An Unpalatable Suggestion

A long time ago, when I was still in high-school, I wrote a poem called “A Night Out” for the school poetry competition. It is not the world’s best poem – I include it though because the ideas the motivated me to write it are ones that still occupy me today. It follows below.

            A Night Out

            Impotent accountants with ulcers

            Slip glistening oysters down rippling throats

            In acrylic restaurants; their wives raise toasts

            And roll back their eyes. Outside traffic pulses

            An unsteady rhythm; the swimming night

            Intoxicates the burning crowd that flood

            The pavement; passions dissolve in blood

            And breath that breaths “I love” but shies from light.

            Alone in bright swarming dark, think of those

            In silent homes; fevered dreams like dew dry;

            Trembling reach for hollow pills, clench cold eyes,

            To extinguish pain felt in unknown bones.

            Night-club beat echoes pound a sound through nerves;

            The pavement stirs like ocean waters;

            Unheard by all, the faint rustling mutter

            Of earnest prayers rising from cancer wards.

            The accountant and wife find some satisfaction;

            The revelling crowd unravels at dawn;           

            The pavement seems solid, substantial and calm;

            The vivid mind contrives a worldly remission.

            The psychic from the next room bends a fork.

            The audience claps then chats as before.

            The thoughts crystallize and drop to the floor.

            My body billows and wavers like smoke.

This is a poem, at heart, about the Placebo effect. When I was young I was hyper-rational, rejecting all notions that evoked the supernatural, such as the idea of ghosts or God – consequently, when I learned about the Placebo effect, I found it profoundly disturbing. How could the mind have influence over the body, how could a disease be arrested or cured by belief alone? It seemed bizarre and frightening and so strongly affected me that I have worried about it ever since. Despite my youthful faith in science, I now have a grudging acceptance of the power of magic. The Placebo effect is real, and I understand furthermore that it is increasingly being recognized by the medical world as an integral part of any treatment. According to Supernatural Selection, an anthropological work about the origins of religion that I am currently reading, it has even been suggested that the term ‘placebo effect’ should be replaced by another term, ‘contextual healing’ – the author Matt Rossano offers evidence that people who attend church regularly live around seven years longer than non-attendees and have significantly lower rates of mental illness. If religion can bring about health benefits, it can only be as a result of the Placebo effect (unless one wants to entertain the alternative hypothesis that God exists and actually answers prayers).

Realistically, the mechanism through which the placebo effect operates must be suggestion. If I consult with a physician, I put my trust in her and am inclined to accept the diagnosis that she makes. Much of the therapeutic value of medicine, as it was in the middle ages, is still based on the power of subconscious suggestion. (Consider homeopathy or acupuncture, therapies that are, when exposed to rational scrutiny, totally risible – and yet often successful.) Naturally, the general public don’t want to know that their doctors are more shamans than scientists, and the doctors themselves certainly don’t want the public to know this. Nevertheless, it is true.

It is at this point in the post that I want to propose my unpalatable hypothesis. Regular readers of my blog will know that, although I usually focus on literary theory, I occasionally touch on other topics, such as schizophrenia and my own stories. I have also on occasion alluded to issues of sexuality, such as in the post on David Foster Wallace and, more humorously, in the short story 69.  My unpalatable hypothesis is this: that homosexuality might be caused by subconscious suggestion. Homosexuals are made, not born. The unconscious suggestions that produces it may occur over many years, starting in childhood or adolescence, or may occur infrequently but at times when a person is under stress and highly suggestible. This hypothesis, that homosexuality is caused by subconscious suggestion, I imagine will seem ridiculous to most ordinary heterosexuals, heterosexuals who, if they think about it all, attribute the cause of homosexuality to ‘a gay gene’ or to some aspect of the mother-child relationship in infancy. The inconvenient truth, though, is that a person’s sexuality can change. It is possible, although I admit this seems incredible, for a person’s sexual identity to be destabilized by something amounting to hypnosis. The hypothesis is disagreeable, yes, I admit, because it amounts to an attack on the idea of an inviolate Self, but this does not make if false.

