Decadence and depravity

Decadence has both an outside and an inside. From the outside, it's simply a condition -- of resignation, self-contentment, ennui, without hope or despair. From the inside, though, it's a pose or posture -- as in Wilde or Beardsley -- a kind of rococo cool. Such a pose may or may not be itself a sign of genuine, or external decadence.

And depravity may or may not be an aspect of decadence. If it is, then it may be assumed, as part of the pose. But it can certainly be found on its own, as a condition characterized by indulgence in appetite, desire, or drive without moral considerations of any sort. Some may be born depraved, as in psychopathy, and some may become so. The latter at least have the possibility of extricating themselves from the condition -- the chance, in other words, of redemption.

Even psychopaths, i.e., the congenitally depraved, however, may learn to overcome their disability, as many do, to various degrees (making them notoriously difficult to detect). As a rule, we are all born with various instincts, including both moral and social instincts. The latter have to do with an implicit understanding of basic feelings and expectations in social situations, and those who lack these, even in varying degrees, are commonly assigned some position in a spectrum of autism disorders. The former, or moral instincts, have to do with an implicit understanding of basic fairness, justice, right and wrong, and it's interesting to consider the possibility that those who lack these, to whatever degree, might fit similarly on some spectrum of psychopathic disorders.

More interesting still is the question of how these instincts and their respective disorders might be related. Looking at them just as sets of instincts, one would tend to think of them as closely related, since social and moral behavior seem so intertwined. Yet psychopaths often have excellent social skills, and can use these skills to compensate for their lack of moral awareness; and similarly, I think, autistic people often have a strong moral sense, even if it's not always expressed in socially "appropriate" ways. So perhaps these kinds of instincts are more distinct than we might think?


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Liberal guilt

A pervasive theme in Elementory -- the association of moral uncertainty with ontological uncertainty. It's a peculiar re-emergence at a time when the draining away of traditional religious "faith" has left people more exposed than ever, and when science only seems to spiral down into ever more incomprehensible and alien, even artificial, non-human "realities". The old religions, of course, had guilt aplenty to dispense, starting with Original Sin -- a concept insulting to the modern notion of the individual, but useful to a traditional social matrix as a way of asserting a kind of universal equality in compensation for hierarchy. But that was a taught guilt -- liberal guilt, on the other hand, is a free-floating, self-generating phenomenon, kind of like what happens to a flywheel when its load is removed. (But also consider Trillings' comment re: Freud, that his resort to a "death instinct" stemmed from a desire to find a source of moral gravity again, in the absence of religion; both metaphors, however -- flywheel and gravity -- may operate here.)

Let's say that such guilt constitutes a theme of Elementory, where it's especially pertinent to the first half -- in fact it becomes a lever in the hands of the main antagonist. To quote from some earlier notes:

And now consider how such a theme might relate to the larger theme of contrasting appearance-as-screen with appearance-as-foundation. The issue is complex, but free-floating, as opposed to specific, guilt acts as a source of moral gravity for those perpetually troubled by the sense of an abyss over which they hover -- i.e., specifically for those lacking a sense of a foundation or bedrock on which to stand.

This is the explanation for that bien pensant "concern" that so often manifests itself in these circles. In the second half, then, would be nice to contrast real or substantive guilt.


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Kung fu and practice

Intriguing essay by Peimin Ni -- "Kung Fu for Philosophers":

An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others. In the art of kung fu, there is what Herbert Fingarette calls “the magical,” but “distinctively human” dimension of our practicality, a dimension that “always involves great effects produced effortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible power that is itself intangible, invisible, unmanifest.”[2]

Consider the protagonist of Blood as one who, having a natural charisma, learns how to affect others.

And, more deeply, consider this philosophical turn, from a metaphysical/epistemological/ontological pursuit of truth, to a more aesthetic pursuit of a kind of beauty -- but beauty in the form of something done well, even a life done well.  Note too the link to speech as act as distinct from communication, referring to Austin's "performative" function of language.

All of which, however, is just a part of the Inversion -- to this Eastern emphasis on the practice of living we need to bring back, reintegrate a Western emphasis on knowledge, but constructed rather than discovered knowledge, and constructed on the basis of practice.


