Lit Crit: Ebony, Naama, Goat, Martin Gardner

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 7549

Ebony wrote:

> Hi Rita--as I said, I think the question is legitimate. I am giving
it  some
> thought before I answer. Those of us in the humanities are always
called
> upon to justify our "right to exist",

What good the humanities are is a good question, but not the one I
asked. I started by accepting the axiom that the humanities have value,
and mentioned ANATOMY OF CRITICISM by Northrup Frye as a lit-crit book
that I had found valuable to help understand literature better. (The
specific question that I was working with at the time was: can a movie
that ends with the heroic, wonderful protagonist dying be considered to
have a happy ending? specifically MR ROBERTS.)

My question is, how does psychoanalyzing authors from their book advance
the mission of the humanities? I will elaborate by using Naama and Goat,
below.

Naama wrote:

> Maybe then it will be established that on a very deep level there is
> randomality in our thoughts, decisions and actions. Then we will be
more
> busy looking at the beauty of the patterns our   minds create (akin to
the
> beauty of the patterns nature creates), instead of obsessing about
> underdetermining causes.

aBERFORTH'S gOAT WROTE:

> Do you? Really? I'm not sure. To believe that something (our pasts,
> our brains, our souls, our hang ups, God, the CIA, whatever) causes
> people to be who they are, is reassuring. It implies that I can (or
could,
> at least  theoretically) make sense of things people say, do or write,
rather
> than just gawp at them. And if I could understand why Jo (or
Dostojevski)
> wrote this or that, I might understand something new about myself. At
> which point, I might even see how to repair a broken part or two,
maybe
> even grow a bit
> (Of course, that leaves open the small question of freedom--but does
> making freedom a by-product of a chaotic interaction between
> quantum-dynamic brain squiggles really help?)

*I* think we should be more busy looking at the beauty of the patterns
our minds create, patterns which are called works of art, such as novels
and hand crafted rocking chairs, rather than obsessing about underlying
causes. Yay, Naama!  Deciding that the author wrote the novel because of
unresolved toilet training issues doesn't explain why the novel is
beautiful and doesn't point out its beautiful features that someone
might have overlooked and doesn't teach people how to make their novel
come out beautiful. Also, Goat, I expect to learn about myself and other
people from Hamlet's or Richard III's actions, reactions, and motives,
NOT from Shakespeare's (especially if he was Francis Bacon). The work of
art exists as itself whether it was written by Shakespeare or written by
Bacon or grew on a tree.

I think that one way of appreciating the beauty of the patterns that
nature creates is just to look at them, but another way is by
understanding how the underlying causes created that pattern. Some
people see more beauty by looking at the rainbow while understanding how
white light is split into colors by a prism because of being different
wavelengths.

It requires either a higher or a lower level of enlightenment than I
have to see beauty in some of the patterns (of behavior) that human
beings create -- racism is an example of a pattern that doesn't look
beautiful to me.

What natural science studies in the way of appreciating the causes of
the beauty in nature is also useful for making fun technology.
What social science studies in the way of appreciating the causes of the
real life behavior of real humans is also useful for coping with the
humans that one encounters in one's real life.

Incidentally, I agree with Martin Gardner (Whys of a Philosophical
Scrivener) that behaving at random is no more free will than is behaving
deterministically. If you decide all your actions by flipping a coin (or
tossing 2D10 (a pair of ten-sided dice)), you're the slave of the
coin/dice.
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