Death In Venice: The Impossibility of Dying on Film

Thomas Mann’s brief masterpiece, Death in Venice, begins, as the name nearly suggests it ought, in a stonecutter’s shop—in a graveyard minus the bodies. We meet its protagonist, Achenbach, whose name means “river of ash,” strolling among the tombstones, a daydreaming, heavily rational, sickly man, who after deciding he is due a vacation is met by a figure whom scholars have suggested is Hermes (Death). Achenbach’s decision to take a vacation, followed by a brush with death, begins the book’s pairing of the Apollonian ideals of reason and restraint against Dionysian abandon and sensual intoxication. Though Hermes is the first of many Dionysian specters introduced in the novel (Hermes was himself a follower of Dionysius) all are portrayed in human forms; we see him here as a man who leans upon a cane but peers with angry eyes from beneath his straw hat. Before Achenbach embarks on his trip, however, we learn in chapter two that he is one of, if not the, preeminent writer of his time. His works are testaments to Apollonian virtue, tomes espousing reason, perseverance, and emotional and mental fortitude. His credo, we are told, is “see it through.” We will soon see this phrase deconstructed,  however, as its dual-nature is revealed; the conventional kernel of wisdom—perseverance—is turned on its head, at which point “see it through” can be taken to impel one to actually give in to temptation. 

Achenbach arrives in Venice, sees a handsome Polish youth named Tadzio, and begins his struggle with the noxious air of the city along with his inner battle between Eros and Logos. In chapter three we see Achenbach’s resolve start to wane as he becomes preoccupied with Tadzio. He begins to give himself over to his flowering obsession as his health continues to decline, and he earns a smile from Tadzio (arguably) in return. By the end of chapter four he has no desire to return to his former self, notably donning a straw hat—the headdress again alludes Dionysus’s mythical regalia. With his fever-dream in chapter five he finally descends completely into a Bacchanalian hell, becomes elatedly and wantonly intoxicated by his admiration for Tadzio, abandons both reason and pride, and dies. We are left to wonder if once he has left the stonecutter’s shop where he soon after meets Hermes, Achenbach is, philosophically at least, a specter himself. Throughout the full length of the book Mann consistently blurs the line between literal and metaphorical death while making a sharp delineation between reason and sensuality, suggesting that for his protagonist the death of reason is a death of the Self, concomitant with Achenbach’s literal demise. Time is slowed down, and we witness through the novel’s progression a man passing from one world to the next.

Turning now to the film: Too often, perhaps, audiences demand that a film stay “true” to the novel, and in some ways this request may have become tired. Yet if we can imagine for a moment seeing this picture having not read the book first, the real question to be considered here is not “Does this film stay true to the novel?” but, rather, “Can this film survive without it?”. I cannot see how. Before I give the impression that Luchino Visconti’s directorial talents are completely wasted on this picture, let me remark that the film is, indeed, beautifully shot (and Dirk Bogarde’s talent on the screen cannot be ignored either). Comparing the relative contents of the movie against the book, and observing the visual rendering of what Visconti was able to mine from the novel, one first marvels at his ability do so much with so little. But the very next thought is, “Why would he take on a project forcing him to do so little with so much?” Perhaps Visconti was forced into a box, albeit a visually stunning one, where much of the truly interesting work is left on the page. The claim, then, is not that the film’s director did a bad job realizing Mann’s book; it is that he had a nearly impossible job given the nature of this particular, highly introspective, novel. From here on out, however, I will leave the issue of whether Visconti was forced to make the choices he did due to the difficulty of his subject, and I will focus only on the ineptitude of the choices themselves, having already given him some defense.

To mark the extreme difficulties placed upon this film one need not go much further than its opening sequence. In the first few moments alone we have culled chapters one and two of the book outright (let’s remember there are only five); we have changed Achenbach from a writer to a composer, a small detail that achieves formidable results by robbing Achenbach of his life’s work; we have neutered the Hellenistic underpinnings Mann so carefully laid in the book’s overture and throughout; and in so doing we have created in our protagonist a blank canvas that—without a manual of instruction, namely, Mann’s book—we viewers have no idea how to fill in. The utter lack of philosophical and psychological background that results is something that will have to be endured through the remainder of the film, and, as I have already pointed out, we are only yet at the beginning.

