jriggenbach

Cut Ted some slack, Christopher, I beg of you! Look at it this way: humor is a scarce commodity; we should always be grateful for it whenever it comes our way. And Ted's spluttering, gulping, eye bulging outrage at the very mention of Michael Moore is nothing if not richly comical. I've seen only one of Moore's films, myself - it was Fahrenheit 9/11 - but I saw nothing in it that I'd call "fraud." Moore is an advocacy journalist. He makes no secret of his views. You know exactly what you're getting when you sit down to watch one of his films or read one of his articles or books. You take his views into account when you interpret and evaluate what you've seen and read. Is this somehow less satisfactory than the usual process of reading or viewing the work of journalists? Most journalists attempt to conceal their views (except for the more fundamental philosophical views they aren't even consciously aware of holding and certainly don't practice in any consistent manner). Reading or viewing the work of such journalists as these, the reader's (or viewer's) task is to try to figure out what those views probably are so as then to be able to take them into account in interpreting and evaluating what's he read or seen. This is somehow to be preferred to the process one enters into with a journalist like Michael Moore? Why? And why are we to regard Moore as any more reprehensible than Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter or the other rightwing hacks on Faux News? It is a certainty that the point of view Moore espouses is less reprehensible than the point of view those other worthies represent - just as it is a certainty that liberal Democrats (at least post-LBJ) tend to do less damage politically than conservative Republicans. JR

Of course what Moore means by the term "capitalism" is not what those of us who hang out around here mean by it. What he means by "capitalism" is what the majority of human beings who have ever used the term have meant by it - the system the term was originally coined to describe: the system people like us would call "state capitalism" or "mercantilism" or "corporatism" or even "fascism." State capitalism is evil,and people should rebel against it, in favor of a more "democratic" system - one in which each individual votes with his or her feet and his or her dollars for what he or she wants. JR

So tell me, oh wise one, just how does someone who hasn't "a clue as to the original" judge that a translation of that original has foregone "all art . . . for the sake of accuracy"? How does one judge "accuracy" with regard to an original as to which one hasn't a clue? Some of us are willing to be accused of "playing gotcha Objectionism," I guess, because we think words ought to be used as though they mean something: when we encounter someone promulgating some notion that, given the actual meanings of the words used to express it, makes no sense at all, we say so. You don't like that? Take it and stick it up your ass. Better yet, don't read my posts. JR

Just out of idle curiosity, how are you able to judge whether a translation of ancient Greek "doesn't lose the meaning" and is (or is not) "too literal"? Do you read ancient Greek? Or are we back in the wonderful world of "secondary sources"? JR

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the very best contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers and an important figure in 20th Century American literature. Her best novels are The Dispossessed (1974), The Word for World Is Forest (1976),The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Malafrena (1979), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). The last two titles are fantasies. Malafrena is a realistic novel, depicting the brief career of a young intellectual who attempts to promote classical liberalism in central Europe in the early 19th Century, at a time when such ideas are still considered too radical by too many to actually take hold and exercise wide influence. The Dispossessed, subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia," is a political novel, telling the story of a scientist born, reared, and educated on an anarchist planet (actually a large moon of the planet Urras) who is invited to visit and, later, to take up residence on the mixed-economy planet his anarchist world revolves around. LeGuin thinks of herself as an anarchist, but not of the sort some Objectivists have been tempted by. Rather than an individualist anarchist or "anarcho-capitalist," Le Guin, who clearly does not understand economics, is an anarcho-syndicalist. Interestingly, however, though she harbors many delusions about economics, LeGuin's artistic integrity is such that she is led inexorably to depict the anarchist society from which her hero, Shevek, comes as more or less permanently impoverished. And this is, of course, exactly what it would be. The opening scene of this novel will be a powerful emotional experience for any Objectivist or other sort of libertarian. This is an exceptionally well written novel from top to bottom, but it will be of greatest interest to those with a strong interest in political fiction. The same might be said of The Word for World Is Forest, which was written during the Vietnam War and has been seen as symbolically depicting aspects of that conflict in its portrayal of a scientific and military mission from Earth on a distant planet and the ways in which the newcomers from Earth treat the indigenous people of that planet. The Left Hand of Darkness also has political content (LeGuin is nothing if not remorselessly political in her thinking), but its primary focus is elsewhere - on sex roles and sexuality and what it might be like if humans (or intellectually advanced humanoids) were sexually ambiguous. As the Wikipedia article on the novel puts it, "The inhabitants of Gethen [the planet visited for political reasons by an emissary from Earth] are sequentially hermaphroditic humans; for twenty-four days of each twenty-six day lunar cycle they are sexually latent androgynes, and for the remaining two days (kemmer) are male or female, as determined by pheromonal negotiation with an interested sex partner. Thus each individual can both sire and bear children." Many critics and other readers regard this as LeGuin's best novel. I'm not sure about that, myself, but I cannot recommend it too highly. JR