Consider the following scenario. An eighteen year old male presents in the psychiatrist’s office with psychosis. He believes that God is talking to him though television advertisements and the newspaper. Perhaps there is a sexual component to his psychosis. The psychiatrist, out of malice perhaps, decides to diagnose the patient as a repressed homosexual and advises him to “stop avoiding”. The young man, who is in a highly vulnerable and suggestible state, understands the implication but is unable to fight back. Because it is oblique rather than direct, the patient cannot challenge his psychiatrist’s opinion. The ‘suggestion’ (and this is what it effectively is) does not have immediate effect, though.  Rather it worms its way into the young psychotic’s subconscious mind and lies dormant for a long time, perhaps for years, before erupting into a full blown sexual crisis at some later stage. By the time the crisis occurs, the original suggestion may well have been forgotten.

The Placebo effect can create illness as well as cure it.

This unpalatable hypothesis seems to be bourn out by the world. If you talk to Gay men, you often find out that they don’t know themselves why they are Gay – I think this supports my hypothesis. These men have forgotten the original suggestions that destabilized their identities; furthermore they reshape their memories to fit their current identity. Interestingly, I believe it is more intelligent people who are most susceptible to suggestion. Stephen Frye is no mental slouch and neither was David Foster Wallace. You may believe me an idiot for making the claim that something so apparently essential as sexual identity can be altered by subconscious suggestion, but the evidence is all around us – and is often found in popular music. I would adduce, for example, the song “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies” by Faith No More and the song “Knives Out” by Radiohead – or, to pick a song from the Gay perspective instead, “Bang and Blame” by REM.  The unconscious mind is not separate from the situations in which its possessor finds himself and is collective rather than individual. Jung had a point.

You may wonder why I am interested in this topic. I feel I should confess that I have experienced psychosis myself – but the scenario I invented above is not autobiographical. For one thing, significantly, I was twenty-seven (not eighteen) when I first became ‘unwell’ and came to the attention of the psychiatrists. At the time, I had formed the delusional belief that the world was ruled by a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I didn't tell anyone what I believed at this time. This was the Bush era. Perhaps my belief was credible. (I jest of course.) It is true, though, that my psychiatrist told me, at the first consultation, to ‘stop avoiding’ and I have hated him ever since.

I hope that disclosing this rather stupid episode in my history does not impugn my credibility as a scholar of film and literature. It was a long time ago now. 

Literature as Speech-Act

I have decided not to apologize for this post as I did for the previous one. So what if I want to write abstrusely about epistemology and ontology? The discussion may be difficult but I believe what I have to say about fiction and truth is both notable and progressive. The theory that I am proposing is, I believe, quite a radical departure from previous theories of literature and I want to hope that some reader will stumble over it accidentally, understand it, enjoy it and recommend it to their friends. This does not seem, I hope, too immodest an ambition.

The last few essays, beginning with the post “Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature”, have been concerned with approaching literature from the position of Formal Logic. In today’s post I want to take this discussion a little further and tie up some loose ends. In particular, I would like to relate my project to John Searle’s theory of Speech-Acts. In passing, I will be saying something about the real world as well as about fiction.

Any literary text can be decomposed into a broad set of simple statements or propositions, propositions that the text makes either explicitly or implicitly. For example, the novel Ulysses can be broken down into ‘facts’ such as the statement “Leopold Bloom is married to Molly Bloom” or the statement “Bloom carries a potato in his pocket wherever he goes”. The number of statements asserted by a literary work can be enormous, particularly in the case of a novel as sprawling as Ulysses. Literary interpretation is tasked with the job of reproducing these statements in a different format, particularly those statements that are made implicitly rather than explicitly. (Analysis also, of course, is engaged with the task of finding relationships between these statements, a process we can describe as structural analysis.) One can make an important distinction between two different types of proposition. Some propositions refer to our shared reality and some refer only to the fictional world represented by the story. For example, on the 16^th of June 1904, the horse Throwaway won the Dublin Gold Cup, an event to which Ulysses indirectly refers. Consequently, one proposition that Ulysses asserts is “Throwaway won the Gold Cup”. This statement is open to historical scrutiny with respect to its truth or falsity. The statement “Bantam Lyons won a lot of money by betting on Throwaway” is, however, not a statement susceptible to independent verification; Bantam Lyons is a fictional character who exists only in Joyce’s Bloom-world and not in the real one. Our only source for information about him is the novel itself.

