Sedimentation of unreality

Dreams sometimes come true. So do prophecies (sometimes). Jealous fantasies can become so destructive that they actually create what they were about (albeit wrongly) in the first place. Visionary leaders know that they first have to draw a picture before people can start acting towards making it a reality.

A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.

Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.

Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]

What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.

Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.

When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.

To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)

Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.

And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]

[1] Umberto Eco, Six walks in the fictional woods. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994, 97–99, the quote is from 99.

[2] Technical side note: I'm using a sketchy notion of cause and effect here that leaves many unclarities and is not (yet) connected to the contemporary philosophical discussion of causation. But note that the idea of sedimented unreality as a cause is no more problematic than any notion of mental causation of events in the world. Sedimentation can unproblematically be analyzed in terms of people's views and actions. It singles out views and actions that are based on an exercise of the imagination, but that's a phenomenon that every account of human action has to deal with anyway.

Aesthetic ascent

This continues my earlier post about literature (and art more generally), approaching the notion of beauty.

2. Ascent. There is something like a natural progression, a sort of development, in the way we attend to fictional works, such as novels, movies, or theatre plays. First, you simply follow the flow, and yield to impressions: this is the stage of immersion. Then follows an activity of comparison: noting characteristics, finding differences and commonalities with other works, understanding patterns and developments. Finally, with the recognition that there is a shaping mind (or several minds) behind all this, someone who has intentionally created it so, there is a stage of appreciation. It's the artist's imaginative performance that comes into focus at this last stage.

Let's take an example: you're reading a novel. The first stage is immersion. You get 'into' the story; you start orienting yourself in this fictional world, you get to know the characters, sometimes from within their own head, sometimes only from without; as the story develops, you're curious why they act as they do; you want to know what happens next. (It's just the same when watching a movie: you're attending closely to what is happening on the screen, you're with the plot, apprehending the events that unfold, listen to the characters' words, watch their actions, empathize with the feelings they express in their body language and tone of voice.)

At this stage, you are not aware of your own position as an observer; you're absorbed — you don't reflect. You're 'dreaming the fictional dream', as writing coach John Gardner has put it.[1]

There may come a point, however, when you step out of this immediate engagement and enter stage two: comparison. This might happen while you're still reading, or perhaps afterwards; it may happen only after you've read many books; and perhaps even then only after prompting from a teacher or a review in a newspaper. Whatever triggers it, you attention is drawn away from what is happening to the characters to what you can observe about this piece of fiction as such. You begin to notice differences and commonalities with other stories; you start categorizing, possibly assign them to genres; you may identify stylistic elements, perceive patterns, developments, and so on.

Once you put a fiction into a comparison class, it speaks to you in a different way. You can't be exclusively absorbed in that single piece any more, because you are now aware of its relationship with many others. It does no longer only exist in the events and emotions it presents to you; it is now also bound into a larger context of ways of presenting such events and emotions. The space of what you're perceiving has widened considerably: from merely something that's going on (for you to raptly enjoy) to goings-on that merely present one lone path through a vast network of connections.

Noting this, of course, you may well ask yourself the question why you are on this particular path now, and not another one. There may be reasons behind it or not, but you'll find that now you realize a shaping will behind the fact that you are going in that particular direction right now. Someone (the author, or artist) has taken choices, has deliberately arranged things in this specific way. And once you're aware that many of those decisions come from a unique, creative mind, the mind of someone who knows about those options, and who has a sense of direction that somehow got transferred upon these fictions — once you notice that, you're on the level of appreciation.

3. I have started above with the claim that there is this development, or aesthetic ascent, in our responses to fictional works. We must get clearer about the status of that ascent.

