Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature

Regular readers of my blog (and I hope I have some) will be aware that I have been, from the beginning, trying to set out a novel theory of literary criticism. The theory of narrative that I have been proposing is based on the idea that a story is a kind of rhetorical construction and that it argues in favour of two mutually-exclusive statements about the world at the same time, statements that I term the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’. It is the tension between the two opposing world-views that creates conflict. A story generally ends with the victory of the thesis over the antithesis – although some stories can finish ambiguously, leaving the issue open. I wrote about this in my first post, the ‘Preamble’ and I have put the theory into practice a couple of times since, for instance in the post about James Joyce’s “The Dead”.

In today’s post I am going to try something new, something that I think may be radical and wholly original and that I suspect may never have been attempted before – to apply the logic of Predicate Calculus to narrative. I need first to say something about Predicate Calculus. Predicate Calculus is a quasi-mathematical formalism, invented by Gottlob Frege and Charles Pierce in the late nineteenth century, which developed from and synthesises the older systems of propositional logic and syllogistic logic. The major advance made by Predicate Calculus is that it introduces the terms Universal Quantifier (represented by a symbol that I cannot put down because Blogspot does not include it as an option) and Existential Quantifier (ditto previous note): the first can be interpreted as signifying the clause “For all things in the world..."; the second can be interpreted as signifying "At least one thing in the world exists such that…” For example, the proposition “All swans are white” can be put into Predicate Calculus form as “Ax: xS C xW” which literally means  “For all things in the world, if it is a swan then it is white”. The proposition “Some swans are black” can be expressed “Ex: xS & ¬xW” which literally means “Something exists in the world that is a swan and is not white.”

[Note:  because blogspot does not know the symbols for logical operators, this is a slightly fudged description of Predicate Calculus. The Universal Quantifier is actually an upside-down A and the Existential Quantifier a backwards E. The if-then symbol should be a horseshoe facing the other way. If you want a less fudged explanation of Predicate Calculus, you can easily find one elsewhere on the Internet.]

Propositions always come in pairs. A universal proposition such as “All swans are white” must be false if the existential proposition “Some swans are black” is true, and vice versa. I believe that the thesis and the antithesis expressed by a story can be viewed as examples of such paired propositions. For example, the thesis of Star Wars is “Good always triumphs over evil” and the antithesis is “Sometimes evil can triumph over good.” Because the Empire is presented as vastly more powerful than Luke and the Rebels, Luke’s eventual victory is a strong argument in favour of the thesis. In the film Sleepless in Seattle, the thesis of the film is “Everyone is destined to be with his or her true love” and the antithesis of the films is “Sometimes the obstacles are too great”. In this film, the destined lovers are on opposite sides of America and yet they still get together– the fact that they successfully find each other is testament to the ‘truth’ of the thesis. In Macbeth, the thesis of the play is “Everyone pays for their crimes” and the antithesis is “Sometimes people get away with murder.” In Macbeth, the witches continually prophecy that Macbeth will escape divine retribution but, in the final analysis, the witches are unnatural whereas moral consequences are a part of the natural order of things. According to all natural laws, Macbeth must die. The witches’ riddling prophecies contain loopholes and it is through these loopholes that Providence reasserts itself.

The examples I have given above suggest that stories always argue in support of Universal Propositions rather than Existential Propositions. This is not the case. Sometimes the thesis a story asserts is actually an Existential Proposition. In Othello, the thesis is “Sometimes jealousy is unfounded”. The antithesis is “There is always genuine grounds for jealousy.” The fact that Othello, a good if easily gulled man, can so easily be taken in by Iago’s plotting is an argument in favour of the antithesis – but it is the thesis that is shown to be true. In Romeo and Juliet, the thesis is “Sometimes the obstacles to true love are too great” and the antithesis is “Everyone is destined to be with their true love” – it is the opposite of Sleepless in Seattle in this respect (and in fact the opposite of most other romantic comedies. One thinks of Something About Mary). The depth and total commitment of Romeo’s and Juliet’s love for each other is not enough to save them. This is perhaps the significant difference between comedies and tragedies. Comedies tend to espouse comforting Universal Propositions – they please because they reassure. Tragedies, by contrast, tend to embrace the exception rather than the accepted rule and this is why they disturb.

