that philosophers and ideologues past and present have created (Wittgenstein, etc).

You also said, "I think the lack of an acceptable answer is a poor reason to take a step back and reject them both." For the most part, I agree, although I can also sympathize with people who see very bad things fall out of Rorty et al. and so make an effort to ensure that others not take their views seriously. Many analytic philosophers (e.g. Haack) dislike Rorty because they feel that his theory opens up an abyss of irrationalism and antiscientism. They think that if the old conception of philosophy as a truth-finding discipline goes away, or loses force, certain epistemic values that they are fond of will fade from western intellectual life. For these people, the answers that I think philosophy can give to antifoundationalism simply won't do, in principle. If you are asking what kind of answers will do for them, I honestly don't know. One would think that if there were any, they wouldn't dismiss Rorty as they do.

As for Derrida, do you think that he creates additional problems for philosophy aside from the ones that Rorty does?

Luiseach

Hi Amos:

Your response reminds me of a very interesting book-length study of the relationship between literature and identity – more specifically, the relationship between national identity and the novel: The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (1999), by Cairns Craig. Although Craig focuses on Scottish nationalism and Scottish novels, what he has to say about the symbiosis between identity and literature could perhaps be applied in a similar way to what you are saying about poetry and our individual sense of identity. In the Introduction to the study, Craig says this:

The development of the novel is profoundly linked to the development of the modern nation. As Timothy Brennan has noted, it can hardly be accidental that ‘the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of literature – the novel.’ In the era of developing capitalism and global imperialism, the nation states which emerged as the standard political formations of the world required a populace committed not to an individual social superior, nor to a religion potentially encompassing all humanity, but to a particular territory and to a purposive history. As Benedict Anderson has argued, it was through the newspaper and the novel that the people of the new national states came to see themselves as communities, as the carriers of a national identity and as participants in a national history. (Cairns Craig 9)

What do you think of this passage, Amos? Do you think it applies?

I did indeed find it an interesting angle. Would you mind expanding on it a bit?

Ah! Was he using Northrop Frye?

I’m ashamed to say that I’m not familiar with that one. I’ll look it up, though....

Sorry to pose another question: What is it about ‘Catholic’ writing you find interesting? Muriel Spark, the author of many novels – including her most famous one, which was made into a movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – has often been described as a ‘Catholic’ writer. I’m intrigued by this label, perhaps because I don’t understand what the difference between a Catholic writer and, say, a Protestant writer, would be.

Luiseach

Hi again, Amos:

This raises the issue of memory into the discussion on authorial influence on interpretations of literary texts, doesn’t it? I mean, any text is written in retrospect, based on memory, which is not always reliable. Even if we try to be honest when recounting something from our past, we consciously and unconsciously include/exclude information to create a certain portrait of ourselves. As with Stephen Daedalus in Portrait. A representation – literal and figurative – of the artist as he remembers himself as a young man. We can ask ourselves as readers if Stephen is being honest, or if he is embellishing the truth somewhat to create the impression that he reached his goal as artist in a certain way. We can focus on his beach epiphany as an event recounted in retrospect – are there any inconsistencies in the text which might indicate that Stephen is making himself out to be more profound and clever than he really is? He sees the girl as an expression of feminine beauty, simplicity and mystery – an ordinary woman transformed by the artist’s eye into something mystical. And yet, we also recall Stephen’s more sordid view of women – his experiences with ladies of the night are recounted with shame and disgust. Then there is his attitude towards his mother – I always recall the bit where he gets irritated by her sneezing. Then there is the mad nun he hears shrieking the name of ‘Jaysus, Jaysus,’ which he finds disturbing. All these views of womanhood, scattered throughout the text, jostling for supremacy. Which is correct? The epiphanic moment on the beach seems to counterbalance his negativised view of women elsewhere in the text. What are we to make of this? Further to this, what – by implication – are we to make of his view of masculinity and himself as a man. The title draws attention to his maleness and youth.

You certainly may!

So the arrival at the clearing could be seen as the completion of a circular journey. This might fit in well with the view of language as a closed, self-referential system of signs. Stephen is ‘written’ and ‘writes’ himself between the Alpha and Omega; with all his wanderings and search for enlightenment, he ends up where he started – on a beach at the sea, the sea being the symbol of life, the feminine, the mother, the waters of the birthing-process. The girl standing in the water – her body emerging from the waters – becomes the symbol of Stephen’s rebirth into maturity as a man – he can finally put aside his animosity to life, reality, and the feminine and ‘see’ the beauty in the ordinary. The true artist, in other words. I think Jung might say something else about the image: the waters might represent the unconscious, and the girl emerging from the waters might be seen as Stephen’s projected anima (his feminine creative side). Which would tie in well with the idea of the boy becoming an artist, a creator.

What do you think?

Luiseach

Hi there:

I first read Portrait in Grade 13, and found it incredibly depressing for some reason! The visualisation of hell scenes to which the young Stephen was subjected were palpably bleak and horrific.

The only time I was in Paris was to catch a connecting flight to Canada...I remember being amused at seeing some French people defiantly smoking in front of a no-smoking sign. When I asked a fierce-looking man if it was okay to smoke, even though there was a sign saying not to, he made one of those marvellously expressive gallic gestures with the hand holding the cigarette, shoved his other hand deeper into his pocket, sucked about half the cigarette into ash in one violent drag, and retorted, 'Mais, oui, bien sur...pourquoi pas?' lol It was also the first time I had to change British money into French money, speaking self-consciously in French to buy a baguette and an Orangina!
:-D

I've started an analysis of the novel in my last post (the one to Amos). I think it might be a good place to start. Stephen's epiphany, I mean. Any input would be great.

I think so. I think that even if we wanted to halt the progress of pomo, we couldn’t; it has become part of our modus operandi. Whether or not we agree with it, we’re infected with it…even theistic websites try to accommodate the sceptical influence of postmodernism to the Christian world-view, even if it means strawmanning the entire pomo enterprise to make it 'fit'. :-D

He can be very self-mocking, perhaps due to the fact that he is always aware of the irony of communicating with words which do contradict themselves. Is irony all we have to work with?

As for the question of lying: yes, the idea of promise is connected to the potential for falsehood.

Grasp is a better word to use, yes, definitely. Harsher. With a tinge of desperation. We grasp for meaning when we use language, always with the potential for being misunderstood, misinterpreted.