First, of course we don't go through these stages with every single experience we have of a fictional work. In other words, you might have got to the level of appreciation when watching a movie yesterday, but that doesn't mean that you can't watch another movie today and remain on the level of immersion. (It's not quite so clear that you can watch the same movie today and remain on the level of immersion. I suspect that once you've reached some level of reflection with respect to a particular instance of fiction, it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to again retreat from that level. Compare this to knowing a foreign language: if you can't understand French, say, and you're sitting in a café in Paris, you may perceive all the talking around you, which you can't interpret, as a kind of music, an acoustic background, sounds without any direct meaning to you. Once you've learned the language, however, it is nearly impossible to perceive those same sounds that way. You'll hear the meaning of what is said, whether you want it or not. I think it's similar with perceiving an instance of fiction on the level of comparison or appreciation: once you're there, you can't go back.)

Second, this ascent is not tied to stages of our personal development. It's not that we're merely immersed in all novels, movies etc. for the first twenty years or so of our lives, and then learn something, get up to the next level, and from that point always remain there. Sure enough, with education and personal maturity comes also a greater ability and affinity for reflection and appreciation in these matters. But there is no reason why young people couldn't go through all stages very early in their development. (Even young children start sorting stories they know by how much they like them, and later on they may find they have a favorite author or two whose works they like most.)

Third, at all three levels external elements have an influence on what we experience, in addition to the aesthetic ascent. You may be immersed in a story at first, but your thoughts may drift away after a while. (So you're not reflecting on what goes on in the story, but you're suddenly in the mood to think about your plans for tomorrow, perhaps triggered by a sentence you've read.) Likewise, your concentration may fade because of physical or mental fatigue; or your ability to follow an emotionally disturbing story or film may be exhausted after a while. (You simply can't take any more of those depressing pictures or situations.)

On the level of comparison, personal preferences may guide your perception. For example, if you've just taken up dancing classes or some sport, you might be sensitive to aspects of physical activity or competitiveness and experience a movie which reflects on them much more intensely; this might lead to a preference for that category which is merely rooted in your own current situation. (Note that in this case, there is still much going on on the comparison level between movies within that same category. The preference is for focusing on movies which deal with that particular aspect, but you're still going to compare them with each other for how they do that; and that comparison activity is of course the more interesting one.) Similarly, there are many other influences here from our own personal constellation: we may find certain actors more attractive than others because of their physical appearance, their unique voice, or their intriguing screen persona; we may be fascinated by the novelty and relative strangeness of something we've only just started discovering; or we may even relish a slight quality of indistinctness in styles we're not yet used to. (Try reading Shakespeare in original Old English, or generally something written in a language you can understand reasonably well, but you're not yet quite familiar with. The fact that there are nuances you won't get, and the fact that you know it, will add a special, unique charm to those works; but it will inevitably wear off after some more practice.)

Finally, on the level of appreciation, where we focus on artistic performance, there is another set of external elements that may influence us, such as a personal like or dislike for the artist, or an own personal experience practicing the art in question: you can recognize an achievement much better if you know from first-hand experience what it takes to get there, what labors, patience, and perseverance are required for it. Thus, on all three levels there are external factors interacting with the development we're looking at here, aesthetic ascent.

(I don't think there is a need to 'purify' our reception of fictional works, in a way that minimizes or even eliminates those external influences. It's just important to be aware that aesthetic ascent, in the sense described here, is not the only thing going on in those experiences.)

There's a fourth aspect to aesthetic ascent. Our experience of an instance of art is deepened, its richness and intensity increased on each of those levels (contrary to widespread opinion that a perception that is unspoiled by theory is the most intense). This connects back to my earlier post about appreciation of the craft. I said there that conceptual skills are required, and must be developed, in order to get to a more refined appreciation of art. Aesthetic ascent is a crucial factor in building these conceptual skills. Understanding is enhanced by informed ways of looking at things; and the ability to appreciate fictional works is no exception to that rule.

[1] John Gardner, The Art of Fiction. Notes on craft for young writers. New York: Random House 1984.

Naturalizing myths (contd.)

(This continues my earlier posting about Plato's handling of the myth of Boreas and Oreithya in the Phaedrus.)