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The world, the flesh, and Merleau-Ponty

Which, I suppose, suggests that M-P is in some sense associated with the Devil -- well, at least in the sense of a rejection of the rejection of the world and flesh. That's important, but it isn't what distinguishes M-P himself. Here's an attempt to explain just that:

Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece, Phenomenology of Perception, was a bold, internally coherent attempt to overcome the problems of empiricism and rationalism in the Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy. As Dillon has shown in his Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, it is pedagogically instructive to introduce Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as an attempt to resolve Meno's paradox. Meno's paradox, of course, is from the dialogue between Meno and Plato in Plato's Meno. Meno poses a dilemma to Plato: "But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you found is the thing you didn't know?"

Merleau-Ponty's existential-phenomenological epistemology and ontology can be seen as resolving the problem of Meno's paradox, and it does so by relentlessly demonstrating how both empiricism and rationalism fail to do so. Merleau-Ponty writes: "Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism (rationalism) fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching." (Phenomenology of Perception)

...

Merleau-Ponty begins his phenomenology by giving primacy to perception. The phenomenologist, says Merleau-Ponty, returns "to the world which precedes (scientific description), (the world) of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language as is geography in relation to the countryside."

... In order to understand how Merleau-Ponty understands this subject-object dialogue, we first need to understand a new idea, something which Merleau-Ponty brought to phenomenology: the idea of the lived body.

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. Recall that for Descartes the body is a machine and the mind is what runs the machine. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not a machine, but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies, and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh," made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world (see The Visible and the Invisible).

...

The idea of the lived body allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve Meno's paradox. The body is both transcendent and immanent. It is the "third term" between subject and object. I know that transcendent things exist because I can touch them, see them, hear them. But most importantly, I never know things in their totality, but always from an embodied perspective.

... I know when I've found what I'm looking for because the world is already pregnant with meaning in relation to my body. Things begin as ambiguous but become more determinate as I become bodily engaged with them. On the other hand, I do not already know what I am looking for, because the world transcends my total grasp. At any given time, the world as it is given includes not only what is revealed to me, but also what is concealed.

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"Touch"

This is the connector between the two parts of Elementory. So it needs to focus on the Inversion, as much as possible within the limits of this fictional context. Why not make an Escher print, then, the focus of the story? Because it's a connector, it's already out of the narrative pattern of the rest, and can be more free in its structure -- like to find a way to move in a spiral-like trajectory, starting from a very high altitude (where the preceding, "Earth", left off), and circling down into a self reference of some sort. Perhaps opening out again on the "other side" -- i.e., the inverted side -- in preparation for "Skin" that follows. ("Touch", of course, referring to the contact of self and world, flesh and earth.)

Could Nick (Air) be the protagonist, making him a sort of central figure for the whole, perhaps the only character who actually goes through the Inversion?

Consider an incident: the discovery of mind over matter (memory/flashback of an early acid trip) -- by a mere exercise of will, the grasping hand on the end of an arm can be raised and extended, its fingers opened and then closed around the cylinder of a glass, and the glass thereby brought to the table.... Ghost in the machine, and also ghost as machine, machine as ghost.

As for the Escher print, see "Print Gallery" for an example of a spiral at least, with its enigmatic blind spot at its impossible center:

Here's the that center itself, animated -- a kind of fractal perhaps:























P.S.: What's the difference between this and simply putting an exact copy of the same print in the gallery -- a print within a print? That too, obviously, has potentially infinite depth, but it's banal. What distinguishes this is that the print in the gallery is not a copy but is the same print as the one we're looking at. Escher has found a way of taking a part and merging it with the whole. It's impossible on a literal level, of course, which is why there's a hole in the center -- but it's a visual display of an idea that wholes and parts are mutually implicative.

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Elementory and the nature of narrative

Time for a fundamental rethink of what the short story collection is about. Still like the title, and the story titles themselves, though the latter are a bit throw-away. And still like the the overall structure -- four sets of paired stories, told and re-told, and one connector ("Touch"), for a total of nine. But the elaborate architecture built around Frye may be a layer of arbitrariness too many. Really want to just focus on the notion of the Inversion and its consequences, as manifested on a kind of micro-level -- the interactions of individuals. Also some experimenting with just fiction and narrative per se. So, some possible themes:

• The notion of the "dirty earth" (re: the Bergman quote) as opposed to world-spurning. (Fire/Bone perhaps)
• The notion of the world's "unfairness" as opposed to those who deal with what they're given. (Water/Blood)
• The most subtle or difficult of all perhaps is the combination of a kind of Darwinian fatalism (or, perhaps better, acceptance) coupled with a sense of embedded engagement (related to the compatibility argument re: free will and determinism). (Earth/Flesh)

The first pair, Air/Skin, may allude to all of the above, first as preview, then as recap.

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