On skipping chapters one and two and the lack of mythology: Due to the opening exposition which has gone missing from the film, the Classicist themes that Mann set out to tackle, and which help  to make his novel so rich, are fully given up. We do not set the stage for the mythological entrances that permeate the book, and while the film tries to trespass into the surreal—doing so most successfully with the elderly dandy on the boat approaching Venice, who portends with the line, “Our compliments to your pretty little sweetheart”—the film is never fully able to achieve the right result. The appearance of the mythical ferryman, Charon, falls totally flat. During their exchange Achenbach comes across as completely and needlessly haughty, which is to be expected since his reluctance to give himself over to death and his eventual acceptance of it are both lost as we are introduced instead to a bumbling oarsman who seems only to be going the wrong way. Mann gives us the internal dialogue in which Achenbach opines that it would be a delight if the ride would last forever, a line that is delicious considering the themes we have read thus far but which is thematically and literally absent from the film. Instead we watch a puzzlingly mirthful rowboat captain making the awkwardly sexual suggestion, “I row you good.” Is this foreshadowing? Is Achenbach being confronted with his latent homosexuality? We will never know.

On Achenbach becoming a composer and the lack of internal dialogue: Presumably Visconti’s decision to turn Achenbach from a writer into a composer was made in order to give the audiences of film the ability to experience his character’s art. Though the choice to model Achenbach upon Mahler is clever and clearly shows that the novel’s background had been studied (Mann reputedly modeled Achenbach’s physical appearance—and that alone—on Mahler), we ought to ask what we have gained from the exchange but pretty music. The change in Achenbach’s vocation deflates the theme of a man’s reason compromised by lust—since a composer, while he certainly may be erudite, is not the preeminent intellectual and the proponent of mental fortitude that Mann’s protagonist was. (The importance for Mann here is the entire purpose of bothering to introduce Achenbach’s corpus to us, in great detail no less, to begin with.) In short, a writer can uphold Apollonian ideals through his work, but a composer cannot in any literal sense. The change refocuses the story more fully on the theme of infatuation, since instead of the undermining of reason through lust we have only the arousal of lust alone. Because of this trade-off nothing truly vital to our main character is wagered, and thus nothing is lost. And the differences that result are stark. The Achenbach in Mann’s book becomes defeated existentially and dies only after surrendering his soul; the Achenbach in Visconti’s film becomes unbearably horny and dies of a cold. (Though, to be exact, it was likely cholera that did him in.) Due to this and to the lack of internal dialogue, nothing half so dramatically interesting happens when the Achenbach of film descends into sensual miasma.

As a result, the film has no tension except that which one gets from watching a mustachioed gentleman eying a handsome young boy from across floral centerpieces—ogling from just above drawn newspapers, and peering around each corner as the film stalks from one scene to the next. As viewers, we are only treated to punctuations of the unrelenting leering with occasional interjections which Visconti must have felt were obligatory in order to follow what was left of the book's original plot. Let me be clear: the objection to the film's rendering of Achenbach's forbidden infatuation is made on artistic grounds, not morally provincial ones. What are we to think about your main character's mind if for more than two hours you do not tell us! Even having read the book, viewing the film still leaves one disconnected from Achenbach's psychological evolution. Without the book's rich interior to guide us, what did Visconti expect us to do during these scenes, if not to laugh? Or yawn.

Release and Punish

                                                                                                                                 *

Hitchcock’s Psycho shook something loose from America's popular imagination, something that fell from its perch and crawled into the shadows, and has been lurking there ever since--something heinous that his nineteen-sixties classic asks us to acknowledge. In this film, Hitchcock taunts us with the notion of the psycho and what he/she represents in relation to our moral values and visceral urges. There is one scene in particular, the parlor scene--arguably a microcosm of the larger message--in which we see an attractive couple having an innocuous conversation. The female lead, Marian, is almost lured by Norman who repeatedly changes the location of their dinner--first her room, then the office, then to the “parlor,” which suggests a romp, then a parley, then maybe just a polite conversation. It's if he can't decide what he wants. As if inside him there is something that can't make up its mind, something squirming, something to be shaken loose, released, and then punished.