In the Republic, where the topic is the proper forming of character, Socrates reflects on the influence which bad myths might have, and proposes to reject them.

(This is not necessarily the call for censorship some people have read into it. Note that the Republic isn't a proposal for direct implementation of political measures; many textbooks misleadingly suggest that, by glossing its content as "Plato sketching his vision of an ideal state". But that's a grave oversimplification. The Republic is about the formation of the human psyche; it aims to explain the main excellences of character and their base in the complexities of human psychology; and it does so by demonstrating the internal processes within the psyche using a model: the model of a city-state, which makes the details more tangible in an externalized form and so helps us to discuss and explore them. This model, the sketch of an ideal state, makes up only part of the work; and though it probably lets us see some of Plato's ideas and fantasies about the political and social realm, this doesn't make it into a work of political science yet.)[1]

One criticism he makes is that portraying the gods as vicious, unjustly violent, or deceptive is wrong: both because it doesn't adequately reflect the nature of the divine (gods who'd behave that way could not count as divine, or something higher than humans; on the contrary, they'd be even worse than humans, at least when the latter are at their best), and also because, adequate or not, it plants the wrong examples in the minds of the audience.[2]

This criticism obviously fits the myth of Boreas we've seen Phaedrus and Socrates talk about on their way along the river in the Phaedrus. There is no way the actions of the personalized wind-god might be described as properly divine. One thing to be said, then, by the standards of the Republic, is that this story would be inappropriate for use in education. Still, Socrates in the Phaedrus avoids ethical reflection.

(Martha Nussbaum sees in this more tolerant stance a change of attitude which reflects a deeper change in Plato's thinking. She sees in the Phaedrus a shift towards higher tolerance and appreciation of emotional elements in ethics.[3] Even if this is true, however, it would explain the acceptance of the mythical story as such, i.e. as a story which displays personalized gods and the like; it still doesn't account for the fact that the sort of behavior shown here is unacceptable. The form of the myth would be OK, but not its content.)

[1] More on the reception history of the Republic can be found in Julia Annas', Ancient Philosophy. A very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 24–36, and the references given there. A more detailed discussion of the inadequacy of a reading reduced to the political can be found in her Platonic Ethics: Old and New, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999, 72–95.
[2] Rep. 377d–378e
[3] In her The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, 225.

Appreciation of the craft

In order to get clearer about my concept of beauty, I'm looking first at artistic creation: beauty in literature, music and the arts.[1] I'm focusing on examples from literature for now, but the ideas I'm sketching here should apply more or less the same to all forms of artistic creation. I begin by introducing the notions of appreciation, aesthetic ascent, and performance.

1) Appreciation.[2] Let's start with an obvious and rather truistic point: when we try to understand a work of literature, there is at least one special dimension compared to trying to understand any narrative in everyday life. A work of literature doesn't just tell a story; it does that, but it does it in a special way. For our understanding of something as literature, the way how the story is told is at least as important as its content.

When we read an article in a newspaper (telling us about a political summit, for instance), or a report at work, what we are mostly interested in is what the narrative tells us, not how it is told. Not that the latter aspect doesn't matter: there is a typical style to newspaper articles or work reports, and if a text of that sort fails to comply to our expectations, we're irritated. Imagine a work report using obscure or flowery language, or a newspaper article written in verse. We would be surprised, and because of the unusual format, we would have difficulty reading it as a work report or newspaper article. So the way such a text is written is not immaterial—it must be written in a particular way. But if it is, then we are precisely not interested in the question in what way it is written. The craft aspect, so to speak, is transparent to us. Ideally, we want to be informed, and the best style for a text with that objective is a style that isn't perceived as style, that keeps in the background.