 The most important non-fictional propositions a story makes are the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’. I have spent quite a bit of time talking about these concepts in earlier posts, perhaps most clearly in the post “Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature”. In today’s post, though, I want to talk some more about the fictional propositions a text makes rather than its real-world relevant ones. How do we assess the truth or falsity of a statement drawn from Star Wars like “Luke Skywalker is Princess Leia’s brother”? In the previous post “Meongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge” I argued that these statements could be usefully understood as true statements concerning fictional worlds. Tolkien, I argued, had privileged access to a fictional world called Middle-Earth and faithfully in his stories transcribed facts about it, such as “Gimli is a dwarf” and “Frodo is a hobbit”. From this perspective, all the ideas in The Lord of the Rings are true statements concerning the fictional world to which he had access. We believe these ‘facts’, not because we can objectively, empirically and independently test them, but because we put our faith in Tolkien as an absolute authority on the history and inhabitants of Middle-Earth.

This construal has its advantages. It is helpful with respect to a number of problems concerning the status of fictional statements. Moreover it sheds light on an interesting aspect of literary criticism: stories are usually written in the past perfect but criticism tends to be written in the present tense. This is an indication that critics tacitly subscribe to the idea that fictions are windows on other worlds. However, one can wonder if this proposal is really feasible. Surely Tolkien invented Middle-Earth rather than discovering it? The rest of this post will be concerned with an alternative perspective on this issue, which employs ideas attributable to the philosopher John Searle.

I don’t have Searle’s works on hand and so I am working from memory. Searle, as I remember, argued that many types of language-use are not representational or referential propositions but are, rather, speech-acts that effect changes on the world. For example, the speech-act “By the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife” is a statement that, when said by a cleric or justice of the peace, alters the world. The statement is, itself, neither true or false but (when said by someone with the right kind of authority) it creates new conditions of future verifiability. Thereafter, if I say “Sam is Mary’s husband” or “Mary is Sam’s wife” I am making true statements. The speech-act has changed the world. Another such speech-act is the phrase “You are under arrest” ­– an order that only has effective power if said by a member of the police.

Although I don’t think Searle talks about this as much, there is a class of speech-act that is highly salient to the discussion– definitions. Suppose I say, “I define the term ‘psueoJedi’ as designating that class of people who identify themselves as Jedis on census reports but do so ironically or facetiously” and supposing that this term takes off, people may, in the future, be capable of making true statements such as “I call myself a Jedi but really I’m a pseudoJedi”. My original definition of the term, though, is not itself either true or false. A real world example of a definition type speech-act is furnished by the ‘discovery’, in the late nineteenth century by Arnold Pick and Emil Kraeplin, of a new disease that Pick called dementia praecox and which later came to be called schizophrenia. In coining a label for a collection of symptoms that he had observed, Pick redefined reality. What had formerly been loosely considered a type of madness would now be categorized as a physical illness. By coining this term, they changed the world.

A literary work can be viewed as an extended speech-act – and the type of speech-act it most closely resembles is a definition. The original definition is, from this perspective, neither true nor false, but it creates the conditions for future verifiability. The meaning of the word ‘hobbit’ as established by Tolkien includes the idea that hobbits walk bare-footed and have hairy feet. If I say “Frodo has hairy feet”, I am not only making a true statement, I am making a statement that is analytically true. (I touched on this idea in the post “Ascribing Attributes to Imaginary Entities”). According to Kant, analytic truths are known a priori. I think this is wrong. The mistake Kant and very many other philosophers make is that they forget that language is acquired. When I was very young and was basing my understanding of the world largely on The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher, I thought all fish were called ‘minnows’. Words are learned. Most garden-variety words are learned via ostensible definition: for example, we learn what the word ‘apple’ means by being shown one and being told the word. Later, we extend the term to all other objects that resemble this original example. Other words, though, obtain their meanings from some authority that has, at some point, defined the word (using other words) and has had his or her definition accepted by the relevant linguistic community. The meanings of words always rest on some authority and, critically, can change if the community decides to put its faith in a different authority.