On the surface, Norman’s demeanor is exceedingly sheepish, stuttering and soft-spoken. Marian by comparison is calm, confident, and self-possessed. To witness the subtext we must make ourselves aware of Hitchcock’s several references to birds throughout their exchange. Humans are said to eat like birds, get trapped like birds, scratch and claw like birds, click their tongues like birds—and, if that were not enough, behind the two actors are several birds that Norman himself has stuffed.** Two of these in particular seem to relate to our main characters. Marian’s bird is small, relaxed, and in a still pose. It also faces away from Norman’s bird. Norman’s bird, a larger bird of prey, is far from relaxed; it is poised with wings outstretched, beak open, and ready to pounce. It also faces Marian’s, so the 180° shot gives the impression that Marian's bird is vulnerable to to the imminent attack. It is almost as if behind each character we see their Greek daemon—the true representation of their inner self, the one they can never see but that always lurks. When the scene begins, Norman has just been scolded by his mother for having, in her estimation, licentious thoughts about their guest. Later we learn that Norman’s mother is in fact deceased, and thus this was an aspect of Norman’s psyche scolding the part of him that would wish to do untold things with his present company. The dynamic between the boyish Norman and the mother he claims he “wishes he could defy” portends the larger implicit theme of the film, which is that whenever lust is released it must be punished with violence. (Norman supplies both urges ultimately, but in our analysis I will speak as if he and his mother were separate.)

Upon her suggestion that he put his mother in a home, Norman tells Marion that he could never submit his mother to the “cruel eyes” of those who would house her in a mental institution. This is the only moment in which Norman becomes even slightly unhinged in front of Marian. And to understand why this happens is to begin to unravel the systemic implications of this film; it will be helpful to contrast these “cruel eyes,” which represent the eyes of societal institutions and accepted social/sexual mores against the Gaze of one who desires the Other sexually. For Norman, these two cannot exist harmoniously. Though murdered by his own hand, his mother's corpse continues to oppress Norman to the point of committing (most likely) multiple subsequent murders. Norman’s mother is connected with that first set of eyes, and here we also find the left-over values of an older generation that Hitchcock ultimately seeks to expose as having been scaffolded on uneven ground. The film was released in just the right cultural moment for Hitchcock's voice, in the  nineteen-sixties, a time when many societal norms, especially those surrounding sex, were just beginning to loosen. The film thus explores the tensions that arise as we give ourselves license to explore expanded sexual boundaries while trying to reconcile these explorations with older values.

To see just how much American culture and cinema had changed, compare Psycho for a moment with the film Meet Me In St. Louis. The latter, released just a decade and a half prior, is a celebration of established moral values. At the film’s close, Judy Garland’s character asks while staring out over the site of the World's Fair (a tribute to American exceptionalism), “They won’t ever tear it down will they?” As if to say, “All that is right and good in our culture is built to last right?” To which the family patriarch replies, “They better not!” Now return to Psycho. In it we see products of divorce, adultery, materialism, lust, and envy, all of which culminate with the on-screen murder of a naked woman in the shower. In Hitchcock’s film the patriarch is completely absent, and the distaff lineage is only present in the form of a corpse—the desiccated husk of a generational morality—which is kept in Norman’s family’s Victorian home. And just where is this Victorian vestige of bygone days? Why just up the hill from the Bate’s Motel! It's a seedy, and notably modern, counterpart to the family estate.

We are told in an earlier snippet of dialogue that “People pay who meet in hotels.” This line is out of place as Marian is only at the time considering a little travel. What are we to make of this portention? Is this character, a girl from the generation of "Meet me in St. Louis," saying that those who meet in hotels instead all get what they deserve? Maybe. This is not to say that Psycho is a morality tale. It is rather more like an “objective” reflection. Norman, despite his very name being an obvious pun on the “new norms” that society has embraced, is unable to cast off his upbringing, nor can he find comfort in his desires, and so he is led to madness. It would be a mistake to conclude that Hitchcock is preaching to us here. To do so would be to grossly oversimplify his artistic vision. What Hitchcock does with this film--despite titillating us probably for his own pleasure--is implicate us as taking part in our own psychological struggle. Hitchcock wants us to see that the psycho is not crouching somewhere in the darkness outside of our imagination; the psycho is in that darkness within our imagination. 