Consider yet another sort of narrative that also is part of daily life. When your friend tells you the amusing (or depressing, depending on where you stand) story how many forms she had to fill in to get her laptop connected to the company network, you're not mostly interested in what exactly happened. If she told you the story to amuse you, then a lot depends on how well she succeeds in making it fun to listen to it. In this case again, the way the story is told is far from unimportant; but again, it should be transparent—it's not necessary for you to notice exactly what makes the story funny, which stylistic elements (choice of words, body language, exploitation of shared opinions) are used, and how well they are employed. On the contrary: the story will probably fail to be amusing if you are made aware of these elements too often and too directly.

In all these examples it is of course possible to reflect on narrative style, and appreciate it. You can come to like a certain newspaper precisely because of its sober and informative style, you can appreciate a colleague's work reports for their matter-of-factness, and of course we can value a friend's talent for amusing storytelling. Such additional reflection and appreciation is not strictly necessary for the functioning of something as a newspaper article, a work report, or an amusing conversation. But it refines your perceptive and social interaction skills if you are capable of doing so (and if you actually do it a lot). It is also a step into the direction of appreciation of art, and literature in particular.

With literature, reflection on and appreciation of the way how things are said in a text are built right into the practice, both on the side of the producers and on the side of the recipients. In other words, authors are aware that it's not just the stories they tell, but also how they are telling them (their particular style, use of language and idioms, the way they construct the story and plot etc.) which is subject to interest and appreciation; and readers know that they must look at these aspects in order to fully 'get' what's going on in the text.

Auguste Toulmouche,
The reading lesson

 Understanding literature, then, must include perceiving and appreciating the 'how' it is made, in addition to the 'what' that it says. This is a skill that requires some development, and naturally it benefits from learning to apply the terms and concepts of technical language. If you are able to distinguish between plot and story, or between the narrator's and the character's perspectives, and if you can use these terms to refer to such differences in discourse with yourself and others, then you have reached a higher level of skill in understanding literature. Note that having a conceptual skill does not necessarily mean that you also have to use some given terminology; many readers have an understanding of the difference between the narrator's perspective and a character's perspective, although they may never have learned the technical use of 'narrator', 'character' and 'perspective' employed here. It's not the particular use of words that matters — what matters is the conceptual capacity.

[1] Further steps must surely include human beauty (including eros and desire) and beauty of nature (in both its main forms: the organism and the wilderness).

[2] This is a slightly reworked version of an earlier post about Reflection and interpretation over at my online journal.

Der Glanz der Unwirklichkeit

I gave this speech at the Spring 2011 Toastmasters Area F1 (District 59) contest. (I wasn't competing, it was a target speech for the evaluation contest in German.) I've used several themes from this blog in the speech.



The speech is in German; switch on the captions for the (German) transcript.

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness (contd.)

(I continue from an earlier post to explore some similarities and differences in Sartre's talk of being and nothingness, on the one hand, and my notions of reality and unreality in this blog, on the other.)

A second parallel is that reality is primary, in metaphysical terms, before unreality: unreality can only be created from reality, but not the other way round. Every form of unreality relies on a background of reality which is much larger than itself. (For instance, take a fictional story, or a lie: we take in some description of the world in those, but most of that world is not explicitly described; so whenever there remains a gap in the description, we either fill it from what is implicit in it, or else we fill it in from what we assume to be the case in the real world.)

Sartre claims something similar when he says that "[t]he use which we make of nothingness in its familiar form always supposes a prelimiary specification of being." And he continues with some examples:

We say, pointing to a particular collection of objects, "Touch nothing," which means, very precisely, nothing of that collection. Similarly, if we question someone on well-determined events in his private or public life, he may reply, "I know nothing." And this nothing includes the totality of the facts on which we questioned him. Even Socrates with his famous statement, "I know that I know nothing," designates by this nothing the totality of being considered as Truth.[1]

Even the nothingness of what was there before a world existed would be based on the world which is now, and from within we can ask such a question. Such a nothingness (the 'nothing' we mean when we answer the question: "What was there before our world?" with "Nothing.") emerged only on top of our reality. If we did analyze it and strip it from "its characteristic of being empty of this world and of every whole taking the form of a world" as well as from its "characteristic of before, which presupposes an after", then we would end up with "a total indetermination which it would be impossible to conceive, even and especially as a nothingness."[2]

"This means", Sartre concludes, "that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. [...] nothingness can only have a borrowed existence [...], and the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness."[3] There can't be any nothingness without being (or before, or after it), just as there couldn't be any unreality without reality.

