Reference: Stephan Matuschek.  Literarische Spieltheorie: Von Petrarca bis zu den Brüdern Schlegel.

I am crawling though this wonderful book.  The obstacle is not Matuschek's writing by my weak German.  I have prepared the following paraphrase and commentary to sort out my own understanding of the penultimate chapter of his book.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

“’Nuda veritas’ is honorable, but ‘ad nudam delectationem’ can mean only shame.” (Matuschek 180)

The early Enlightenment critics of poetry honour the bare truth but warn shame bare delight.  Matuschek does an admirable job of tracing the development of an ethics of play throughout from mid-17th century French debates about play and poetry to German critics considering the role of play in the ethics and poetry of a developing national vernacular culture.  From French Jesuits to German Rationalists, play is seen as licentious dalliance with bare delight.  The critics' concern is not (solely) with representation of seductive objects, but with the unproductive employment of creative faculties in peculiar, private word games.

This is the Classical Era and the classic of choice for literary critics is Horace's "Ars Poetica."  It gave as the aim of poetry  "aut prodesse aut delectare," or to profit and delight. The “prodesse” bit is sometime translated as “to teach.”  And Norman Holland characterizes such translations as symptomatic of “duller periods of literary history” where to teach means “teaching better morals.” This moralization of “prodesse” is evident in the poetology of the early Enlightenment but is more subtle than that derided by Holland.  But both the dull moralist and the earnest rationalist might share a conception of play: play is often posited as the antithesis to all that is profitable, including all that is profitable in the writing and reading of literature.

In the “Deutsche Ethik” of 1720, Wolff stressed the necessity of employing “der Witz” in the service of an understanding that seeks profundity.  It is unethical to waste Witz in a peculiar, private “Wort-Spiel.”  The valuable faculty for observing similarities must not be wasted unproductively in playing with words or representations but in discovering actual similarities.

Gottsched’s “Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen” (1730) makes the case that Horatian "prodesse” should mean making the reader “more clever and virtuous.”  The poet is to employ his or her creativity to engage readers in activities that will cultivate these faculties.  His later "Handlexicon" (1760) makes it clear that the "Spielende Schreibart," the kind of playful and unproductive writing theorists of the Classical era regularly condemn, is a relic of the Baroque era, something too childish and unproductive to be of use for an enlightened German literature.  Profitable poetry must employ the poet's cleverness and virtue in the cultivation of the same faculties in readers.

A similar concerning the understanding is included among the “virtutes intellectuales” in Wolff’s Philosophia Moralis sive Ethica.  And there too Witz is given its proper place: Witz or “ingenium” is the “facultas rerum similitudines observandi.” The paragraph “De ingenii usu in fingendo” examines the work of poetic invention with an ethical interest.  The poet is, predictably, expected to hold up examples of conduct that will inculcate virtue, not foolishness. Of more interest is the way in which Wolff twice places play in proximity to the vice of “laciviousness."  This happens once in condemning the poet who shapes histories in a way that is “ludicris atque lascivis,” and again in the case of poets whose tales are both "ludicrae atque lascivae.”  Wolff's repetition stresses his assertion that is it unethical to waste Witz/”ingenium” in games that dally with lasciviousness instead of productive work towards truth and virtue. Such waste substitutes bare delight for delight in bare truth.

The aimless indulgence of the poet’s Witz/ingenium is a moral lapse that encourages similar lapses on the part of readers.  No one profits from this activity.  Profitable poetry helps one recognize truth, cultivate virtues, and drive away vices, and “lusus ingenii” or ""spielende Schreibart" provide no help in achieving these aims.

A connection with Nabokov would work here.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/15/why-i-still-write-poetry/

Also: chess/poetry/intellectuals/eastern europe: is this a thing?

There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kind of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

http://www.researchgate.net/topic/Art_and_Science/post/Monroe_beardsley_complexity_of_modern_batik_write_in_sidoarjo

How do we evaluate aesthetic complexity? How can we increase the sensation of aesthetic complexity for consumers?