*It's true about the films release. Hitchcock held theaters to this in contract.

**I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that one.

Merkel cells a primary factor in generating philosophical discomfort with superposed states

                                                                 Merkel Cells stained with fluorescent dye.                                 

• P1) Over millions of years experience leads us to believe, in the same way that instinct is “learned” by a species, that two exclusive things cannot occupy the same space.
• Endowed with foresight by the cerebral cortex, humans then develop the intuitive sense that, categorically, no two exclusive objects can occupy the same space.
• P2) This gives rise to the broader logical concept of negation and definition by negation: thing A is not thing B.
• P3) With the same means used to justify the Sheffer Stroke we can now explain our intuition for formal, binary, Boolean/mathematical logic provided that we can also give a historical account for the concept(s) “and” or “or.”
• These concepts are both supplied as soon as we posit the “first ontological piece” + 1, and their appearance happens simultaneously by virtue of p2.
• P4) Using this binary-based mathematical logic, Newton and Leibniz invent calculus and several physical sciences bloom, rendering our understanding of the natural world on a large scale.
• Multivalent and fuzzy logic will also come eventually, but only from meta-analysis of bivalent logic.
• P5) In the 20^th Century, human beings bear witness to small things for the first time. Classical models “break down” because objects of little mass do not exhibit the same behaviors seen in macro phenomena.
• P6) Our logical intuitions cause us to question why superposition does not adhere to the world’s “normal” behavior, or, rather, we ask why the world does not square with our intuitions.
• At its heart superposition undermines p2 because it violates the assumptions of p1 with regard to state; p1 no longer implies that one thing does not occupy two spaces/states.
• P7) The commensurability problem between superposition and p2 is relaxed when we consider that there is no reason that every corner of the universe (specifically quantum corners) should comply with our logical intuitions. This is because the consistent correlation between logical and mathematical truths with empirical observations has hereto been what may be called a false isomorphism—a dual succession of deductive procedures compatible between what only appears to be two systems: mathematical logic, and the world as it is subjected to empirical experimentation.
• First there is the application of a bivalent logical postulate to the ingression of sensory data upon our physical bodies, which creates a systematic ordering of the natural world—and the creation of a mental world of order that is neither Platonic nor divine.
• Outcomes of the manipulation of symbols within this mental realm can then be verified by experimental observations: of course. The output is the same as the input. The “second” system seems to be the physical framework of our world, but natural order and our innate logical/mathematical order are selfsame.
• P8) The philosophical problem arises that the p7 explanation is only satisfactory if there is a cause for countenancing the “first ontological piece” through the means of logical negation. (Which really came first, p1 or p2?) In order for the isomorphic premise (p7) to eat its own tail, the process it describes must begin somewhere. In other words, there must be a reason for our first supposing that two things are separate. And this cause should be supported by at least one identifiable evolutionary/scientific beginning to be satisfactory. A sufficient case: we differentiate the separation of our bodies (about which the CNS receives a constant flow of tactile information) from the rest of the world (about which it doesn't) through the sense of touch, through integumentary nerve bundles—Merkel cells.

Therefore: Merkel cells (and other tactile PNS sensation) lead to our discomfort with superposed states and can now bring comfort to those still “touchy” about quantum phenomena. 

