Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science
About: This article is published in Substance.The article was published on 1989-01-01. It has received 5 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Philosophy of computer science & Philosophy of science.
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19 Dec 2008
TL;DR: In this paper, Stoppard takes the abstract as an essential part of appreciating the flux of reality, and the audience is invited to eschew the clockwork of the former in favour of the "mystery" of the latter.
Abstract: artificial view of the world (“A”) is pitted against the flux of reality (“B”), and the audience is invited to eschew the “clockwork” of the former in favour of the “mystery” of the latter’, I would say that Stoppard takes the abstract as an essential part of appreciating the flux. Corballis is on the right track in recognising the critique of abstract logic in Stoppard’s work, but embraces too readily the idea that Stoppard abandons the world of scientific discourse in favour of the experience of the mysteries of reality. The question of whether science and art both count as knowledge is another source of debate between Valentine and Bernard. On the one hand, the most valuable aspect of science is its ability to organise our perceptions of reality into a system which helps us weed out untruth, however attractive. On the other, poetry emphasises our innate ability to make intuitive leaps which bypass the slow, methodical rules of science. In following Thomasina’s research even Valentine learns that sometimes it is possible to understand a larger pattern of interactions without having knowledge of the system’s basic elements. But for the mathematician, the reason for striving for knowledge is always the knowledge itself, which exists apart from the lives and personalities of the people involved in its creation. ‘It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus’, he declares. ‘The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz [sic]. But it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge’ (A 60-61). As the counterbalance to this cumulative view of the human endeavour Stoppard presents the anachronism of Thomasina’s discoveries (Clayton 2000: 205). Although her thinking was left in a cul-de-sac of scientific discovery, her ideas have a value that depends on their connection to her singular personality. At the end of the play the audience would be hard pressed to claim that personalities did not matter, and that Thomasina’s death was of no consequence since her inventions were rediscovered by later generations. Self-Similarity of Mind and World 242 The play consistently balances these two aspects of knowledge with the help of deterministic chaos. For Bernard, the human dimension is the only one that counts: ‘I can expand my universe without you’, he snaps to Valentine and quotes Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’ (A 61). Valentine, for his part, has to admit the inherent impossibility of his attempt to define the actual chain of cause and effect in the fluctuations of grouse populations. On the other hand, the surprising harmonies of the universe connect one set of characters with another, making possible the transmission of knowledge through the intervening decades. The two true geniuses of the play are Thomasina and Gus, one able to see into the future of mathematics and physics, the other able to see back into the past lives of the Coverly manor. Mathematics is a field where individual intuition is vital for the creation of new solutions, but even though Thomasina may have known she was right, her discoveries could not be integrated into the larger system of mathematics until much later. In historiography too the gut feeling of one person may be either a personal truth or an intersubjective one, depending on the kind of evidence it is possible to gather. According to Stoppard (as quoted in Fleming 2001: 207), Gus is an embodiment of those elements in the universe which are not mechanistic, those aspects which we know are there, even though we have no rational, scientific way of explaining them. The boy is an embodiment of intuitive genius, of the idea that chaos theory might explain why the correct conclusion may be reached through subjective certainty even when intersubjective proof is lacking. Hersh Zeifman (1990: 179) has pointed out that though Stoppard’s plays are indebted to Beckett, they are fundamentally optimistic about ontology in that they evince a heartfelt belief that things do exist even though their existence cannot be logically proven. Between this optimistic subtext and the use of absurdist techniques Stoppard has created a tension from which arises postabsurdist, or according to Demastes (1998), ‘chaotics’ theatre. ‘On the surface, the absurdist vision originally “inherited” from Beckett is brilliantly sustained, but under the surface that vision is continually being eroded and sabotaged’, Zeifman (1990: 179) conSelf-Similarity of Mind and World 243 cludes. In my opinion, Clive James (1975: 75-76) epitomises this duality best in suggesting that Stoppard relies on intuitive certainties even while he deconstructs the logic behind them: And if the whole vaultingly clever enterprise turned out to be merely intuitive – well, what is so mere about that? It might be only in Stoppard’s enchanted playground that the majestic inevitabilities of General Relativity can be reconciled