I just got done watching the episode from season 4 called "Karma." It is the one where the psychologist is trying to frame the guy he thinks killed his wife for actually killing himself. Harold plays largely thematically in the episode. The way he plays thematically is the flashback thread of him almost killing Allison with a bomb for the death of Nathan Ingram and the theme of "does vengeance bring closure" (a nice touch too, in the present timeline, with the thing about the dog being from a former "spouse" as a lead in to Harold's recalling his grief about things with Grace ... in a scene where dealing with grief is what the shrink is talking about).
What is interesting from looking at the way the show uses tropes and borrows from previous works, in this case the whole AI theme, is when the machine is trying to call Harold (in the flashback) on the payphones in Battery Park to keep him from going through with killing Allison as he has her trapped in her car with the bomb under it. He looks to the camera and asks if the machine is trying to say something to him, and replies that it can't because he never gave it a voice.
What this is an allusion to, I think, is Isaac Asimov's I-Robot. I. that original work (not the movie with Will Smith - I liked the movie, and I liked the book, but they are almost not the same work, definitely not the same story arc, at least not the original I-Robot; I haven't read the works with the Spooner character in them ... I had the same reaction to World War Z, loved both book and movie but two totally different projects, although the movie did a nice job of working as much in from the book as they could)
... sorry bout that digression, as I was saying, in the book of I-Robot, the development of speech is the key turning point in the evolution of robotic AI. I don't think they really go any further than allusion in PoI, but I do think it is a concrete allusion distinctly hooked to the AI theme of the show, which is what makes the machine like humans, because, as I have said before on this blog, I think AI sci-fi, when done well, is about certain aspects and potentials of humanity.
For Asimov, this human/AI connection plays out in contrasting I-robot with Second Foundation. In the latter, we finally meet the psychologists (the second, hidden, foundation), who view the development of speech expression as actually a DEvolution in humans. They have learned to have very complex and intricate conversations with very few actual words. Most of the communicating is done through body language. If speech is an evolution for robotic AI (I-Robot) but a devolution for humans (Second Foundation), and the re-evolution for humans involves BODY language, then being embodied (incarnate ... which as a Catholic Christian is very important to me) is central to our humanity ... and what Harold is all about was teaching the machine to value human life the way humans do.
Maybe in light of this, Root, while maybe not the most solidly developed as a character, is very central to the development of the theme of the machine's relation to humanity, since she is the one the machine actually talks to in a way it does not talk to Harold.
Just some random interesting thoughts about my current fave show and arguably the father of sci-fi (or one of them, can't ever leave Frank Herbert out of that scene)
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Monday, October 5, 2015
Once Upon a Dissertation: Israel as the "Inheritence" of the LORD in Deut 32:8-9
Once upon a time, a boy living in New York City submitted a proposal for a PhD dissertation. The dissertation was never completed, and so the degree never won ... but this is a snapshot of how the boy saw the project as he wandered aimlessly west out of the big city.
Intro
The project was to examine a metaphor used in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (part of Deut 32 as a whole, which is a section known as the "Song of Moses"), where Israel is referred to as the "inheritance" of the LORD. The word can also mean "allotment." In its literal use, it is a term for physical material being divided among people, but I will go into more detail on that below. For here, what I will say is that the basic idea of the metaphor is that, just as something physical like land or other property can be divided into parcels, the world could be divided into different nations. Among all these nations, the one that belonged to LORD was Israel, also referred to as Jacob, the collective entity of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob the patriarch.
The resulting idea for this religious context (Israel's and Jewish thought on its place in the world of other nations and on its the relationship to LORD, especially what is constitutive of that relationship) is that Israel is "elect." Among all the nations of the world, Israel has a special relationship with the LORD.
I am discussing things in a certain order here. I am not going to give the central thesis here and risk a particular temptation I have to go on digressions by trying to work everything into the key thesis now, pretty much writing the whole thing in the introduction, but in a very jumbled manner. I am, instead, going to give the central thesis after I have built up to it by describing central elements systematically. The central thesis is labeled below if one wants to go see it now, if it makes it easier to read the elements if you know what they are leading to. This is just how I have to write it to stay as organized as I can (which is sometimes not too organized).