The impossible thing before breakfast, methinks.

http://www.bakeru.edu/crit/

Baker University's Center for Critical Thinking
provides in-service faculty development programs and
seminars, posts selected papers on critical thinking
(especially the approach adopted at Baker), is
engaged in on-going research and
assessment of critical thinking
methodologies, maintains a large
bibliography on critical thinking articles, texts and
books, and provides links to other critical thinking
web sites and resources.

http://www.criticalthinking.org/

Web site is a little old skool.

The concept is excellent:


We cannot deal with incessant and accelerating change and complexity
without revolutionizing our thinking. Traditionally our thinking has
been designed for routine, for habit, for automation and fixed
procedure. We learned how to do our job once, and then we used what we
learned over and over.  But the problems we now
face, and will increasingly face, require a radically different form of
thinking, thinking that is more complex, more adaptable, more sensitive
to divergent points of view.  The world in which
we now live requires that we continually relearn, that we routinely
rethink our decisions, that we regularly reevaluate the way we work and
live.  In short, there is a new world facing us,
one in which the power of the mind to command itself, to regularly
engage in self-analysis, will increasingly determine the quality of our
work, the quality of our lives, and perhaps even, our very survival.

http://ailact.mcmaster.ca/

Founded in 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical
Thinking (AILACT) is a non-profit scholarly association which aims to
promote research into, teaching of, and testing of informal logic and
critical thinking. It sponsors programs in conjunction with the annual
meetings of the Eastern, Pacific and Central divisions of the American
Philosophical Association, and has in the past sponsored programs in
conjunction with the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical
Association.

My bad.

There IS a discipline that talks about how social primates developed cultural structures which relate them in larger groups.  It is called "An- thro - pol - o - gee."

Have I ever heard of it before?

Guess I have.

Thanks for reminding be about it Scott Atran.  And for giving some serious prods to the swagger of the New Atheists on Point of Inquiry.

Remember atheists: magic is NOT the same as religion or the sacred.

Will have to check this out.  and this too.

"Thoughtless Disbelief"

Not rational, but living in the freedom to disbelieve.

http://uottawa.academia.edu/AdamGoodwin/Papers/898462/Faith_In_Control_Militant_Atheism_Epistemological_Bigotry_and_State_Violence

The author presents Dennet, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens constitute a "hegemony" which somehow shores up the "neo-liberal secular capitalist order."

Instead of millitant atheism there are "traditionalist perspectives" that foreground "intersubjectivity" instead of an authoritarian epistemology.

A somewhat vulgar response:  the honest questions of "do you really believe that B.S. you are preaching?" or "why on earth should I accept your ideas?" are questions to ask of clerics, leaders, evangelists, and apologists.  One could bring up Bakhtin and his praise of the insolent, snotty, disrespectful treatment that festival participants or folkloric discourses turn on institutionalized pieties.

And what is a leftist doing privileging traditionalist perspectives.  Traditions are maintained by institutions and dominant figures -- institutions are to be left unquestioned?

Of greatest value in the paper is Goodwin's insistence that the athiests' dislike of religious praxis clashes with their preoccupation with epistemology.  This is a very telling critique.  Now, some like Paul Kurtz have always been concerned with practice over epistemology.  As a student of Dewey, Kurtz is a pragmatist and his secular humanism is based on creating a desired future through discussion, co-operation and experiment -- in short, practice.  But integral to that pragmatism is the notion of experiment and testing.  And, consequently, all our propositions and sentiments will come into question, whether it is the demotic "what kind of B.S. are you selling?," philosophic tests of pragmatic relevance, or a very loose application of the kind of hypothesis testing often acquainted with experimental science but not restricted to it.  Asking yourself "is raw fish tasty enough to become part of my snack repetoire," figuring out the best vendours to try, then trying them, is hypothesis testing.  Going with uninvestigated tradition -- "raw fish is great, says Mom" or ""raw fish, that sounds weird, don't eat it" -- won't resolve the question.

He accuses the horsemen of determinism where they take an evolutionary approach, which means chance, probability, emergent structure are what is happening, not simple cause and effect.  But evolutionary or game theoretical approaches have not spread as far as they could have.  Pierce opened the door to a philosophic and practical approach to understanding what it means to live in a universe of chance and evolutionary change but few social theorists have been willing to follow him. (Goodwin recasts the Horsemens' evolutionary thinking in traditional sociological distinctions between agency and structure)

And turning to Noam Chomsky to justify an ethical critique of the 4 Horsemen?  That is a fumble which costs you the game.  Chomsky's linguistic investigations are based on a thoroughgoing rejection of social-constructivism.  He regards language as an organ, like the liver.  Remember the snarky motto that the M.I.T. linguists are supposed to have had printed on their pencils: "context sucks"?