with the Uncertainty Principle or quantum physics, but Einstein’s life-long search for the Unified Field was the same game, and he believed in intuition. In Arcadia Stoppard pulls in all the different strands of these issues, creating a play in which the idea of deterministic chaos is used to enliven questions of knowledge. The characters are shown as embodied beings in a world of deterministic chaos, attempting to understand their environment and themselves by both imaginative and rational means. The presence of mistakes and failures in the characters’ various quests for knowledge serves as a reminder that certainty arrived at through an imaginative leap is by no means infallible. The resounding failure of Bernard’s intuition to alight on the truth about who exactly shot which hare and who challenged whom to a duel may for some members of the audience overshadow the quiet successes of the other modern characters. But they do make genuine discoveries: Hannah by uncovering the fate of Septimus Hodge, and Valentine by unearthing the meaning of Thomasina’s equations. These characters are also the ones who passionately believe in the importance of finding out the true nature of things. This is particularly true of Hannah, the selfdeclared enemy of chaos in art and life, who in the course of the play accepts both Gus’s apple and his invitation to dance, learning to trust her feelings and let her imagination guide her. However wrong Bernard turns out to be, his mistaken intuition is counterbalanced by Hannah’s correct gut feeling about Septimus being the hermit. ‘You don’t know that’, Valentine warns her, but Hannah is adamant: ‘Oh, but I do. I do. Somewhere there will be something ... if only I can find it’ (A 66). What is more, as the structure Self-Similarity of Mind and World 244 of the play intersperses action from one era between the events of another, the audience is first put in the position of the arbitrator of the different intuitive certainties, and is then led, along with Hannah, to the intuitive conclusion that the hermit must be Septimus (Martyniuk 2004). The arguments between Bernard and Valentine over whether cosmological models should be accepted because they are true or because they suit a particular temperament, are an echo of the epistemological discussions on the position of the natural sciences after Kuhnian paradigm shifts and social constructivism positioned them as just one of many alternative ways of presenting reality. Stoppard (1993/1994: 268) comments in an interview on the reaction against scientism around the year 1800, when Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were resisting the idea that science might soon find out all the answers: ‘The sense, or illusion, that science is doing exactly that seems to accompany every age, and creates an opposing force’. The new angle that chaos theory has given Stoppard is that science may reveal important truths about the world and about our relation to it, and yet at the same time bring out new mysteries that give our lives even greater individual resonance than before. In his article marking the opening night of Arcadia, Michael Billington (1993: 2) identifies the search for a system of postChristian morality as the core of Stoppard’s writing career, and describes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as ‘a play about the danger of living in a society that dismisses God as a logical impossibility and moral absolutes as unprovable’. A similar warning can be seen in Arcadia: time and time again in the play rigidly logical processes are shown to be erroneous because, as chaos theory states, all the variables affecting the final outcome can never be known. Many critics have also latched on to Stoppard’s (1974/1994: 65) comment that his plays ‘are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know’, and have interpreted this as an admission of his own uncertainty. But the evidence of his plays, as well as many other comments made by him in interviews, suggest that rather than being a resolute relativist he is merely accepting his Self-Similarity of Mind and World 245 own lack of proof and emphasising the difference between two kinds of knowledge: the kind reached through logical proofs and the kind grasped by intuition. In this way Stoppard’s own need to avoid endorsing any specific point of view in his plays can be explained not as embracing relativism, but as a way of bypassing such logical arguments which suggest that true knowledge about mind-independent reality is an impossibility. The two aspects of knowing, intersubjective science and individual imagination are reiterated on different levels of Arcadia and result in a blend in which Lightman’s serene science and the ‘exquisite contradictions’ of literature are irrevocably stirred together. Conclusion: Science and Story-Telling Looking back at the twentieth century, historians will speak of it as the Century of Representation: a time when, in all fields of art, thought, literature, and science, people considered, or reconsidered, the place of language in human life, and the bas
26 citations
Dissertation•
01 Dec 2014
16 citations
TL;DR: Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge, including historical knowledge, geographical knowledge, technological knowledge, and anthropological knowledge as mentioned in this paper, and if by some unimaginable excess of socialism and barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument.