The Shadow Knows

The opening sequence of Citizen Kane invites us to trespass into an occluded space, as completely drenched in shadow as it is with meaning, which we will later learn is the estate of media mogul Charles Kane. We are to understand that within the film’s narrative this is a real place, though the way we first experience it is entirely surreal. As soon as we pass through the gate marked with a “NO TRESPASSING” sign we are allowed to survey the grounds, though not as one might if shown the landscape through one continuous long-shot. Rather, director Orson Welles continually fades from one image to the next as we move from the exterior of the estate toward the mansion itself, creating for us a pastiche of a real-life landscape in place of a a plain view of Kane’s home. The music is ominous. The figures are dark and otherworldly. Among the many contorted images we notice caged animals, gargoyles, and the inverted image of Kane’s castle in the water. We might almost consider the scene to be purgatorial, especially once we note that this is a place completely void of human forms save for one corpse—Kane himself—and one wall-eyed image of a nurse seen only through her distorted reflection on a glass sphere. The culminating effect is defamiliarizing, as we are invited, not only to enter, but to reconstruct the life of the deceased Kane being communicated to us only through remnants—there are no present survivors except for one employee and a literal mountain of possessions. Aside from setting the tone of Kane’s life, the broad message, perhaps, is that a biography must always be reconstructed in a similar fashion. In this way, the opening of the film makes us into intruders (all along we have been trespassing, after all) and thus we might surmise that to define the life of another is always to trespass in a sense, since a life cannot be directly known except by the one who lives it; but then we still have the rest of the film to see as of yet, and so we move on.

Of all the elements that we witness in this sequence the most telling is the presence of shadow. Shadows appear throughout the rest of the film, enveloping people and places, encroaching and receding, and giving significance to the life of our protagonist almost as if darkness itself were a character in the film (perhaps the ghost of Kane himself). Indeed, it can be argued that shadow is Kane in two important respects: shadows consistently represent both Kane’s power, and the mystery that remains in the lives of those who knew (or attempted to know) the man.

On the subject of mystery: When taken as an interrogation of a life, the film becomes a commentary on the project of the film itself. In the scene that immediately follows the one described above we are shown a newsreel about Kane’s life. And this scene is followed by one in which a room full of newsmen are discussing the reel we have just seen and that they have created. They begin to question its authenticity and resolve to dig a little deeper. They want to know the real Kane; all the while they are, of course, cast in shadow. For the remainder of the film we follow one of these reporters, Jerry Thompson, as he seeks to uncover the mystery behind the man—the true story about his subject. And from one sequence to the next we see him entering shadows, addressing shaded persons in murky settings, moving, much like the viewer of the opening sequence, eventually toward the heart of Kane’s estate. As he stalks Kane’s ghost toward Xanadu we are led to ask the question, “What is so impenetrable, so unknowable, about the solitary life of this man?” He was a highly sociable and public figure after all. The answer is ultimately given through the same means as the mystery; again Welles uses darkness as a symbol.

Kane isolates himself, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because he knows no other way, through his own desire for and struggle with power and wealth. He is both obsessed with the accumulation of material wealth and uncomfortable with the material means he was born into. In this way Kane is like a Brahmin—born to a station far above the majority of his fellows. And while he is well meaning, attempting to level himself with his peers through the charitable mission of his newspaper, in the end Kane cannot cleanse himself of the sin of all Brahmin (if one can call it that) which is participating in and thus benefiting so fully from an oppressive system of caste. True deliverance, it appears, cannot be achieved through good will alone. At one point in the film Kane is told by his friend that “one day the common man will decide he wants his rights and not just your gifts.” While some commentary on capitalism is unavoidable in this film, I argue that for the most part the film is the discussion of a life, and insofar as it speaks on what it means for Kane to be an American capitalist, these terms are predominantly addressed in a personal, biographical sense, rather than through an indictment of the upper class. It has been reported that Welles changed the original title of the film from The American to the name which we all now know, Citizen Kane. The difference here is a subtle but telling change in focus. Our attention is directed toward a man, an existential, personal study, rather than toward a commentary on the economy of our country at large. The film is much more prescient as a result; Kane’s discomfiture with his wealth is not about the struggle of the “common man” but of the “Everyman,” and its implications thus bear more directly upon the soul of an individual than on the soul of a nation.