I'm uninterested in how or what any writer is "considered" (particularly when the considering in question is being done by unnamed parties). I'm interested in what a writer actually is. Speaking very generally, it might be helpful to wean any given reader away from writers like Heinlein and Asimov so that the reader in question can learn the difference between slipshod, half-assed prose and artistically admirable prose. Note that Mr. Brown has no idea what writers I'm talking about - or even what sort of writers I'm talking about ("whatever those are") - but he has a very definite opinion of the quality of the science fiction these unspecified writers write. Is it even worth replying to such ignorance, irrespective of how ungrammatically and ineptly it's expressed? JR

Good luck with that, Phil. I think you're biting off more than you can chew. But, hey - what do I know? Actually, I'd appreciate it if you'd take that literally. I meant it literally. And how, exactly, am I going to learn not to generalize from my own experience where I lived when my "teacher" does exactly the same thing himself? Is he not arguing that because no one had heard of Atlas Shrugged on the unknown planet where he went to high school and college, therefore no one in that time period would have heard of it? In other words, it's not the job of the writer to make sure he expresses himself clearly. Instead, it's the job of the reader to figure out what the writer was trying to say but was too busy learning Chinese culture to bother about getting right. True - it's not a very debatable point. It's quite obvious that Atlas Shrugged would have been much more familiar and identifiable during Rand's heyday in the '60s than it would be today. JR

And, as we know from an earlier post of Phil's, "in the sixties or seventies, no one would have recognized the book [Atlas Shrugged]." Am I alone in finding this claim comical? I was in high school in the early '60s and in college in the mid-to-late '60s. And I assure you Atlas Shrugged had been "heard of" back then. It had been a huge bestseller in hardcover in the late '50s. The paperback came out in the early '60s. Lots of kids were reading it at my high school; I saw it being carried around all over campus. You couldn't walk into a drugstore without seeing it staring back at you from the paperback rack. In the later '60s, NBI was at its peak, and almost every year saw publication of a new collection of essays by Rand (sometimes with additional contributions by such of her associates as Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. You couldn't walk into a bookstore without encountering a large display of books by Rand, and such displays always included Atlas Shrugged. JR

(NOTE FROM MSK: This thread was started from posts split off from here.) I didn't know Dostoevsky had written any short stories. As for Joyce, I think the two in Dubliners that would be most likely to impress Phil positively are "Eveline" and "The Dead." The others likely won't work at all for him. Regarding fantasy, Goodkind's books are of little or no literary value, but there are a handful of works in that genre that do qualify as genuine literary classics of the very first quality. Some of these date from the 19th Century - Bram Stoker's Dracula, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I used to tell my students back in the '90s, when I taught a course in Fantasy and Science Fiction at an art college in San Francisco, that those were the three great works of fantasy of the Victorian Era. (There were several great 19th Century works of science fiction, too, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) There are also a handful of genuine literary classics among the fantasy works of the 20th Century. One of these, which I know Phil hasn't read - sudden, terrifying thought: does Phil appear on every thread at this site, explaining why he won't read or hasn't read whatever book{s] is/are under discussion there? - is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Another is the first two volumes - Titus Groan and Gormenghast - of the somewhat misnamed "Gormenghast Trilogy" of Mervyn Peake. Still others are Little, Big by John Crowley and The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney. Some other time, I'll try to wean Phil away from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Niven and get him to try some more literarily respectable science fiction writers. JR

I don't know that anyone does. But some people, including Kant, have believed they do, and have undertaken such analyses. Well, I guess I'm too stupid to understand what I just walked into. No, Kant did not (apparently) understand the implications of his own philosophy. He made numerous errors in working out those implications. Various people have seen this and have pointed out his errors. What did I walk into? No reason I can think of. I'd advise that person, however, to avoid trying to pass himself off as knowledgeable on Kant's philosophy.