Abstract: Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge...historical knowledge, a geographical, a social (colonial), a technological, a botanical, an anthropological knowledge...if by some unimaginable excess of socialism and barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature, which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument. —Roland Barthes (1996, 463)
10 citations
TL;DR: The endeavours of romance are suffused with this abiding and guiding undercurrent as mentioned in this paper, which is represented in the romance-inspired stories of the Renaissance, and hence the link between genre and the phylogenetic and instinctual orientation toward home.
Abstract: Nostalgia expresses a mind state saturated with emotion, an enduring appetite, adaptive and presumed beneficial when it does not paralyze agency in the real social world. The endeavours of romance are suffused with this abiding and guiding undercurrent—a matter of destiny and a matter of volition combined. Hence the link between genre and the phylogenetic and instinctual orientation toward home, particularly as it is represented in the romance-inspired stories of the Renaissance.
4 citations
05 Nov 2011
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a descriptive method in which she describes the picture of theories of naturalism and other meaning to support and influence the theme of Deborah Digges' poems.
Abstract: Ratu Prayuana, Naturalism in Deborah Digges’s Poems, Thesis. Jakarta: English Letters Department, State Islamic University of Syarif Hidayatullah, July 9, 2010. This research concerned about the discussion and analysis of Deborah Digges’s poems entitled; Trapeze, My Life’s Calling, and The Leaves. The writer uses a descriptive method in which she describes the picture of theories of naturalism and other meaning to support and influence the theme. It is analyzed qualitatively based on the relevant theory of the study. The writer employs herself to collect the data; by reading the text, and marking them to make it easier to analyze. The three of Digges’s poems is rich of intrinsic elements. This research is limited on figure of speech and some of imagery elements. It includes the Social Darwinism that represents the naturalism. In her conclusion, the writer found that the three of Deborah Digges’s poems have the similarity of its picture, and it represents the naturalism through out the nature image in the poems.
3 citations
References
More filters
19 Dec 2008
TL;DR: In this paper, Stoppard takes the abstract as an essential part of appreciating the flux of reality, and the audience is invited to eschew the clockwork of the former in favour of the "mystery" of the latter.
Abstract: artificial view of the world (“A”) is pitted against the flux of reality (“B”), and the audience is invited to eschew the “clockwork” of the former in favour of the “mystery” of the latter’, I would say that Stoppard takes the abstract as an essential part of appreciating the flux. Corballis is on the right track in recognising the critique of abstract logic in Stoppard’s work, but embraces too readily the idea that Stoppard abandons the world of scientific discourse in favour of the experience of the mysteries of reality. The question of whether science and art both count as knowledge is another source of debate between Valentine and Bernard. On the one hand, the most valuable aspect of science is its ability to organise our perceptions of reality into a system which helps us weed out untruth, however attractive. On the other, poetry emphasises our innate ability to make intuitive leaps which bypass the slow, methodical rules of science. In following Thomasina’s research even Valentine learns that sometimes it is possible to understand a larger pattern of interactions without having knowledge of the system’s basic elements. But for the mathematician, the reason for striving for knowledge is always the knowledge itself, which exists apart from the lives and personalities of the people involved in its creation. ‘It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus’, he declares. ‘The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz [sic]. But it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge’ (A 60-61). As the counterbalance to this cumulative view of the human endeavour Stoppard presents the anachronism of Thomasina’s discoveries (Clayton 2000: 205). Although her thinking was left in a cul-de-sac of scientific discovery, her ideas have a value that depends on their connection to her singular personality. At the end of the play the audience would be hard pressed to claim that personalities did not matter, and that Thomasina’s death was of no consequence since her inventions were rediscovered by later generations. Self-Similarity of Mind and World 242 The play consistently balances these two aspects of knowledge with the help of deterministic chaos. For Bernard, the human dimension is the only one that counts: ‘I can expand my universe without you’, he snaps to Valentine and quotes Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’ (A 61). Valentine, for his part, has to admit the inherent impossibility of his