Regular readers may also have noticed that I generally tend to come back to the same literary examples in my writing. This is because it is convenient and I am lazy. Nevertheless, this form of literary analysis can be applied to all stories, all books, all films and possibly even most poetry. Recently I saw the Spielberg film Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks. I thought the film was great – perhaps partly because the Coen brothers had input into the script. This film is not immune to analysis of this sort. If one wants, one can interpret Bridge of Spies in terms of thesis and antithesis. In my view, the film is dedicated to the claim “Enemy spies should be treated as humanely as we would want the enemy to treat our own combatants.” The antithesis presented by the film is “Enemy spies are evil and should be imprisoned forever or executed.” The film treats the Communist foe ambiguously – sometimes it is represented as an Evil Empire, sometimes as a mirror image of the American-led Western alliance. I am unsure if the thesis is a Universal or Existential proposition, but I will say one thing about the film generally. It does not draw explicit parallels to Guantanomo Bay but one has to wonder if the compassion extended towards the Russian spy in the film is not something that should also be extended, in the present day, to the inhabitants of this brutal institution.

The theory of narrative I am proposing can be applied to almost all stories. Stories which resist interpretation in this way tend not to be good stories – they lack cohesion, they lack a central, defining idea. My theory is that the central idea of a story can be expressed as a logical proposition. A story is trying to persuade its audience that its thesis, its moral, is true. The fact that different stories can present contradictory morals evinces the fact that there is no genuine reality behind them, that truth is what we make it. This fact may be depressing but it is undeniable.

Why I hate "A Beautiful Mind"

Stories constitute a kind of rhetoric and one of their functions is to construct the reality in which we live. Schizophrenia defies explanation – but it is susceptible to the theories that we invent to try to explain it. If a schizophrenic comes to believe in the theory of the schizophrenogenic mother, for instance, he or she may decide to blame his or her mother; if he or she believes that the condition is caused by childhood trauma, say of a sexual nature, he or she may unwittingly invent a false memory of such trauma to makes sense of why he or she should suffer so. The Soul is malleable. Perhaps the best approach to Schizophrenia is to pragmatically devise the theory that gives the patient the greatest possible hope for recovery and a normal life, and the least possible stigma. Or perhaps the psychiatrists could actually try to establish the reasons why a person has become ‘ill’ in the first place by determining the environmental causes that provoked the first episode (such causes probably differ from person to person). This approach would be preferable to most current theories, theories that stick a terrible label on a person and which put him or her in a sealed box from which they can never escape.

I should say something first about the theory of schizophrenia that prevails today. This theory holds not that the condition is a reaction to environmental stresses but that it is a physical disease. As a result of bad genes or some such somatic agent, the psychotic’s brain overproduces dopamine; consequently the patient should ben given medication that suppresses dopamine levels. This is currently established medical wisdom. I think it’s bullshit but, then, what do I know?

Today’s post is on A Beautiful Mind, a film that is virtually unique in attempting to describe the schizophrenic experience from the inside. As such, the film takes on the significant task of elucidating the condition to a general public that knows little or nothing about it. This is a great responsibility. The protagonist, John Nash, based on a real person, is not an individual; he stands as an exemplar of all schizophrenics everywhere. Consequently, if the film propagates false ideas about the nature of madness, as I think it does, it deserves to be held to account. This is the purpose of this post. Before I begin though, I feel I should concede a small flaw in my preparation: the DVD I watched had a glitch in the middle so I have never seen the scene in which Nash is told he is schizophrenic. I have tried to rent other copies but, bizarrely, the glitch always occurs and always in the same place. I hope this gap in my knowledge won’t unduly affect this essay.

I know little about Nash apart from what I have gleaned or surmised from the film and from his Wikipedia page. I know enough, however, to be able to point out some major inaccuracies in the film. According to his Wikipedia page, Nash did not start experiencing paranoid delusions until 1958 or 1959 when he was about thirty years old; according to his own account he only began to hear voices in 1964, after six years of ‘treatment’ consisting of repeated hospitalizations, induced seizures and antipsychotics. The film, by contrast, presents Nash as interacting with his ‘imaginary friends’ as early as 1948 immediately after his acceptance into Princeton. The film also suggests that these delusional companions assumed corporeal form when in fact (and not until eighteen years later!) Nash only ever heard their voices.

Other inaccuracies in the film relate to the issue of Nash’s character. In 1952 Nash had an illegitimate child by a nurse Elenor Stier, a woman and child who don’t feature in the film at all; his relationship with his wife Alicia de Larde, moreover, was far rockier than presented in the film. He also reputedly had a couple of ‘homosexual experiences’ during his early adulthood but I am uncertain how relevant this is to his ’illness’. All of these troubling footnotes the film leaves entirely untouched. Generically, the film is tragedy-of-hubris tale and a saved-by-loved tale and the filmmakers obviously felt that including such details would spoil the picture. The facts should never get in the way of a good story.