I hope I am expressing myself clearly. I may have to write about these ideas again some time. I should say though that I have thought about these issues for years and, as proof of this, thought I would finish this essay with an anecdote. In around 2004, I wrote a number of Research essays on the poet John Ashbery; I decided to write about him quite arbitrarily, mainly because he was very influential on the post-modern poetic scene. I set myself the task of reading and interpreting his incredible long and difficult autobiographical poem Flow Chart. Having read it twice, I was forced to conclude that Ashbery must be gay and that this poem was his ‘coming-out’. Coming out as gay is a pre-eminent example of a speech-act, a verbal utterance that changes the world, and this was the gist of my essay about Ashbery’s poem, that it was a ‘presentation’ rather than a ‘representation’. This was years before I had read John Searle. Even then, though, I believed in speech-acts. These days I have wondered if I made a mistake in the essay I wrote about Ashbery. Perhaps he was attempting that most bizarre of actions, coming out as straight. The world is a strange place and such things are not impossible.

Meinongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge

The last couple of posts have been concerned truth and logic and, I am sorry to admit, this one and the next will also be concerned with fairly dry and abstract ratiocination on these themes. I apologize in advance. I feel my readers may be more interested in stories and critiques of films like Ghostbusters and A Beautiful Mind – but I have my reasons for wanting to write about predicate calculus and ontology. It is all part of the same process. I am endeavouring to devise a new theory of literary criticism and one cannot do so properly without addressing these issues. Any account of fiction must also account for reality.

Today’s post takes as its subject the question of whether existence is a property of things, a property that individuals can either possess or lack, or a ‘second order property’, that is, an instantiation of a first order property. This is a serious issue in logic and metaphysics. The second view, that existence is not a properly a property but rather the instantiation of a property, was put forward by Frege and Russel; the first view was proposed by Meinong. We can explore the difference between the opposed positions by considering the following two propositions: “Pegasus is a winged horse” and “There is a winged horse called Pegasus.” According to the descriptivist account, the one adopted by Frege and Russel, these two propositions are equivalent and can be alternatively expressed “Something in the world exists that is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” According to the descriptivists, both propositions are not only equivalent but also false. They are false because Pegasus does not exist. For the Meinongian however, these two propositions are qualitatively different: the first is true and the second false. The first can be alternatively expressed: “Some individual, either real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” This the Meinongian (or at least some Meinongians) regard as true, true because an individual need not exist to be the object of a predicate. The second can be alternatively expressed: “Some individual, either real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings, is a horse and actually exists.” This second proposition, which ascribes to Pegasus the property of actual existence, is the one Meinongians would decry as a falsehood.

Although the descriptivist proposal is the one more commonly accepted, I think I have to throw in my lot with the Meinongians. Extreme Meinongians believe that for every predicate or set of predicates there is at least one individual, real or imaginary, which satisfies all the relevant conditions. This can be contrasted with descriptivists who restrict the domain of propositional functions to real existing individuals. I am unsure (at the present state of my understanding) that I would go so far as to describe myself as an Extreme Meinongian, but I definitely would describe myself as some kind of Meinongian. I have no choice in the matter. If one wants to say that interpretations of fictional works can be true or false, we need to allow at least some imaginary entities into the tent. How else can we talk meaningfully about them? In the rest of this post, I am going to consider some of the objections to Meinongianism from I think an unusual perspective, an epistemological perspective, and attempt to show that these objections fail. (I should say that this post is indebted to the article on existence included in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence , for including these objections and forcing me to think of replies. The article is worth a look.)

One objection to Meiongianism is that it permits incomplete objects. An incomplete object is one that does not have the full set of properties one associates with a complete object. Consider the proposition “Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his left shoulder.” According to critics of Meiongianism, this proposition is neither true nor false and so fails the test of bivalence (because all propositions must be either be true or false.) It fails because the object in question is incomplete –all complete objects either have moles or don’t and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never mentions whether Holmes does or not. I want to disagree politely with this way of construing the objects predicated by fictive statements. I propose that Holmes is, in fact, a complete object and that this proposition is definitely either true or false. The issue is not that the proposition lacks a truth-value but that we have no way of knowing the proposition’s truth-value. Consider, as a counter-example, the proposition “Socrates had a mole on his left shoulder”. This proposition is definitely either true or false but we have no way of knowing, now, whether it is or not. Socrates’s mole has been lost to the sandstorm of time. The proposition concerning Holmes is comparable. Perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always imagined Holmes as having a mole on his left shoulder but never informed anyone; perhaps he even wrote a story that mentioned it but never published it or told anyone about it. Perhaps this story was exiled to a remote drawer of an obscure bureau and has never seen the light again. Just because we don’t know a fact does not mean it does not exist. Not having any means of knowing the truth-value of a proposition does not mean that it lacks a truth-value.