(As a side-note: the process I have labeled sedimentation of unreality into reality also relies on this grounding of unreality in reality. Sedimentation happens when on the basis of some instance of unreality action is taken, in reality. Real events happen in response to unreality just as well as they are caused by something within reality. But all this presupposes an underlying reality as basis on which that unreality was formed. There is a hint to a parallel to this also in Sartre when he remarks that "it is from being that nothingness concretely derives its efficacy."[4])

[1] Being and Nothingness, 48–49.
[2] Ibd., 48–49.
[3] Ibd.
[4] Ibd.

Naturalizing myths

On the last day she was seen alive, Oreithya, the daughter of the ancient Athenian king Erechtheus, was playing with her friends by the river Illissos; not suspecting any danger here, she was taken by surprise and carried away in a violent gust of wind from the north. Stories and legends have grown ever since about what might have happened to her.

Ages on, two philosophers stroll along those same banks of the Illissos, minding that it's more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets,[1] but nonetheless, of course, intending to put their leisure to good use— and what better use could there be than a deep and pleasant conversation on the art of love, the craft of rhetorics, and the philosophic life?

On their way, they pass a spot that looks just as it might have been the very site where Boreas, the north wind, once did snatch the innocently playing girl; it seems so fitting, as Phaedrus observes: "The stream is lovely, pure and clear: just right for girls to be playing nearby."[2] Of the two philosophers, he's the one who really has an eye for that sort of thing; he's got imagination enough to see how nicely the scenery would invite people to dream up a mythical story, unfolding here in ancient times: of the wild and passionate wind god, Boreas, who'd fallen in love with the king's daughter and, having been rejected by her before, decides to take her by force, seizes the opportunity, grabs and carries her away to a cliff where he covers her in a cloud and rapes her.[3]

Giovanni Battista Cipriani, The Rape of Oreithya

But even though Phaedrus might welcome stories such as this one as occasions for testing his talent of spotting locations that look like just the right setting for them, he also is aware that it is only a myth, something an educated person wouldn't believe in. Socrates, his companion, seems to have a more nuanced stance on this, however:

Actually, it would not be out of place for me to reject it, as our intellectuals do. I could then tell a clever story: I could claim that a gust of the North Wind blew her over the rocks where she was playing [...]; and once she was killed that way people said she had been carried off by Boreas [...]

Now, Phaedrus, such stories are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all. [...] Anyone who does not believe in them, who wants to explain them away and make them plausible by means of some sort of rough ingenuity, will need a great deal of time.

But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.[4]

I think is important to note that Socrates says two things here: first, he recognizes the possibility to give a naturalized account of the events.[5] It is possible to explain it without recourse to gods or supernatural powers; what happened can be accounted for by giving a perfectly ordinary explanation. But, secondly, he also says that there are more important things to do, that it is not of the highest importance to do so; at least that is so for him, but by quoting the Delphic prescription, "know thyself", it seems clear that he thinks it would be a good idea for others as well to strive for self-knowledge rather than think up sophisticated naturalized versions of complicated ancient myths.[6] Thus, although Socrates might not really believe that gods and the like are necessary for explaining what's going on, he still seems to acknowledge that stories such as this can tell us something about ourselves—something we might also formulate differently (in a naturalized way, perhaps), but which would then also take more time and effort to formulate, time and effort that could be spent more wisely otherwise.