I sincerely believe that the writers of A Beautiful Mind based their screenplay, not on the real Nash, but on a short psychiatric monograph on schizophrenia, an approach I despise because, quite honestly, I sincerely despise psychiatrists. Immediately after Nash is first institutionalized and is being given his first insulin injection, the psychiatrist tells his wife “You see the nightmare of schizophrenia is not knowing what’s true. Imagine if you had suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments that were most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be.” This statement misrepresents Nash because, as I pointed out earlier, Nash did not start experiencing psychotic symptoms until 1958, the previous year. More than this, though, it misrepresents the nature of schizophrenia itself. Paranoid delusions are rarely pleasant and, if a psychotic is fortunate enough to hear friendly voices rather than abusive ones, the fact of whether they are real or not is irrelevant.

In 1970 the real John Nash, with the consent of his doctors, discontinued his medication and gradually, over the course of several years, recovered. In the film, though, towards the end when the old Nash is being considered for the Nobel prize (around 1994) the film-Nash delivers the following short piece of dialogue to the person tasked with the job of assessing if he is fit to receive the award:  “I am [to be honest] crazy. I take the newer medications but I still see things that are not there… I simply choose not to acknowledge them.” This speech is all bullshit. The fact is that Nash didn’t take any kind of medication at all after 1970 and I would bet my life that, by the stage in his life that this scene depicts, he must have been completely free of psychotic symptoms and would never have described himself as ‘crazy’. The fact is that the real Nash believed that medication actually impeded the process of recovery. Apparently the film's director, Ron Howard, inserted this line about medication because he was worried that “the film would be criticized for suggesting that all schizophrenics can overcome their illness without medication”. In other words, the film was kowtowing to established psychiatric wisdom – whatever the hell that is.

According to established medical wisdom, schizophrenia is a physical illness that first manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, that is chronic and from which one can never recover. According to this wisdom, the condition cannot be cured, only managed by ‘appropriate’ treatment. This is the agenda the film is trying to push. There is no questioning of the veracity of psychiatric discourse and the psychiatrist in the film gets off scot-free. The idea that inducing epileptic fits can alleviate psychosis is plainly profoundly stupid but the film effectively endorses it. (This form of treatment has, by the way, long since ceased.) Personally, I think psychiatrists are generally stupid, incompetent or just plain corrupt; most of them don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing. Psychiatric discourse is a patch-work of sophisms but the public continues to invest trust in these people as though they are priests of an esoteric religion. As though one could draw a distinction between the diagnosis and the condition.

Obviously, I have strong views about schizophrenia. I have a theory about it – quite a good one I believe – that I worked out only today. I may write about it in a later post. Suffice it say that I believe in nurture, not nature, and I sincerely believe that schizophrenia is something from which a person can recover. So long as they receive humane treatment – as Nash plainly didn’t.

[Note, added 21 August 2016. This post is one of my popular post but it doesn't do John Nash's story  justice. About six month later I wrote a second post about Nash, "Why I Hate A Beautiful Mind Part 2". This second post elaborates further my understanding of Nash. This second post is also incomplete and is slightly tentative in its conclusions, especially towards the end, but if you have read this post about Nash I recommend you also read that other one.]

Narrative, Morality and Shakespeare

In past posts I have argued that literature should best be understood as a kind of rhetoric, that a literary text is an argument in favour of a particular proposition or set of propositions. In this instalment, I thought I would back up my views by going back to Shakespeare - but before I adduce some of Shakespeare’s plays in support of my theory, I thought I would say something about the world in which we live. This is necessary, I believe, because it is impossible to give a good account of fiction without also giving an account of reality.

Most of what we know about our social environment is based on hearsay. Theories of mind, of personality, of society, of science and of politics, we learn from textbooks, from TV, from conversations with others, from schooling, from novels and poetry and plays.  A person’s ethical system, in particular, is taught to him by the people around him. There is no way to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – although some have tried (John Searle has made a good attempt, as has Ayn Rand). We cannot learn our moral principles from direct observation of the physical world because the real world, the natural world, is inherently amoral; rather we absorb the ethical lessons underlying the books we read and movies we watch. Stories do not principally provide us with information about the actual world; rather they teach us how we properly ought to think and behave in certain situations. One of the great myths, for instance, that virtually all fictions espouse, is that the good are rewarded and that the wicked are chastened. In Shakespeare’s stories, anyone who kills another is doomed to die himself during the duration of the play. One is forced to wonder, though, if this notion of a necessary, causal relationship between good deed and reward, between crime and punishment, is not a massive con foisted on the general public. Josef Stalin died at the age of seventy-five still leader of the Soviet Union; Mao Zedong was still Chairman of the People’s Republic of China at his death at the age of eighty-three. Did these monsters deserve their success? Atrocities during the Second World War and in Cambodia during the late ‘Seventies, for instance, offer ironclad evidence on the other hand that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Our faith in moral acts having appropriate, condign consequences for the agents concerned is based not on reality but on the fictions we embrace. And fiction is far removed from reality.