Yes. Somewhere around here I have a brochure listing what it had for sale ca. 1967 or early '68 (just before the split and the dissolution of NBI). JR

I suspect you mean "underestimate." I've done the same, including with Kant. Okay. Have we reached "hundreds of hours" yet? Kant's argument for the existence of a noumenal world rests on far more than just that. It rests on a detailed analysis of the nature of human consciousness and the extensive "filtering" it imposes on our experience of the world in which we live. I'd say that's one of his errors, yes. Agreed. As noted above, they aren't. (1) Kant's philosophy, properly understood, does not reject our ability to know the world as it is. Kant himself seems (at least at times) to have drawn some such conclusion as that, but as various neo-Kantians in the 20th Century have shown, he was mistaken. (2) There is much more to Kant's philosophy than merely his views on conceptual knowledge. Many of his views on morality are pretty loathsome, but his views on politics are actually quite libertarian and admirable. And his views on art are of considerable historical interest, because of their later consequences in the work of other thinkers, including Ayn Rand. (It was Kant, for example, who first enunciated the principle that a work of art is not a utilitarian object and has no "use," strictly speaking, but contemplation.) I don't recall anyone saying that secondary sources shouldn't be relied on in part. Yes, carefully cherry-picked in most cases (at least when you're dealing with a controversial and obscure thinker like Kant) to justify a particular interpretation of the works under discussion. If you don't read the original, how can you be certain that this isn't the case? How can you be certain that you understand the context in which the author under discussion made the quoted statements? All true. I advise the use of secondary sources when reading a philosopher like Kant - as an extremely useful adjunct to one's careful reading of the original work under study (the Critique of Pure Reason, say, or the Critique of Judgment). Used in this way, secondary sources can be invaluable. Used as a substitute for first hand knowledge of the work(s) in question, they will steer you wrong at least as often as they steer you right. JR

That seems like a very high rate of reading to me. Sure, if I was reading a Robert Ludlum novel, I could probably read it that fast, but I don't think I could read and comprehend Kant at that speed. And, yes, I have read a little Kant, though I won't claim to be an expert. To me, reading a philosophy book for comprehension is sort of like reading a Calculus text book. I have a thousand page calculus text book sitting on my shelf at home. Are you telling me that, knowing little about calculus, you could read it in 25 hours and at the end of that time you would know differential and integral calculus and elementary differential equations? Color me incredulous. Darrell Reading speed will vary from reader to reader and from one type of material to another. Some people read about as slowly as a speaking voice when they're studying. All I meant by my comparison is that the average silent reading speed is roughly double the average speed reading aloud. So even the forty-five hours it takes me to read Human Action aloud, though far short of the "hundreds of hours" Phil is afraid to having to devote to a Philosophically Incorrect author, is also probably longer than the time it would take many people to read the book silently. JR

Don't wait for me; I ain't comin'. I devoted a few weeks (a couple of months, maybe) to studying Kant back in 1972 or 1973 - thirty-six or thirty-seven years ago. To find one or more of your nuggets for you, I'd have to re-read what I read back then, and at the moment, I simply don't have the time. I'm struggling to finish up a book manuscript that's already grossly late and has been stuck in its last chapter for months. I need to do some major work on my library if I want to avoid ending up having thousands of volumes and four file cabinets full of clippings and documnents and being unable to find anything at all in all those holdings. And anyway, it really doesn't work the way you seem to suppose it does. What I remember getting out of reading Kant wasn't exposure to long, unrelenting swathes of Philosophically Incorrect theory, interrupted now and then by brief insightful passages on this, that, or the other. What I got was a first-hand understanding of why various commentators on Kant (including Rand and Peikoff) understood his work in the ways they did. I remember coming on passages that made me say, "Now I see why Rand says what she does; given her way of looking at things, that's certainly one plausible interpretation of this somewhat ambiguous passage. On the other hand, I can see another interpretation that seems to me equally plausible . . . ." And so forth. Reading Kant helped me understand why later writers thought of themselves as Kantians or neo-Kantians, though they did not hold that "reason . . . is stuck in the world of appearances (the phenomenal world) and can't know reality as it actually is (the noumenal world)." For example, does Ludwig von Mises strike you as an adherent of any such doctrine as that? Or is Human Action also not included in your list of what you need to bother to read for yourself? If you don't want to read Kant, don't read Kant. Read what you want to read. I wash my hands of the matter. JR

