Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in [a precise] manner.Slightly modified from Marginal Revolution; I think saying story-telling tends to be more inaccurate than argument is, itself, inaccurate (or at least imprecise!).
This brings up all sorts of thoughts for me. Is the political left more accepting of Mystics than the political right? Is there a connection between left-wing politics, mystical thinking, and the stronghold of liberal intellectualism that is the humanities (at least, that's what we're always told about the humanities)?
And for the record, no, context-dependent / narrative thinking is not the same as sloppy thinking. As Joel has argued before, it's probably better suited to different kinds of questions than precise / mathematical thinking is. Mystics are those who are better at context-dependent, narrative thinking and tend to think the questions it is suited for are the most important ones. Mechanics are much better at pure logical and mathematical thinking, and tend to downplay the importance of questions where mechanical thinking doesn't cut it.
And I'll re-emphasize, once again, that most of how God chooses to communicate with us is through narrative, metaphor, and other context-dependent modes of thinking rather than through logical constructs and syllogistic arguments. I find it hard not to believe that the imprecision is intentional. I am also convinced that most people (and by extension most students these days) lean more toward mystic than mechanic, but the opposite is true for professors. This matters a lot for how we teach our students, a fact I continually have to remind myself of, and hopefully won't forget during my teaching presentation tomorrow.
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I think you're spot-on with most of this, and that this is why literary studies are the ultimate field of human knowledge. Not that I'm biased.
But I wonder: do you think that metaphors and narratives are imprecise as such? Why?
What else would a metaphor be if not imprecise? Precision is something granted by a definition: all the conceivable properties of the expression or idea are captured by the sharp boundaries placed on it. It always works according to the constraints imposed by the one doing the defining, which is why mathematicians can build whole universes of pure deductive logic from a set of definitions.
Metaphors are quite the opposite. Their purpose is not to define, but to evoke, to stir up, to create a link or state of mind in the hearer or reader of the metaphor. Unlike a definition, which is entirely independent of the hearer, the properties and successful application of the metaphor hinges on its interaction with the one receiving the metaphor. Some hearers will make more of a metaphor than others, and due to their history, experience, and temperament, among other things, some will make connections that others never can. Metaphors have a speaker meaning the one crafting the metaphor intends, but they also have listener meaning which depends on who is doing the listening. We could point to many instances when a hearer was able to build on and flesh out a metaphor in ways the speaker never thought of, but heartily approves, and of course much of literary studies is founded upon the fact that you don't need the author's approval for such an extension of interpretation to be legitimate and meaningful.
And it's not like any of these claims are novel to me, as I really just stole them from the epistemology and philosophy of language literature. They also apply just as easily to the meaning of narratives and stories. A metaphor isn't a thing that is true or false, although it might be felicitous or less than such; similarly, a story that makes no claims to historicity can hardly be assigned a truth value in any useful way, but it can be better or worse at achieving the purpose of the story.
But that's just the beauty of metaphor and narrative, isn't it? The *point* is that it's not a definition, that it's not a mechanism with sharp walls and boundaries on it. Because sometimes the hearer will get the point better from a story than from a lecture, or at least Moses seemed to think so. Sometimes an idea is better communicated by being imprecise than by trying to put boundaries on it. Some ideas of their very nature aren't well defined, just as some sets in mathematics aren't bounded. The edges are fuzzy, and if we try to pretend they are sharp we aren't really talking about the intended object. Metaphorically speaking, of course :-)
BTW, the clumsiness of that last statement is just another example of how a mechanic like myself does better thinking when using definitions. Trying to define things best expressed using metaphor will lead to overlong, awkward, and still unsatisfyingly vague writing. C.S. Lewis gets his ideas across most effectively when he is using story and metaphor to convey the impressions and general ideas, rather than trying to be technical regarding something he doesn't think about in a technical way. It's not that failure to think technically is sloppy, any more than failure to think metaphorically is awkward and forced. Most ideas are better expressed with one or the other, and most people are more inclined to easily grasp one or the other.
(I really should be writing something else right now...)
but I would say in answer that while your idea of a metaphor is serviceable, especially in light of a lot of modern trends in literary scholarship, I tend to feel that authors use metaphors to evoke precisely calculated thoughts, ideas, and reactions, as well as feelings; and if a metaphor fails to do what its author intended, we may regard it as a failure, irrespective of whether or not other readers can enjoy themselves playing mad libs with its smoldering remains. Sure, someone who agrees with you may extend on your metaphor in a way you approve, but that isn't because metaphors are themselves plastic, but because you didn't think it through as clearly as you might have.