The tenet that moral acts (and all acts are moral) have their consequences in this life or the next plays a central role in all major religions. Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven and a hell; Buddhists and Hindus believe in karma. The common feature of these religious systems is that if a person does not receive his proper requital in this life, he or she should expect it in the one after. Mainstream religions do not claim that the consequences of a moral action inevitably occur in this life; that particular idea is left to the poets, playwrights and authors. In a way the world’s storytellers are participating in a global conspiracy, a conspiracy to convince the public that if you do right you will inevitably benefit and if you do wrong you will suffer. It is a kind of conspiracy because this proposition is arguably frequently untrue; it is a benevolent conspiracy because, arguably, the world is a better place for this maxim being believed. The notion that the good inevitably prosper and that the wicked inevitably pay for their crimes is a kind of necessary fiction. It is a fiction because it is often untrue; it is necessary because society needs its constituents to believe it true for society to continue to operate. It is not the only necessary fiction: other examples of necessary fictions include the idea of an eternal unchanging soul and the idea of True Love. These necessary fictions help us navigate through life and one of the principal functions of literature, perhaps the most important one, is to create and sustain these beneficial illusions.

This idea that moral actions rebound on their authors is not, of course, the only proposition that fiction can propose. According to Lajos Egri, the premise of Othello is “Jealousy destroys the thing it loves”. The whole play, he proposes, operates as an argument in favour of this premise. I would like to suggest that the thesis of the play is far simpler: “Jealousy can be unfounded” – Egri’s premise is in fact the antithesis. It is of the nature of tragedy that the antithesis reaches its catastrophe before the thesis can assert itself.

Hamlet is a more complicated play and harder to interpret. The central conflict of the story concerns Hamlet’s indecision, his reluctance to carry out the wishes of his father’s ghost and take bloody revenge on his stepfather. The occasions when Hamlet kills, when he stabs or poisons Polonius, Laertes and Claudius, he kills out of passion or by accident, rather than from premeditation. The exact reason Hamlet hesitates so long, finds it so difficult to avenge his father, continues to mystify but, perhaps, a part of it is that to follow his father’s demand is to bring about his own death. The paradox of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy is that private (rather than public) retribution is simultaneously morally justified and a mortal sin that must inevitably also erase the avenger. Hamlet is mad, not only in seeming but in actuality, and it is surely true that his madness is because his father has trapped him in a double-bind. I may perhaps have to do some research on Hamlet and write about it again…

Macbeth also concerns the spiritual consequences of murder. The great complex soliloquy that Macbeth delivers at the beginning of Act 1 scene 7 about his intention to kill Duncan fundamentally deals with issues of moral causality. I quote the first part of the soliloquy:

            If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well

            It were done quickly: if th’ assassination

            Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,

            With his surcease, success; that but this blow

            Might be the be-all and end- all… here,

            But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

            We’ld jump the life to come. But in these cases

            We still have judgment here – that we but teach

            Bloody instructions, which being taught return

            To plague th’inventor: this even-handed justice

            Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice

            To our own lips.

Macbeth begins with the hope that the murder might be free of consequences – aside from the obvious effect of granting him the crown. He goes on to briefly consider the notion of an afterlife but decides kingship in this life worth the risk of eternal damnation in the next – or perhaps decides to simply ignore its possibility. He goes on to consider the act’s worldly consequences, that he might teach others to do to him the same violence that he intends to do to Duncan.

In the next part of the soliloquy  he considers Duncan’s virtues, virtues that

            Will plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against

            The deep damnation of his taking-off;

            And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

            Striding the blast, or Heaven’s cherubin, horsed

            Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

            Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,           

That tears shall drown the wind.

The soliloquy, taken as a whole, conveys an almost religious feeling, an almost supernatural intimation, that great moral crimes have profound magical effects on the world. Macbeth is a towering figure because his ambition, his criminal desire for power, is almost completely balanced by a powerful, instinctive (perhaps even subconscious) and almost mystical sense of good and evil. The consequence of the murder that Macbeth does not consider in the soliloquy is that his own conscience may plunge him into hell while he is still alive. This is the maxim of the story, its message, that when a person commits a great crime, he damns himself to hell even before he dies. Of course, this is a falsehood or, as I have said, a necessary fiction, but it is a fiction that most of us non-sociopathic ordinary folk find reassuring…

This particular post is, by the way, not the best I have written. Sometimes one begins a post not particularly sure of what one wants to say. For those interested in my better attempts at interpretation, I recommend the interpretations I did of Donnie Darko or “The Dead” by Joyce. My next post should be on A Beautiful Mind.  I hope it will be a good one.