Paul Ricoeur's Literary Theory as the Conceptual Rurbic
One can look up Ricoeur on one's own to get a more detailed overview (herafter in this post I may just refer to him as "R." for ease in writing). He was a French philosopher in the 20th century. I read all 400 pages of his work, "The Rule of Metaphor" (French= The Life of Metaphor), for my PhD comprehensive exams. It is dense and loaded. His thought, in two instances, was to be the conceptual framework for my examination of the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9.
Ricoeur on Metaphor:
The first aspect of his thought to be used was his work on metaphor. There is way too much of it to give even an overall glance (he does a very thorough overview of the history of thinking about metaphor, from Aristotle up through the 20th century, but he gives it across the whole of his book, not just as an introduction, and each thinker he examines provides a distinctive piece of his own theory of how metaphor operates). But the key aspect of metaphor for the dissertation project was that he talked about metaphor as producing new meaning. This means that it does not just convey something already conceived of the thing spoken of through metaphor (in this case Israel), but actually generates new ideas about it.
Think about the common phrase of "water under the bridge," which is metaphorical in nature, even if it has been used so often that we forget it is a metaphor. (This is actually the nature of our language - it all originally starts off in metaphor, and then the metaphors "die" by becoming so common we no longer realize them as metaphors; the elements become parts of dictionary definitions - they become "lexicalized.") What people usually mean by "water under the bridge" is that the things of the past have gone by and are no longer present to irritate relationships. But people don't think that metaphor all the way through when they use it. Literal water under literal bridges takes soil with it, which is called erosion. So, while the issues have been carried away by the flow of time like water, they have also impacted the relationship negatively. When we use the metaphor, we usually think of only the first aspect (passing, no longer present), but we have opened the door for all the possible aspects of the literal situation that could be applied, opened our expression to a meaning we did not intend, a new meaning.
Ricoeur's "Worlds" around the Text
This second tenet of Ricoeur's thought does not come from The Rule of Metaphor, but form other of his works. Rather than me piecing them together here, it is easier to send a reader to Walter Breugemann's Theology of the Old Testament, in the Intro, on pp 57-58, where he gives a brief overview. There, he describes R.'s concept of there being, for every text (meaning every utterance or communication), a world "behind" the text and a world "in front of" the text, with the world "of" the text being the connector. Hopefully the what is meant by the world in front and the world behind will be come clearer s I describe what they are in this instance, Deut 32:8-9.
R. said two main things (at least main for this discussion): (1) The world behind the text has been largely lost, or at least the reader cannot really connect with it, and (2) The consequence of 1 is that the world in front of the text is the real world for the reader ... in the case of metaphor (or at least this is my own interpretation of his thought), the world of the new meaning is the only real world for the reader. I don't know that I agree with him on the extent to which the world behind the text is lost (I was, after all, in Biblical Studies, a field which is historical in nature and largely concerned with retrieving the world behind the text), but for the dissertation, the focus was on the new idea that was the literary world in front of the text created by the metaphor as created by the historical world in front of the text, those reading it and receiving the meaning in their own historical religious world.
The basic gist of the project was to say that the world behind the text had been explored very thoroughly. While the work was valuable in and of itself, I felt like those projects had obscured working on the world in front of the text.
(At the time of my proposal, and even at the time I stopped working on the dissertation, I don't think I had incorporated this second element from Ricoeur. If I had, this might be being written in a different venue ... but who knows)
The World Behind This Text
The metaphor of Deut 32:8-9 had a background. The verses probably had a background further back than their being inserted into the Song of Moses (chapter 32 as a whole), and thus older than the insertion of the song in the book (actually in the work known as the Deuteronomistic History [the DH, for short], which, according to the DH theory, was originally a single work made up of Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings, with Deuteronomy at the beginning as a sort of introduction containing the key concepts for interpreting the rest - the division into "books" with these names was later, rather than the work being a compilation of boos that already existed).