attempt to define the actual chain of cause and effect in the fluctuations of grouse populations. On the other hand, the surprising harmonies of the universe connect one set of characters with another, making possible the transmission of knowledge through the intervening decades. The two true geniuses of the play are Thomasina and Gus, one able to see into the future of mathematics and physics, the other able to see back into the past lives of the Coverly manor. Mathematics is a field where individual intuition is vital for the creation of new solutions, but even though Thomasina may have known she was right, her discoveries could not be integrated into the larger system of mathematics until much later. In historiography too the gut feeling of one person may be either a personal truth or an intersubjective one, depending on the kind of evidence it is possible to gather. According to Stoppard (as quoted in Fleming 2001: 207), Gus is an embodiment of those elements in the universe which are not mechanistic, those aspects which we know are there, even though we have no rational, scientific way of explaining them. The boy is an embodiment of intuitive genius, of the idea that chaos theory might explain why the correct conclusion may be reached through subjective certainty even when intersubjective proof is lacking. Hersh Zeifman (1990: 179) has pointed out that though Stoppard’s plays are indebted to Beckett, they are fundamentally optimistic about ontology in that they evince a heartfelt belief that things do exist even though their existence cannot be logically proven. Between this optimistic subtext and the use of absurdist techniques Stoppard has created a tension from which arises postabsurdist, or according to Demastes (1998), ‘chaotics’ theatre. ‘On the surface, the absurdist vision originally “inherited” from Beckett is brilliantly sustained, but under the surface that vision is continually being eroded and sabotaged’, Zeifman (1990: 179) conSelf-Similarity of Mind and World 243 cludes. In my opinion, Clive James (1975: 75-76) epitomises this duality best in suggesting that Stoppard relies on intuitive certainties even while he deconstructs the logic behind them: And if the whole vaultingly clever enterprise turned out to be merely intuitive – well, what is so mere about that? It might be only in Stoppard’s enchanted playground that the majestic inevitabilities of General Relativity can be reconciled with the Uncertainty Principle or quantum physics, but Einstein’s life-long search for the Unified Field was the same game, and he believed in intuition. In Arcadia Stoppard pulls in all the different strands of these issues, creating a play in which the idea of deterministic chaos is used to enliven questions of knowledge. The characters are shown as embodied beings in a world of deterministic chaos, attempting to understand their environment and themselves by both imaginative and rational means. The presence of mistakes and failures in the characters’ various quests for knowledge serves as a reminder that certainty arrived at through an imaginative leap is by no means infallible. The resounding failure of Bernard’s intuition to alight on the truth about who exactly shot which hare and who challenged whom to a duel may for some members of the audience overshadow the quiet successes of the other modern characters. But they do make genuine discoveries: Hannah by uncovering the fate of Septimus Hodge, and Valentine by unearthing the meaning of Thomasina’s equations. These characters are also the ones who passionately believe in the importance of finding out the true nature of things. This is particularly true of Hannah, the selfdeclared enemy of chaos in art and life, who in the course of the play accepts both Gus’s apple and his invitation to dance, learning to trust her feelings and let her imagination guide her. However wrong Bernard turns out to be, his mistaken intuition is counterbalanced by Hannah’s correct gut feeling about Septimus being the hermit. ‘You don’t know that’, Valentine warns her, but Hannah is adamant: ‘Oh, but I do. I do. Somewhere there will be something ... if only I can find it’ (A 66). What is more, as the structure Self-Similarity of Mind and World 244 of the play intersperses action from one era between the events of another, the audience is first put in the position of the arbitrator of the different intuitive certainties, and is then led, along with Hannah, to the intuitive conclusion that the hermit must be Septimus (Martyniuk 2004). The arguments between Bernard and Valentine over whether cosmological models should be accepted because they are true or because they suit a particular temperament, are an echo of the epistemological discussions on the position of the natural sciences after Kuhnian paradigm shifts and social constructivism positioned them as just one of many alternative ways of presenting reality. Stoppard (1993/1994: 268) comments in an interview on the reaction against scientism around the year 1800, when Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were resisting the idea that science might soon find out all the answers: ‘The sense, or illusion, that