Not only does Socrates express tolerance for mythological accounts here, but later on he uses myths himself to make some of his ideas intelligible. And what applies to Socrates, the character in the Phaedrus, holds also more generally for Plato; he's built mythical stories into many of his dialogues. (Think, for instance, of the myth of the ancestry and birth of Eros in the Symposium, 203b–c.) Myths, as a form of unreality, are a vehicle of the imagination just as novels or movies are in our time, and as such they can convey insights, enhance our self-knowledge, make the world more intelligible for us, and propel us forward in our actions and projects.

(Next, I'll look into the corresponding need to restrict myth, by what I call reflection, in Plato.)

[1] Phdr. 227a–b. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the Phaedrus.

[2] 229b; The general theme of fittingness of the sites they encounter, the 'impressario' role of Phaedrus in choosing them, and the dramatic and philosophical significance of all this for what follows (after all, the Phaedrus is the only dialogue where Plato makes substantial use of a landscape setting, and one outside the city for that) is carefully analyzed by G.R.F. Ferrari, in his Listening to the Cicadas. A study of Plato's Phaedrus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987, ch. 1. Thus, that Socrates responds with a correction of fact at this point shows that "appropriateness is not a sufficient condition for truth" (ibd. 10). And then he launches into what is also the topic of this post, namely that "in a certain sense of truth, truth is not what matters". (Or, in the terminology of this blog: there is a role for unreality, just as for reality, in all our thinking and acting.)

[3] See the Wikipedia entry about Oreithya for more details on the myth, and references.

[4] 229c–230a

[5] Note that the term 'naturalized' is a modern word that I simply use for convenience; of course, the ancient Greek concept of nature was very different from the one that we have in mind when we talk of 'naturalizing' ideas.

An alternative might have been the term 'rationalizing' (which is what Ferrari uses in his analysis of the passage in Listening to the Cicadas). Insofar as rationalizing would mean to find reasons or reasonable explanations (ratio roughly means reason, after all), this doesn't seem to be a helpful term to me, though. Both the myth and the naturalized explanation aim at coming to terms (and thus to emotionally cope) with what is a disturbing event: the vanishing and probable violent death of a young girl. Both the mythical story and the naturalized story provide an account of what happened, and in both cases the account is given in a coherent, intelligible way. Their difference lies in that the former includes forces (such as gods and the extraordinary powers ascribed to them) which the latter wouldn't allow, restricting itself to natural forces. These stories differ only in the ingredients of the world view from which they come, but not in the rationalizing function (which both fulfill).

[6] By quoting the Delphic oracle, Socrates indirectly brings the authority of Apollo into play; which looks a little tendentious if you're on the side of the naturalizers. If you strive for naturalized explanations of the events in old myths, surely you wouldn't stop at oracles and this god either. Of course, the natural reply here would be that Apollo stands for rational discourse, truth and insight, and finally self-knowledge; there's nothing really mythical about that, and Socrates claim about priorities is made precisely as a rational argument (there are more important things than old stories, and time is limited).

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness

When Sartre writes, in Being and Nothingness, that "we see nothingness making the world iridescent, casting a shimmer over things" (58)[1], his notion of nothingness is not quite the same as my notion of unreality, and his 'iridescent shimmer' not the same as my concept of beauty. But they're close enough to venture a comparison.

1) For one thing, both Sartre's nothingness and my unreality come into the world because of us human beings, who have consciousness and can take various attitudes towards what's going on around us. There wouldn't be nothingness (or unreality) if there were no human (or other conscious) beings, if the world consisted only of rivers and stones, trees and insects.[2] The key to these attitudes seems to be an ability to think of possibilities, of ways the world might be (in contrast to how it actually is, or at least seems to be). "[n]on-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation", and "negation[3] appears on the original basis of a relation of man to the world. The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities." (38)

However, compared to unreality (in my sense), these possibilities may remain implied—and will remain so, in fact, in the majority of cases. They form a much more pervasive background in Sartres universe than instances of unreality (which must play out in the world) could produce. Whenever something is missing, absent, or lacking, there's nothingness; Sartre himself brings examples such as the notions of destruction (39–40) and distance (54–55); and eventually lists "absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, etc. [...] which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation" (55). Thus his notion of nothingness is much more inflationary than my unreality, which implies the deliberate creation of what is at least in some respects a 'candidate reality'.