What is to become of Kane’s soul? Let it be enough to say there is no Disney ending to this picture. I have mentioned that Kane’s legacy is represented in shadows. These shadows literally descend upon the film’s speakers as they reminisce about Kane and even interact with him during flashback sequences. One especially stark image is that of Kane approaching his second wife Susan—covering her with his shadow—in a scene in which he will not let her leave the career he has chosen for her. (The following morning we learn she has attempted suicide.) If it is Kane’s affair with the power he inherited in his youth that blocks his entrance into deeper, more meaningful human relationships, then it is the malignant effect of the affair manifested through shadow that we observe steadily consuming both Kane and his companions throughout the film. Again we turn to Susan: In her last scene she experiences a kind of catharsis by recollecting her decision to leave Kane. Then, through a hole in the roof, a light shines down upon her and she makes the relieved comment that "It is morning at last." And so it is for many of the friends and lovers that disengage from the oppressive side of Kane’s personality.

The symbolic themes of power and mystery are neatly resolved at the end of the film when we finish the journey that starts with the opening sequence—when we finally reach Xanadu, though this time in the light of day. The film closes after the reporter we have been following leads us at last into Kane's home. At this stage, many past characters have now made their peace with the past, the investigative journey has come to an end, and we pan through one high long-shot as we are shown a real, rather than surreal, survey of the estate. All the accumulated mystery and opulence, all of it, is finally bathed in light; it is at last revealed, and we are shown that it is no more or less than it has always been—it is but a life. 

This Week In The News

". . . After their huts were fired upon with machine guns, the remaining survivors were finished off with machetes. Stock prices are up. There is traffic north of town."

And all of this in just a few seconds. My god. How does anyone make sense of this? Any one of these facts (especially the first) can give us plenty to think about. But combined in such a way--without so much as a beat between them--they gel, creating a kind of apocalyptic collage that is unthinkable. And yet it must be. So let's try to pick up the pieces, shall we?

The first problem might be that we have moved into a world without sin and we don't know quite what to make of it. Back in the good old days, when we were sinful, there was a way of explaining human suffering to ourselves; it may not have done the best job, but it gave a purpose to the inequity that we find all around us (and something to do in the meantime). Some of us meet a fate worse than death, and, while horrible to ponder, there was at least one reason why. Sin. Or put completely, because the big man upstairs is unhappy.* To understand the importance of sin, for some, we turn now to a second item in the news. There has recently  been much controversy about a certain celebrity's vocal disapproval of gay people. What does he find wrong with homosexuality exactly? Let's remind ourselves that it's not the "what" that matters so much. He is, merely, trying to hold on to sin. No sin, no rules. No rules, no fouls. No fouls, no reason for the big man to be upset. No reason for the big man to be upset, no meaning behind the suffering, and more than that, perhaps no big man at all. And without HIM, there's no afterlife. No afterlife? Well then it turns out there are no fates worse than death.

Not all religions are as sin-heavy, however. The Judeo/Christian/Muslim brand is especially focused on it, and this is because each is a sky religion. The other types, earth religions and intrinsic religions--an example can be found in Native American myth and Zen Buddhism respectively--are less focused on punitive repercussions for our transgressions. In Earth-religion the focus is more on "imbalance." Once balance is restored, hey, no harm no foul. And in intrinsic religions where the object of enlightenment is self-discovery the notion of sin is almost entirely absent. That leaves the rest of us, the Aurarians, from the magnificent Greek gods with their thunderbolts on up to the present day. Our errors come from failing to follow the dictates of those gods in the sky, who look down with watchful eyes.

But it's not all top-down so to speak. Our relationship has changed over the years. We've gone from being just one of many washed up in the flood to having a personal, one-on-one relationship with god. Starting with the Reformation, the nature of man's connection to his creator has become much more personal as the focus of salvation has been redirected to the individual. Protestantism, hand in hand with capitalism, has at every turn encouraged a singular story, although here the brand of religion becomes markedly Christian. Indeed the Old Testament, and hence Judaism, centers on the story of a people. (Even David--arguably one of the most personal narratives in the whole text--is someone to be revered more than emulated.) Which leaves Islam. And it lacks the same historical turn made by the Reformation primarily because it has grown in an entirely different economic environment.