science is doing exactly that seems to accompany every age, and creates an opposing force’. The new angle that chaos theory has given Stoppard is that science may reveal important truths about the world and about our relation to it, and yet at the same time bring out new mysteries that give our lives even greater individual resonance than before. In his article marking the opening night of Arcadia, Michael Billington (1993: 2) identifies the search for a system of postChristian morality as the core of Stoppard’s writing career, and describes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as ‘a play about the danger of living in a society that dismisses God as a logical impossibility and moral absolutes as unprovable’. A similar warning can be seen in Arcadia: time and time again in the play rigidly logical processes are shown to be erroneous because, as chaos theory states, all the variables affecting the final outcome can never be known. Many critics have also latched on to Stoppard’s (1974/1994: 65) comment that his plays ‘are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know’, and have interpreted this as an admission of his own uncertainty. But the evidence of his plays, as well as many other comments made by him in interviews, suggest that rather than being a resolute relativist he is merely accepting his Self-Similarity of Mind and World 245 own lack of proof and emphasising the difference between two kinds of knowledge: the kind reached through logical proofs and the kind grasped by intuition. In this way Stoppard’s own need to avoid endorsing any specific point of view in his plays can be explained not as embracing relativism, but as a way of bypassing such logical arguments which suggest that true knowledge about mind-independent reality is an impossibility. The two aspects of knowing, intersubjective science and individual imagination are reiterated on different levels of Arcadia and result in a blend in which Lightman’s serene science and the ‘exquisite contradictions’ of literature are irrevocably stirred together. Conclusion: Science and Story-Telling Looking back at the twentieth century, historians will speak of it as the Century of Representation: a time when, in all fields of art, thought, literature, and science, people considered, or reconsidered, the place of language in human life, and the bas
26 citations
Dissertation•
01 Dec 2014
16 citations
TL;DR: Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge, including historical knowledge, geographical knowledge, technological knowledge, and anthropological knowledge as mentioned in this paper, and if by some unimaginable excess of socialism and barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument.
Abstract: Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge...historical knowledge, a geographical, a social (colonial), a technological, a botanical, an anthropological knowledge...if by some unimaginable excess of socialism and barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature, which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument. —Roland Barthes (1996, 463)
10 citations
TL;DR: The endeavours of romance are suffused with this abiding and guiding undercurrent as mentioned in this paper, which is represented in the romance-inspired stories of the Renaissance, and hence the link between genre and the phylogenetic and instinctual orientation toward home.
Abstract: Nostalgia expresses a mind state saturated with emotion, an enduring appetite, adaptive and presumed beneficial when it does not paralyze agency in the real social world. The endeavours of romance are suffused with this abiding and guiding undercurrent—a matter of destiny and a matter of volition combined. Hence the link between genre and the phylogenetic and instinctual orientation toward home, particularly as it is represented in the romance-inspired stories of the Renaissance.
4 citations
05 Nov 2011
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a descriptive method in which she describes the picture of theories of naturalism and other meaning to support and influence the theme of Deborah Digges' poems.
Abstract: Ratu Prayuana, Naturalism in Deborah Digges’s Poems, Thesis. Jakarta: English Letters Department, State Islamic University of Syarif Hidayatullah, July 9, 2010. This research concerned about the discussion and analysis of Deborah Digges’s poems entitled; Trapeze, My Life’s Calling, and The Leaves. The writer uses a descriptive method in which she describes the picture of theories of naturalism and other meaning to support and influence the theme. It is analyzed qualitatively based on the relevant theory of the study. The writer employs herself to collect the data; by reading the text, and marking them to make it easier to analyze. The three of Digges’s poems is rich of intrinsic elements. This research is limited on figure of speech and some of imagery elements. It includes the Social Darwinism that represents the naturalism. In her conclusion, the writer found that the three of Deborah Digges’s poems have the similarity of its picture, and it represents the naturalism through out the nature image in the poems.
3 citations