Sorry this is rushed and not entirely in-joint. I'll have more time in a few days.
I've never known a poet who set goals or thought like a technician. But perhaps this is because I spend my time around technicians, rather than poets.
Do feel free to expand on this thought in the coming days.
Heh, technician-poets: Petrarca, Dante, Tasso, Donne, Milton, Ronsard, Sydney, Spenser, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot (everyone else I've ever enjoyed reading)...
Seriously, although I have very little knowledge about trends in modern poetry (= after 1850), every poet that I can think of writes, re-writes, adjusts... there's no end to the tinkering.
And if you read great writers with the care they deserve, I think this comes out. Any pair of lines from Paradise Lost is going to have four or five things going on simultaneously: allusions that contradict and undermine and complement each other, word play that brings to mind a whole complex of emotions and ideas... the reason that people can write pages and pages about Paradise Lost is that Milton put pages and pages worth of thought into every single turn of phrase.
I don't know if that is different from your idea of a technician. But I don't think most poets attain the heights of sacred Helicon simply in a moment of artistic transport. They have to climb.
Let me make you an example. If I tell you that you walk in beauty like the night (I'm sure you must get that all the time), I've made a couple of metaphorical steps (personification of night, ambiguous referent of "like", either "beauty" or "walk", etc.), but the meaning is pretty clear. You, the object of the poetic gaze, have been credited with particular characteristics in common nighttime: beauty, certainly, but with a softness or gentless, a sort of hesitating tread so graceful as to make no noise. In fact, the association of the night with movement brings the moon into this pretty easily: a light, certainly, and hence a source of beauty and inspiration; but not at all brash. Changeable, mysterious, not entirely known - always sailing just beyond some barely visible horizon - yet desired.
I dunno, I'm just doing this off the top of my head, but that's like twenty adjectives off a single metaphor. Short of including your current blood pressure, how could it be any more precise than that?
I also think that true and false is ultimately the only game in town, and if a fictional story is any good, it will respect that. Of course you couldn't have an entirely false story, because that would be a blank page (I'm told Pasolini actually tried something like that)...
Let's not confuse thought and competence with technicality. A technician is someone who, given the same materials (in this case, language) and the same objectives & available methods, could perfectly reproduce the product of an equally skilled technician. One mechanical engineer (or economic analyst for that matter!) is pretty much a perfect substitute for another.
On the other hand, as brilliant and skilled as Shakespeare was, I don't think anyone would claim he was a perfect substitute for Donne. Do we really think Donne could have penned the Tempest if the circumstances were just right? We may have had another great play, but it would never have been the same play.
"that's like twenty adjectives off a single metaphor."
Again, let's not confuse being good at one's job with the nature of the job being precision. There may be many layers of intended meaning in a competently employed metaphor, but for your use of it to be precise, you would have to be able to say the exact number of adjectives which are invoked by the metaphor, and exactly what those adjectives are. In other words, precision means the metaphor does nothing more or less than compress the data from a specific list of adjectives into the space of one metaphor, and setting aside space considerations the meaning of the metaphor and the meaning of the list of adjectives are the same. Now, if the purpose truly is data compression, a metaphor seems a precarious tool to use for it, especially since the advent of set theory; but in any case I doubt this interpretation of metaphor as implied list. If anything, I would say a great many lists are inadequate attempts, through mechanical means, to capture the multi-dimensional imprecision of a well chosen metaphor!
"I also think that true and false is ultimately the only game in town"
I honestly cannot tell what you mean by this. If you are saying that truth values are inherently binary, I can't see how anyone could argue. If you are saying that all meaning is no more than the truth values of constituent claims, or that any aspects of a story's meaning other than its truth value don't really matter, I can't see how anyone could agree. I suspect your intention was neither of these, though, so I await clarification.
First in re: technicians. So what you mean by "technicianliness", just so I understand you, is interchangeability. That is, if Donne and Shakespeare were technicians, as opposed to mystics and artists, you really wouldn't need to have both of them. Not being a technician, therefore, means being an individual? Is that something like what you mean?