Is it funny, then, that shifts in theology have accompanied shifts in political and economic climate?** The Catholic pontiff once gave imprimatur to the authority of a king, justifying his right to the lion's share. But as we turned our backs on aristocracy, a stage in which all money flows constantly and unquestionably up, we needed a new story--one of personal triumph and possibility no matter how difficult to endure are the current realities. Enter Martin Luther. It is possible with right thinking to move upward through the social strata into a state of wealth a leisure, just as it is possible for every individual with a pure soul to move upward into a figurative sky and enter a land of, well, wealth and leisure. Although it must be said that in both cases the real potentiality of everlasting milk and honey, shall we say, strains credulity.

Your current options? A fate worse than death. Stock prices are up. And traffic on the north side of town. If you want to make sense of this and get to the real truth, my suggestion is to follow the money. But then who has time for that with so much to do?

In other news, I bought a shirt today. It looks and fits great and it was probably made in China under much less than favorable conditions. I haven't yet explained that decision to myself. I turned on the radio instead and caught the news. But I know this much: never listen to a man with a well-fitted shirt; somewhere inside himself he has forgotten that the truth isn't pretty.


* Alternately, according to some theological positions, he has allowed us to bring suffering upon ourselves.
** For a particularly nice take on this connection that also ties in the history of the novel, read Susan Bauer's The Well Educated Mind. It's mostly about classical education, but her section on history is very good. I wonder too whether increasing complexity in monetary policy corresponds with ever more facile theological explanations. But we will rest there. 

True or Not True

First of all, I'm for truth. Even though I will hold here to my contention that Kuhn's paradigm theory is pretty spot-on. (See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.*) So if we are going to rescue ourselves from those objective types who can't wait to impale the naysayers--the mealy-mouthed who think life is but a dream--with their wagging fingers, we have to make an attempt to define what the truth is. A dream?! Pah! Here's a quick and dirty account.

The issue is seen clearly if we ask ourselves, as we navigate through the network of 'facts' that comprise our own personal narrative, "What are we going to spend our time learning?" Of course we'd rather learn true things, right? We will see that truth is really about interconnected language.

Let's compare two motifs of theory making, or, depending on our level of confidence, learning: We can learn about black people and white people, about race and about groups--anecdotally and through loose conversation. Or we can learn about melanin, eumelanin, pheomelanin, and sociology. Which is framework true? Is it the second, scientific one? If so, why? Remember that very paradigm and all the science that follows from it is a model waiting to be toppled. What ends up determining the amount of truthiness, then, while often scientific, does not lay prostrate before science. (Although I will say that the god of the 21st century has traded in his white robe for a white labcoat, and, as always, those who most fervently believe in his magic are the ones who least understand him.) No. The most we can say of a statement of fact is that its truth depends upon the degree to which that purported fact is interwoven with others. Is fact A an anecdote? A guess? How insular is it? Is it a groundless myth? Or is it instead something rooted in a broad and deep theory, in other facts?

If it is the case that fact A derives from the last in the above list then I dub it "true," and I do so because something very remarkable happens when we buy in to a protracted, thoughtful exercise in the production of thought; it's the same thing that happens when we labour over symphonies or spend hours each day as Coltrane did learning to improvise well--we do good work. This happens because human beings are not unlike the computers we have made in our image. We can "machine learn**" a great number of things, but for the knowledge to be worthwhile it must be predicated upon and presided over by an engine of logic. The better the logic engine and the longer it is allowed to run the better the machine's output in the end. Lousy facts have a way of weeding themselves out; they won't stick with many other facts. For an example, take the musings of a schizophrenic. She might create a very long string of internally consistent delusions, but eventually that consistency runs out and the narrative crumbles. It is no accident, perhaps, that those who suffer from schizophrenia often invent spontaneous words, the least sticky and most disconnected of all linguistic bodies. What has happened, as we sometimes say to one another, is that she's lost logic. (We would do well to always ground ourselves in fact--in logic--lest our ignorance lead to insanity.)