He also has (I think) a much heavier burden of argument to carry for his claim that these négatités, as he calls them, are a feature of objective reality. They're not subjective in the sense that we merely produce them in judgments, i.e. in our descriptions of the world, but there is something in objective reality that precedes them, and is in fact what such judgments are about: "non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being." (42) Now, on my account, unreality does come into the world by mere mental activity (thinking, imagining, remembering, and so on), and so it has obviously no claim for belonging to objective reality. Of course, unreality it doesn't come into the world by simple negative judgments, but instead by a rather more complex human activity (for which I've used the broad term 'imagination'). Yet at the same time, the paradigm examples of forms of unreality (the various sorts of fiction, scenarios, lies, dreams, and the future as well as the past) seem to me more specific and concrete in their phenomenology than Sartre's négatités.

2) This may make the scope of these two notions look rather different, and yet there are also some more (and deep) points of agreement.

(Of which there'll be more later.)

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A phenomenological essay on ontology. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press 1992. Quoted with page numbers in the text.
[2] Where exactly does the line run? Do animals count as conscious beings? In some sense, of course, but I think the way Sartre uses the term it would require more than (most) animals are capable of. At the very least, none of the forms of unreality in my sense are within reach for (most of) them. (I say 'most' because, again, we may have to qualify this a little since latest research seems to find rudimentary forms of self-consciousness in some primates. Some rudimentary forms of unreality, then, might be in play for these as well.)
[3] A judgment about some instance of nothingness is called a 'negation' in the context from which I'm quoting.

Borges' crevices of unreason

We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.

Thus Borges has memorably summarized his brief discussion of the appearance in philosophy of paradoxes flowing from the idea of infinity. (A formulation suggestively posed just after another quote from Novalis to the same effect, but formulated in terms of magic instead of dreams, thus replacing one form of mystified unreality with another one.)

'Unrealities', as Borges uses the term (in the essay, though not in the passage I quoted), seem to be exclusively paradoxes, which are however assumed to reflect something in the nature of the universe. Mere fiction, say, or ordinary dreams would not count as unrealities in Borges' use of the term, as they would in mine. He finds examples for his unrealities in Zeno's paradoxes of motion and Kant's antinomies of reason. (The former he traces through a mostly arbitrary selection of philosophical works.) Given the "hallucinatory nature of the world", which remains in Borges' essay a mere claim rather than a motivated view, the function of such paradoxes (those "tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason") is to remind us of the falseness of the world. They are part of the original plan: the illusion might be perfect, so that we can't see through it; but anticipating that success, we have put some signposts for our dreaming selves into it which tell us that this dream world is false.

But it remains to be clarified in what relationship a 'false' world and a 'true' world would stand. (Note that the pair of terms, reality vs. unreality, is already used up for the reality of the dream world vs. the paradoxes built into it.) Would a world that didn't contain those 'unrealities', in Borges' sense of the term, be so perfect that it couldn't be distinguished from a 'true' world then? Would that mean that it were a 'true' world? Or would it still be 'false' because of its origin as dreamt? Moreover, is there yet another world, that of the dreamer who "has dreamt the world"? And if so, is that containing world now a 'true' world, or yet another dreamt one? And if the latter, how could we avoid the infinite regress that Borges himself has found in all those philosophical texts? Wouldn't he have to diagnose that regress first and foremost in the idealist philosophies to which he refers so admiringly?

For all its bibliographical interest, there isn't much to be gained from Borges' essay. What, then, remains to be drawn from it? At least, there is a memorable (and beautiful) quote: right at the end.

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise", in: Labyrinths. New York: New Directions 1964, 202–208, 208.