And these theories and the reasoning behind them didn't occur in particular passages. I see. No. The point's just worthless, that's all. Your statement of it was flawless, however. This is probably because it was offered in response to an identical argument from authority (Rand's view of Kant is uncontroversial) based on identically limited personal experience. Perhaps its point was the variability of personal experience? (Just a thought.) JR

You can't argue about the interpretation any particular writer or speaker places on a particular passage from Darwin or Newton, because you've never read those passages and don't know what you're talking about. No one is asking you to do so. I am merely asking you to acknowledge what you do and don't know and to refrain from presenting yourself as knowledgeable about the details of works you've never read. Actually, they're quite controversial. I've never encountered any actual expert on Kant who didn't regard the Rand/Peikoff take on his work as preposterous and ridiculous. The same for Hume. To read Rand and Peikoff, you'd think the man had never written anything other than his comments on causality. I'm beginning to wonder if you don't have a somewhat inflated conception of how long it takes to read a book. There's another post in this thread in which you go on and on about the "hundreds of hours" it would take to read somebody else you want to be famous for knowing all about without having actually read. Context check: not long ago, I read the entirety of Ludwig von Mises's Human Action (a much longer book than any book by Kant) aloud, into a microphone. The resulting recording runs forty-five hours. I was reading at about 135-150 words per minute. The average person's silent reading speed (not skimming, but reading for comprehension) is 250-400 words per minute. It would take maybe twenty-five hours, then - not "hundreds of hours" - to read about a thousand pages of high-level material, more pages than anybody here is asking you to read of Kant or Hume, or (probably) the two of them together. JR

Still another reason might be that you would like to discuss and debate Kant's or Hume's ideas, and would prefer not to appear to be a fool when you do so. For some mysterious reason, people who vociferously argue for a particular interpretation or valuation of work they've never read themselves are often taken to be fools by those who hear them pontificate. Actually, here is the point: Michael says somewhere on another thread that he hopes denizens of OL will check not only their own premises, but also those of people they read and learn from, like Rand and Peikoff. Are you content to parrot the interpretation of Kant or Hume promoted by your teachers without reading Kant and Hume for yourself, finding out first hand what the basis of your teachers' interpretation is, and discerning for yourself whether you agree with it? Or would you rather know what you're talking about? I'd say, for example, on the basis of my own reading of Kant in the early '70s, that Rand's and Peikoff's interpretation of his work is oversimplified and invariably puts the worst possible face on anything at all ambiguous in Kant's writing. Phil tried to argue with me about this one evening in San Jose years ago (we were attending a science fiction convention together), but he had rather a hard time of it, because, not having read Kant himself, he had no way of knowing whether the Rand/Peikoff interpretation was as I said it was. The Rand/Peikoff interpretation of Kant was all Phil knew about Kant. I dare say it's still all he knows about Kant; he can't spare the precious time he needs to devote to studying the culture of China. Fine, I say. Let him learn all about the culture of China and remain ignorant of Kant. The problem is, he wants to have it both ways - ignore Kant's books, study the culture of China instead, but then try to pass himself off as somebody who knows something about Kant and can debate the correctness of an interpretation of his work. I should probably add that I read Kant in English translation, rather than in the original German. (One of my German professors in college told me that even Germans often prefer to read Kant in English, because he's clearer that way. I can't say whether this is true, of course, never having read Kant in German. I expect Phil can tell you, however.) I can testify that, even in English, Kant's meaning is often rather opaque, at least in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment. My own feeling is that this was because Kant had happened upon an insight about epistemology that no one he knew of had ever formulated before, and he was struggling to articulate what he had suddenly grasped. He didn't do a particularly good job of it, in the end, and I think he also badly misjudged some of the implications of the undeniable truth he had grasped. (No matter. One glance at the special theory of relativity should convince you that the same might be said of Albert Einstein.) Context: Phil can't possibly know how many nuggets of truth or beauty are "buried" in books he hasn't read. He can't possibly know whether the search for such nuggets is more like the search for a needle in a haystack or the search for a blueberry in a blueberry muffin. It's true that you have only so long to live, and you'll never be able to read all the books that have already been written, and people like me are busily writing more of the damned things even as we discuss this. Do pick and choose what you devote your time to reading. Do take into account your limited time on this Earth. But if you choose not to read something, don't then posture as an expert on its contents. JR P.S. There is much of value in Hume, though admittedly not in his writings about causality.