Chomsky is a strict positivist: he will not permit any connection to be made between his studies of language and his anarchist politics.  Occasionally, he will make comments about how egalitarian politics and our individual freedoms are rooted in the animal that we are.  But he holds out Humbolt and Kropotkin -- practicioners of the kind of Enlightenment rationalism Goodwin sees at work in the neo-atheists -- as good sources for thinking about freedom and society.  And he can come down pretty hard on the postmodernists.

But the article is a sign of things to come: those who argue forcefully against traditional beliefs will have to offer pragmatic reasons for believers to change the way they act, not batter away at what people think with their supposed superior insight.  But testing, reflecting, and discussing are PRACTICAL activities and engagement in those practices could very well endanger the religious and cultural traditions in which some people embed themselves.

Should American secularists really begin a respectful, hermeneutically open dialogue with Michelle Bachman and pastors who have helped stoke the fires of lethal homophobic prejudice in Uganda and elsewhere?  I doubt that Goodman would agree to that.

Finally turned to one of the books on my shelf that has been taunting me for over a decade:  Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html

It's magisterial, classic, seminal, provocative.

But I cannot see my way past one of the fundamental assumptions of the book.  It is one of the fundamental assumptions of a great deal of cultural history.  Robert Alun Jones puts it this way:

"The most ambitious claim of The Elementary Forms, of course, is that the most basic categories of human thought have their origin in social experience."

No. 

Sorry to be a positivist pill.  But no, they don't.  You could be a Kantian and talk about the fundamental categories of perception and thought that orient distinct persons but are universal (that old empirco-transcendental doublet).  Or you could follow the Chomsky/Pinker/Dennet angle and consider language/perception and thought/philosophical reasoning itself as products of the physical evolution of the species.  Their evolutionary and materialist perspectives are, for me, the correct ones. 

So religiosity (as distinct from magic or simple deluded thinking) may provide many of the basic categories of human thought, and this religiosity may be inseparable from social experience.  But that social experience is the experience of a hairless African primate that has evolved to have a complex social life.  And, apologies to Aristotle, the political animal that we have evolved to be is not one suited to a city or nation, but one suited to small communities where you know every member, and your relationship to all members of that community at any given moment is of immediate concern.  To talk of cities and nations and cultures is to talk of real entities.  They might be emergent from the phenotypic expression of the innate, genotypic sociality of the animal that we are, but they are emergent and require a mode of thinking that doesn't conflate the behaviours of the small-group primate with economic, military, and cultural activities involving millions of those hairless monkeys.

The trouble is that bio-evolutionary psychological perspectives will not lead one to say ANYTHING interesting about the things that interest me: particular pieces of culture that deserve examination, appreciation, and performance.  I.e., plays.  Generalities -- whether biological, linguistic, or psychological -- are not conducive for looking at particular works of art and their affiliations to each other and their cultures. Because the shifts, reversals, inversions, explosions and condensations of cultural elements that are the subject of humanistic study happen at the scale of centuries, or decades, or even between years.  These spans of time are orders of magnitude smaller than the history of the biological evolution of our gene-rooted sociality. 

I don't feel comfortable accepting the tabula rasa proposed by the sociologists.  But the natural historical approach has repeatedly led to vauge generalizations (factor X is present in work Y because of some "essential human nature") or eternalizing judgements that shut off any discussion, kill conversations, and can inculcate prejudice (factor X in work Y affirms the existence of some human -- or male, or female, or racial -- quality that has evolved in primordial time and will last for millennia).

All these complexities are arising from a question which has been perplexing me for weeks: is there a way of thinking or discussing unbelief that does not reduce the doubter to an outlier or even an essential element of religious cultures.  What does it mean to doubt if, as Durkheim suggests, the god is society symbolizing itself, and there are no categories of thought, feeling, or behaviour that are not inescapably social?

I need to practice some guitar now