Gambling with Sartre

So, if we take Kierkegaard's definition of the self, unreality is inherent in the structure of the self. (If we both accept Kierkegaard's definition of a self, and that the past is a form of unreality—which are mere claims so far. Let's further suspend judgment on all that and keep playing the game a little longer.)

Sartre is making a similar point in the course his discussion of 'The Origin of Nothingness'.[1] He is out to show that between our actions and the motives we have for those actions there is inevitably a gap: our motives themselves are ineffective to bring about our actions. It's always possible that we act differently, or don't act at all. And though I may have a motive to act in a certain way, nothing in that motive is sufficient to make me act that way (rather than act differently, or not act at all). Sartre speaks here of "that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act". (71) For him, this idea has to carry some theoretical burden: because of it we can experience human freedom: "the structure of motives as ineffective is the condition of my freedom" (ibd.). If we couldn't perceive our motives as in the end always ineffective, we wouldn't be able to see ourselves as free. But since we do experience them as ineffective, we are aware that we have to make up our attitudes and actions over and over again; thus "freedom [...] is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates the free being". (72)

And he gives a very helpful example for this line of thought: the gambler. Sartre invites us to consider the case of a man who has been a habitual gambler and now wants to stop it—he's "freely and sincerely decided not to gamble any more." (69) He might have all sorts of good reasons (perhaps he realizes he risks financial ruin, or he feels he is a disappointment to his family and wants to correct that). So he makes a resolution of 'not playing any more'. Now, having thought it through and being determined to stick to the resolution, that should be enough to make his future actions comply with it, shouldn't it? However, what he actually experiences shows that this was an illusion: "when he approaches the gambling table, [he] suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away." (Ibd.) What he realizes is that however determined his stance might have been, it's in the past, and if he wants his reasons to guide his actions, he has to re-make the decision, he has to get to the resolve again:

I should have liked so much not to gamble anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of relatives) as forbidding me to play. It seemed to me that I had established a real barrier between gambling and myself, and now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. In order for it to come to my aid once more, I have to remake it ex nihilo and freely. (70)

One thing we should note here is that, in this example, freedom is not exactly welcome. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly disturbing insight that at this point, the gambler is free, i.e. exactly not bound by the resolution he had made in the past. Or, to put it the other way round: there was a certain comfort and security in the idea that a resolution might be enough to control one's further actions; the insight that it doesn't, that in the event there is nothing to stop one from acting against a resolution, destroys that comfort and security. Being free isn't always easy. (More often than not, according to Sartre, we attempt to look away from our freedom in an attitude which he calls 'Bad Faith' and illustrates most ingeniously a few sections after the passage I've just quoted.)

That we have to "remake the Self" (72) in this way is because the past that is involved here is a form of unreality (and not reality). (Notice, in the quote that I'm about to give, how Sartre tellingly puts the word 'magic' in the mouth of his gambler.) Or again, as Sartre puts the point:

The not gambling is only one of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is one of them, neither more nor less. I must rediscover the fear of financial ruin or of disappointing my family, etc., I must re-create it as experienced fear. [...] After having patiently built up barriers and walls, after enclosing myself in the magic circle of a resolution, I perceive with anguish that nothing prevents me from gambling. (72)

And there we have it, the "nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act". (71) It's a nothingness (as Sartre calls it) which in this case comes from the past, a form of unreality, being involved here. (Other forms of unreality might come into play, but in this example, just as in my own example in my post about Kierkegaard's definition of self, it happens to be the past.) According to him (if I understand correctly), such nothingness is continuously involved in the relation of a human being with itself, and thus an inevitable component of it. When we become aware of this, one effect is that we become aware of our own essential freedom (which we experience in what Sartre calls 'anguish'). What's perhaps even more interesting is that, in continuously doing so, human beings (beings with consciousness and a self) perpetually bring nothingness into the world—that's where it actually comes from.

(But this is a topic for another time.)

[1] In chapter 1 of his Being and Nothingness. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press 1992. Quoted with page numbers in the text.