At some other time, I will try to form my reflections on your reflections.
For now I will make the following clear about my position.
I don't think that creative arts, or the various narrative arts in particular, are fundamentally about or for any one particular thing or function in any one particular way. It is for beauty, it is for truth, it is greatly for entertainment and diversion, and it is "for" constructing of nice little delusions about ourselves and our society and about others and the universe. Narrative arts are for pleasure and pain, and vicarious experiences, and game playing, etc. etc. It is for ritual and the undermining of ritual, revelation and obscurity, illusions and disillusions. In these matters I am a pluralist.
My point, in the discussion with Michael C. is to argue against the truth-value of art as a (single) criteria of judgment. That doesn't mean that art can't tell the truth. Powerful and lasting narratives can tell little truths, or it can be neutral as far as truth is concerned or it can lie. I think that inevitably narrative arts do tell little truths about human character in general and individual human characters.
But also my point is that there is something fundamentally misleading about the structure of narrative. It leads us to believe things that we want to believe because it is comforting....That humans are the center of the "world".... and we are not. We are only one species that will die out like all other species. That the structure of the universe somehow makes "me" matter... and it does not. The structure of the universe is neither "caring" nor indifferent. Whatever the structure of the universe is, it just is, with or without me or my species.
Chuck writes: Jerry notes that art helps us to invent meaning to deceive ourselves...but that history has no narrative meaning. Are we all that certain? I don't think so. In fact, I think that narrative drama derives from the reversals of narrative history, in fact forms drama out of the apparently irrational reversals of history.
_the teleology of narrative and human history_ JM: As a thought experiment take this supposition: If a cataclysmic event had happened 200 years ago and our sun suddenly exploded or a comet plunged into earth, and the whole of the human species disappeared, what could we then say about the narrative of human history? Or of our own belief in narrative-itself? Ultimately I don't think the "narrative" of the human species qua species (i.e. as a biological construction) is any different than the "narrative" of the species we commonly call brontosaurus.
But, you may say, that our biologically produced species- "narrative" may not be the same as what ever historical narrative we may be able to take in our hands and "write" for ourselves. I think here is where metaphors obscure instead of enlighten. We may be able to create a good society, where human individuals and society are constructed so that all of us can live more fully for our own potential and in social solidarity with others. Or we may not. The fact that this is my goal does not make my goal (our goals) an historical "narrative" that is intrinsic to what we are as human beings or to what "history" is for us. We shape narratives out of history in order to better understand history because this is the way the human mind/brain works. Of the many mental "tools" that we work with, the narratives we make with our brains, that emerge from the patterns of narrative in our brains, are just one major part of our mental "tool-kit." We try to find patterns in history and we try to educate ourselves about ourselves. We find some small truths in these narratives and a small amount of certainty about human history. But there is no teleology to history,even human history. And it is one of those fundamental impressions left to us from our stories that every story that we tell is somehow teleologically shaped, including those stories that we call history.
( Note: I can't prove that there is no teleology to human history, I just think that it is very unlikely, as it is very unlikely that there is a personal God that cares about individual humans or human history in general. )
On 10/6/06, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Whether people believe it or not, the arts structure their minds,
> perceptions, and sensibilities---including the movements of their
> bodies, their gestures, poses, walk and the reaches of their
> imaginations just as Whorf claimed for language, thought and
> reality. We are completely acculturated by these symbolic systems to
> such an extent that it is almost ridiculous to make claims of good art
> and bad art.
I have to disagree with you here. I think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bogus through and through. It started out as a bad guess and developed into a bad ideology. In short I think that this is particularly one case where there is as much fruitful thought in "astrological" thinking there is in Sapir-Whorf type "anthropological" thinking. This is not mere over-kill. I think that Sapir-Whorf is the astrological thinking of the social constructivists.
How do those abstract appraisals have any meaning at all, except to
> reflect the rectitude and status of our social hierarchies, give our
> social system of economic classes the signature of cosmic
> authenticity? Do you really think that my contemplation of a scratchy,
> old blues record has any more or less greatness, participates in human
> experience any more or less than my contemplation of the falcon who
> guides Pharaoh?
Well, as a matter of fact, the old blues singers, and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, hit me on a deeper level than most contemporary art. As a matter of fact they feel as weird and ancient to me as Aeschylus and Sophocles. I am not exaggerating here. It is my considered judgment that much of the old blues and much of Jazz is part of the greatest body of art ever created.
Jerry notes that art helps us to invent meaning to deceive
> ourselves...but that history has no narrative meaning.
I think I said that human history has no _intrinsic_ meaning. The "meaning" of human history is what-ever we can rationally and reasonably make of it with the knowledge and experience we have. I take meaning and judgment and goals of human history to be to some extent separate from debates of what actually happened in human history or discoverable patterns in human history, etc., etc. But I will refer you to my thought experiment above as a way of thinking about the "meaning" of history.
Are we all that
> certain? I don't think so. In fact, I think that narrative drama
> derives from the reversals of narrative history, in fact forms drama
> out of the apparently irrational reversals of history. In Greek and
> later Roman iconograph the falcon of Chefren, is transformed into the
> owl of Minerva and you can revisit an intimately related reflection
> from Hegel, that I think takes on a far more haunting reality when
> contemplate from Chephren at Giza.
>
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