I argue that human logic is internal, and a well-supported fact is precisely what happens the more we think about something, the more we allow our "program" to run. Our internal logic is the only means by which a thought is ever vetted and its appearance is what makes something ultimately true. Still, truth needs to be fully defined before we're done. The game we are playing has not very much to do with the incremental march from the dawn of our ignorance into the historically inevitable light of truth, which is the notion that Kuhn argued against; it has everything instead to do with instances of a priori synthesis***, or as I would have it, linguistic interconnectedness. The more nexus that become linked by strands of logic, the greater the number of ideas fashioned firmly together, the stronger this lattice of language becomes. And so truth at last is a matter of degree; but it is one that depends (perhaps reassuringly) upon a magnitude of connections in a linguistic web that is threaded with logic--the stuff of all dreams.



* Basically, he argues that every scientific model is only a framework that's "truthiness" is really more about efficacy, since our perspective  might change fundamentally, and tomorrow, in support of a totally different theory.
** Machine learning involves teaching a computer to recognize an object based on a preordained set of patterns. And here the analogy breaks down. Though we could try to make comparison between the patterned object and either some type of cultural or semiotic object--something I would tend to to but won't do here--or to neurological pathways. These are two completely different routes for completing the analogy: the first of which I would argue collapses eventually into the second, and the second, in practice at least, has already been preempted by neural networks, a completely different form of AI that attempts to imitate the structure of the human brain.)
*** A shambled two-second definition might be: Kant's word for logic + impressions of the world

Free Will vs. Determinism

There is a fact of particle physics that will be helpful to this debate. I mean to cite those cases in which we can know either the velocity of a particle or we can know its position, but not both—so it is with free will vs. determinism. The two are mutually exclusive, or so the traditional argument goes. Our traditional definitions of freedom and determinism dictate that we can countenance either the presence of free will or the presence of a deterministic, material cause, but not both at the same time. And yet there may be a way that we can paradoxically accommodate both views. (After all, a particle has both a position and a velocity, hence our trouble might be one of perspective.)

If pressed I am first inclined to lean towards determinism,  since if we subscribe, at minimum, to the possible reduction of mental events to material causes then determinism clearly follows; in a materialistic universe there will always be a citable physical cause for any given event. However, if we define free will as a psychological event—the experience of choice—then clearly it exists as well, even if the causes of our choices are material. It is good philosophical practice to mark a delineation between the physical cause of any mental occurrence and the phenomenon of human beings actually undergoing that said occurrence. You can hardly argue that the two are one in the same. (I posit this in full awareness of the thorough and seamless overlaying of consciousness with the activities of the brain; you will find no dualistic theory of mind here.) For example, the cascade of biological events, of electrochemical impulses that account for what we would call amorous feelings, it can hardly be argued, give a full account of what it is like for human beings to experience even a loose approximation of love. A clear difference exists, then, between the utterly material and the unique phenomena experienced by those with cognitive faculties.

There comes a point, I would argue, when we can take the physical cause as so remote with regard to what appear to be autonomous rational decisions that the case for free will becomes that much stronger. Consider first a proximate cause by relating the experience of hunger and the subsequent decision to eat with a sudden drop in blood sugar. Here most of us will be comfortable attributing the experience of “choice” as being, for the most part, false. The material cause of the mental event is plain. If, on the other hand, we behave as Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and rationalize our behavior in such a way as to attempt freedom from determinism—even if through highly neurotic and abstracted means—it becomes evident that the material cause of our behavior is very remote. (The possibility of psychological determinism, Freudian childhoods, Skinner’s mechanistic account of our desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure—all such objections—are duly noted: yet none rule out the ability to rationalize our own behavior, and it is here, through metacognition, that the purview of choice is expanded.) While all brain states are reducible to material ones, it is worth bearing out that, in fact, many brain states are caused by other brain states; in other words, while many motives are not, certain others are highly rationalized.

This may not completely liberate us from the eventual deterministic explanation of our behavior, but it certainly does make the deterministic cause of that behavior much more distant in some cases, and in this hinterland between cause and effect I find it irresistible to wonder if there might be something very interesting happening here. Too often we forget about matters of degree when discussing such topics. It appears to me that in some cases the material cause is strong, but in other remote cases the influence of clear material causes becomes asymptotic, that is, it never quite reaches zero but the end behavior of the line is such that it becomes negligible. From the living specter of determinism rises the shade of free will.