I would like to go on record at this point in support of table-pounding as a positive trait, especially when it is undertaken with a shoe. JR

Let me just weigh in here by saying that, though I cannot speak for Jonathan, absolutely nothing would ever convince me to reconsider my own policy of making vast, global generalizations as if they were self-evident. JR

I'd just like to go on record here as believing that probably most Objectivist businessmen know more about art than even the very greatest artists. JR

What's important about McCarthy's review is not her ferreting out of "symbols." It's her grasp of the Chinese-box structure of Nabokov's narrative. JR

Yes to all of the above - except for the sense of life issue. I have no problem with his sense of life, myself, but I'm a notorious range-of-the-moment whim-worshipper and an inveterate psychoepistemological criminal, whose views on all things should be disregarded by earnest students of Objectivism. Nabokov is one of the top half dozen writers of modern English in history. He spoke and wrote English, French, and Russian from earliest childhood. He spent his college years at Cambridge and submitted a translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice books into Russian as his senior thesis. His greatest novel is Pale Fire (though there is much brilliant writing and much brilliant characterization in both Lolita and Ada as well). A caveat for anyone who wants to try Pale Fire, however: It appears to be so simple and straightforward that many readers fail utterly to see its underlying complexity and emerge from reading it without having understood it at all. If you read it, track down a copy of Mary McCarthy's essay "A Bolt from the Blue" (her lengthy review of Pale Fire, which ran in the The New Republic), read that, and find out if you noticed even a tenth of what was really going on all around you as you read the novel. JR

Kipling had a truly amazing verbal facility, but little else. Stevenson's short stories, unless you regard the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a "short story," leave much to be desired. He's a very interesting writer and much more important than most people realize, but he wrote too much too fast, and only a handful of his works achieve real excellence. Lack of "benevolence" is not an aesthetic flaw - in Hemingway or anybody else. What it means to call Salinger "salacious and deviant" is beyond me, and what salaciousness and deviance have to do with artistic excellence is anybody's guess. If anyone ever "tagged" me as an Objectivist, I remain blissfully unaware of the fact. I certainly don't tag myself that way. As far as I can see, the word "Objectivist" has been used for years now to describe people who clearly don't understand Ayn Rand's ideas and are unable to figure out how to apply them to anything in life. JR

Just for the record, I'd like to let it be known that these ancient articles on imaginative literature seem pretty substandard to me nearly thirty-five years later. I gave Roger permission to reprint them when he requested it, because, like them or not, I *did* write them, and the historical record should be allowed to stand without interference from those who helped to make it. But I must confess that I see little in these pieces to admire, and I have often wondered why various people over the years have told me they liked the articles and would like to see them in print again. The fact is, I was too young to write something like this, and my ignorance shows through. If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably drop Lawrence from the article on the short story, and I'd probably add Melville - specifically, "Bartleby, the Scrivener." I wouldn't add Fitzgerald, however. He didn't impress me then, and he doesn't impress me now. As to "evil," my purpose in these pieces was not to talk about the morality of literature. It was to recommend some aesthetically worthy literature. If a writer views life as "evil, death, and disaster," my only question as a critic of literature is how effectively, how artistically, he expressed that worldview. If he did a good job, it's a good work of literature. If you don't like it because of its moral implications, fine. But keep the issues separate. They are, in fact, separate issues. JR