We can view the imaginary objects represented by literature in the following way: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had access to another world, call it Holmes-world, and selected facts about this world to inform his stories. Doyle is an absolute authority on Holmes-world in the same way that Tolkien is an absolute authority on Middle-Earth. With respect to the characters, locales and events peculiar to Middle-Earth, Tolkien is, like the Pope, infallible. Putting our faith in Tolkien, we can truly say that Gimli is a dwalf, Frodo is a hobbit and Arogorn truly the rightful scion to Gondor’s throne. All of these propositions are true, because Tolkien says so, and because Tolkien is the only one with privileged access to the domain of individuals and relationships that constitute the fictional world of Middle-Earth. (I appreciate the fact that Tolkien’s account may be internally inconsistent. Such inconsistencies are problematic for the proposal now under consideration but I do not have space to explore this issue here.)

A second objection to Meiongianism relates back the example I gave at the beginning of the essay. I quote the Stanford entry on existence: “Consider the condition of being winged, being a horse, and existing. By the naïve comprehension principle, there is an object with exactly those features. But then this object exists, as existing is one of its characterizing features. Intuitively, however, there is no existent winged horse; existing seems to require a bit more substance… This is overpopulation not of being but of existence as well.”

The hole in this objection concerns the argument’s use of the word ‘intuitively’. It is not intuitively obvious that Pegasus does not exist. Perhaps Pegasus is tenanted in Area 51 with Sasquatch, the water-powered automobile and Elvis. In truth, Pegasus’s lack of existence is something we accept on faith – it is part of ‘consensus reality’, the shared system of beliefs that inform our language and behaviour. The definition of Pegasus that most people accept is “a mythical winged horse”: if I say Pegasus is winged, or is a horse, or is mythical, I am making true statements – because a majority of people, I think, accept that these propositions are true. If I say that Pegasus exists in the real world, only a confused minority, I think, would believe me. This is, by the way, the problem with most discourse about logic. It depends too heavily on ‘intuitive’ (read ‘obvious’) facts.

I am arguing that true statements are true not because they correspond to entities in the world but because they conform to what people believe. And our beliefs not only concern ordinary properties but also concern whether objects are real, mythical, fictional or nonsensical. This is not to suggest that consensus reality is homogenous. People disagree frequently about many issues all the time. (I often find myself totally at odds with consensus reality.) Sometimes empirical facts have input into these debates, as when a scientist performs an experiment, but generally, when there is uncertainty, people make decisions about what to believe by trusting in some authoritative source. I believe that light can usefully be thought of as consisting of photons but my belief in this is based not on direct observation but on my faith in my Physics textbook; I believe that Socrates was mortal but this is because I trust in those sources that say he died when forced to ingest hemlock in 399 BC, rather than those sources that say he is still alive and is now domiciled in Area 51 with Elvis and the other aliens. If we are to accept that knowledge is phenomenological, we must also accept some form of Meiongianism, because we must accept that the reality of entities is contestable. 

Other objections to Meiongianism involve paradoxes related to meta-logic. I am not going to attempt to counter these objections here except to say that the descriptivist accounts are not free of paradox themselves. Consider, for example, ‘the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves’ or the issue of whether the word ‘heterological’ refers to itself or not. (I might mention in passing that the greatest problem with Predicate Calculus is not to do with fictional characters but rather the issue of time and change. Does the domain of a Quantifier cover only individuals existing currently? Or should it be extended to cover entities that used to exist but now no longer do? And, if so, should it also be extended to cover those entities that don’t exist, have never existed but will in the future?)