I think you are going to find yourself in difficulty if you keep pushing on the distinction between "precise" technical language and "imprecise" literary language, because at bottom it's all going to be language. Sure, we can come to a certain workaday consensus about various terms, but probably not in the precise sense you seem to think.
Suppose I tell you that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjecent sides. What about this notion of "equality" that arithmaticians toss about like car keys on a table: the cry of serfs and Jacobins against the heritable dominance blood? No, it's just a couple of numbers. My point is that all language seems to have some basic ambiguities about it, but we generally expect intelligent readers to get the point.
I'm not quite sure my definition matches yours. Let me put it this way: if we told Donne "write The Tempest", he may or may not have been able to - I don't think he ever tried his hand at drama. But the main issue, I would think, is that he wouldn't have wanted to - he was interested in exploring somewhat different questions. So to compare them isn't a matter of comparing a set of indefinable pixies, so much as it is comparing a baker to a carpenter. Both are highly skilled with their hands, and have certain points contact. But it wouldn't really occur to me to ask one to do the other's job.
Does that mean that all four professions are mystical and imprecise, in your view, or is my analogy inapt?
"Not being a technician, therefore, means being an individual?"
If you don't count an engineer tasked with building a bridge to spec as an individual, then I suppose so. It seems harsh to question a man's individuality for not being Frank Lloyd Wright, though. Technician just means the work you are doing is a strictly mechanical process.
"at bottom it's all going to be language. [...] What about this notion of "equality" that arithmaticians toss about like car keys on a table:[...] My point is that all language seems to have some basic ambiguities about it[...]"
No, actually. We might use natural language to describe pure mathematics on a blog, but it is a kind of language all its own, one that doesn't even activate the same centers of the brain as any natural language. Concepts like "equality" can have their properties defined to infinite precision because of the nature of the language of pure mathematics. Now, that language is a poor medium for other intellectual constructs, but that rather makes my point for me.
"Precise" language is language which sees doing what pure mathematics does as the desired goal, even if that goal is achieved imperfectly given the actual medium used. "Imprecise" language is language which, the more like pure mathematics it becomes, the further it is from the kind of communication actually desired.
Regarding Donne, I fear I've overstretched my analogy. To be honest, I know virtually nothing about Donne's work, and only used him as an example because I know he lived in roughly the same era as Shakespeare, making his use of the same version of English at least plausible.
But if I might hijack your analogy instead, I think you've actually illustrated the mystic-metaphor-story vs. mechanic-definition-mathematical logic dichotomy I'm trying to draw. Skill with ones hands is a benefit to both modes of work, and there's no reason to think the baker couldn't make a table top if needed or the carpenter a loaf of bread. But each is best suited to one medium or the other. Similarly, each medium is best suited for certain types of problems--an exquisite rocking chair is little comfort to the starving, but you wouldn't want to make an entertainment center out of a brioche.
In the same manner, both the skilled mystic and the skilled mechanic must be intelligent and articulate if they want their thoughts to affect people. And a mechanic like me can use stories to make his points, but will be rather clumsier than an equally skilled mystic. Similarly, a mystic like Lewis can be an effective logician, but will ultimately miss important nuances an equally able mechanic would have caught. And sometimes we want to make our case logically, as Paul often does when explaining God's relationship to man, but then David and Moses communicated on the same subject in poetry and narrative. And since all three were inspired, we can hardly say any of them were use the wrong tools.
So I think I'll keep pushing the distinction, because I think it's darn useful. I won't pretend that I've discovered some ultimate aspect to reality or human psychology, and as I've said in the past what I treat as sharply divided categories may involve, in more mystical fashion, a continuum with plenty of room for overlap and blending in particular cases. But I think many of us who teach, at least, implicitly make use of this distinction when, having explained something technical with definitions that will appear on the exam, we then give an anecdote to communicate the same thing to those who didn't really get it the first way. Not everyone does this, though, so if someone explains something technical, or gives an example or analogy, and we don't see how it could be so, I think it's worth while to ask "Am I not getting it because it doesn't make sense, or am I not getting it because this is a mystic (mechanic) explaining in his own terms to a mechanic (mystic)?" I find it makes using the rule of charity in interpretation a great deal easier. You can ask my wife, it's done wonders for communication in our marriage!
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