The key idea I want readers to take away from this is that a fiction is a partial description of another, albeit fictional, world and that the author of a fiction is an absolute authority on the elements of that world. There is another way of approaching the issue, employing the notion of speech-acts as proposed by John Searle. This will be the subject of my next post.

Ascribing Attributes to Imaginary Entities

I would be the first to admit that this blog is a loose, baggy monster. Sometimes I use it to promote my own theory of narrative, sometimes to present interpretations of written fictions and of films, and sometimes as a vehicle for my own short stories. I hope that those who stumble over this blog by accident forgive me for so often digressing. It is the prerogative of all bloggers to write about whatever they want. In today’s post I thought I would follow up the previous one by talking a little more about truth and logical propositions. I concede that this post is quite abstract and difficult - I feel that people generally prefer to read my short stories rather than my philosophical musings. But perhaps someone might find this post at least a little interesting.

The current post concerns logical statements. Consider the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn.” This is a universal proposition that would be falsified by the existential proposition “At least one unicorn exists that does not have a single horn.”   One of these two statements must be true and the other false. Empirically, it must be the second proposition that is false – we say this because no unicorns exist at all. Consequently, by the law of non-contradiction, the first proposition must be true.

Now consider the proposition “All unicorns each don’t have a single horn.” The counterpart to this statement is “At least one unicorn exists that has a single horn.” Once again, the existential proposition is false and so, consequently, the universal proposition must be true. We seem to have hit on a paradox! It seems that, logically, the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn” and the proposition “All unicorns each don’t have a single horn” are both true - and yet they can’t both be true at the same time because they contradict each other. The problem we have here is that unicorns are imaginary and so one can’t truly attribute properties to them. One route out of this impasse is to decree that all propositions about imaginary entities are necessarily false. Another is to define all such propositions as meaningless. I believe (although I am not sure) that the later solution was the one adopted by Bertrand Russel.

There is a third approach. We could say that the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn” must be true because it follows quite simply from the definition of the word ‘unicorn’. (The second universal proposition mentioned above would then be false.) The proposition "All unicorns each have a single horn" would be what Kant calls an ‘analytic truth’. Analytic truths are true by virtue of how we define the words we use. A famous example of another analytic truth is the proposition “All bachelors are unmarried.” This statement is true by virtue of the definition of the word ‘bachelor’ and (according to Kantian logic) would be true even in universes that do not have bachelors. If you were to ask the average man in the street which universal proposition concerning unicorns he believed to be true he would probably pick the one above; he would do so because it follows directly from the generally accepted definition of the word ‘unicorn’. Analytic propositions are true or false not by virtue of empirical evidence that verifies, supports or refutes them but rather by virtue of what people believe concerning the meaning of words.

So we must accept two types of truth, empirical truths and presumptive truths, truths based on fact and truths based on belief (presumptive is not quite the right word but I am unsure of a better word to use). In the real world there is, in fact, no clear-cut distinction between these two types of truth. Statements concerning ‘God’ or ‘love’ or ‘morality’ do not easily fall into either category. In antiquity, people believed that unicorns actually existed - reality is to some extent what we make it.

This discussion has enormous importance to the interpretation of literature. Literary criticism is entirely concerned with fictional entities – and yet we would like to think that some interpretations are true and others false, or, at least, that some interpretations are better than others. Consider the statement “Hamlet is a Dane” or the statement “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father”. Neither proposition is empirically verifiable and yet we would like to think that neither is meaningless, that both are actually true. The film “The Empire Strikes Back” defines Darth Vader as Luke’s father and consequently all future statements concerning Darth Vader must fall back on this definition.  The better solution to the paradox concerning imaginary entities it is to say that statements about fictional characters are analytic rather than empirical truths, that they are based on definition rather than on fact. In literary criticism and in many other discourses, it seems, truth does not depend upon factual evidence but rather upon an established consensus among the relevant community.

Obviously this discussion hinges on the notion of ‘definition’ and this opens up a whole other can of worms.  I may have to talk about it in a later post. For those interested I recommend an earlier post “On Metaphor and Interpretation”, a somewhat less dense and more readable essay. Those interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the literary theory I am proposing might want to have a look at it.

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.