The verses were borrowed form a polytheistic context (although not used in a polytheistic emphasis now that they were inserted into the Song and the larger work, which is why I was using R. for metaphor, because he focused on a new meaning ... the author's of the song were distinctly working contra polytheistic cultures). Deut 32:8-9 does not say just that the world can be thought of as divided into nations; it says that it actually had been divided thus, with each nation being given to a particular "son of god/s" ... in other words, each god got a nation. My initial formulation of my thesis was that I wanted to loosen the hold of a long standing debate over exactly where the authors (or the compilers who inserted the verses into the song) fell on the spectrum between ploytheism and monotheism.
The Term Itself
If the polytheistic background of those two verses was a first element in the "world behind the text," a second was the literal uses of the term itself ("inheritance/allotment," in Hebrew, nachalah) before the writing and reading the metaphor in Deut 32. The term had often been taken by scholars to be one of landed inheritance: the estate of a patriarch, upon his death, was divided between his heirs, one portion going to each (there are myths in the Ancient Near East of the world being originally divided among the gods this way; I mean actual myths we know of from actual cultures, not just the implication of these two verses).
Scholars usually took perpetual inheritance (being passed down from the heir to his own heirs) as a key idea in the term, but I began to sort of agree with the American scholar who had, in his own dissertation, done the most extensive study I had seen of the term. He said that it did not have to be just land and that it did not have to be division among familial heirs (and that the idea of perpetual inheritance was relatively late in the development of the term). It could be, according to him, any property divided by a superior for dispersal among his inferiors For instance (and an aspect very fitting for the particular Hebrew Bible material I was studying), it could be the spoils of war (land, livestock, money, and even, in those cultures, slaves and servants, all of it) divided by a conquering king among his generals who participated in the conquest, perhaps as reward for their role (although not necessarily).
The Allotments of the Then-Known World as the "world behind the text"
A further element from the world behind the text was dividings of the known world other than an original allotment among the gods. The idea of scholars who did this work was that the metaphor had behind it thoughts about particular divisions of empire territories by super-powers in that time, that it was sort of "code" for the world political situation at the time of the author. Which one a given scholar might say was behind it depended on what time period the scholar thinks the composition (and insertion into the Song and the DH) happened. One, who proposed an early date, thought that it was really about the division Assyria made of its territories. Another, who advocated a later date, thought its secret referent was the division of the Persian empire.
An important one was on a smaller scale, all the more important to my study because of the particular smaller scale. It was based on the theory that the conquest narratives I will describe in a little bit were formed together as a work (the DH) under the reign of King Josiah of Jerusalem in the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom when the kingdom of the people divided into two, a north and south. The theory is that the work described an original united kingdom because Josiah wanted to claim the land of the northern kingdom after it had been wiped out by the Assyrians, so the people who put it together (the literary work ... out of a larger body of sources they had inherited ... sort of their religious library) made a picture of the whole land being divided among the people at the time of the conquest. In other words, the original twelve-tribe division of the land was a retro-jection. But the most important point was that the model they used (according to this theory) was the real-world, present (at the time of Josiah) division of the Kingdom of Judah into twelve provinces ... the authors sort of projected that allotment schema onto a larger land that included both kingdoms (that's this theory anyway).
The World Immediately in Fronto f the Text
My own work (or at least the work I proposed to do), was to focus on what the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9 made of all this in its present context. What did it mean for those reading it in the religious context of hearing an authoritative text talk about their own history as a religious people?
The DH
The first thing that has to be kept in mind is that those listeners were not hearing Deut 32 in isolation. Whether or not the DH theory (formulated by Martin Noth in the mid 20th century) was accurate, both that audience and all those down through the ages after heard the Song and the whole book of Deuteronomy as coming right before, and very much preluding, the people's entrance into and taking of the Promised Land, Canaan (the book is staged as one long speech by Moses on the verge of entering the land). The entrance and taking of the land is called the "Conquest narratives." And a central part of these narratives was that the land was divided among the twelve tribes in a particular way, a way "given" by the LORD by casting lots before the Tabernacle tent. Each tribe's portion was a nachalah, the same term used in Deut 32:8-9 to describe Israel as the LORD's "inheritance."
Thus, my theory was going to say that, in the world immediately in front of the text, all those repetitions of this tribe's and that tribe's and the other tribe's 'inheritances' (actually, two terms were used in Deut 32:8-9, both appearing heavily in the conquest narratives as well) would feed back into the metaphorical use of the term in Deut 32:8-9 to describe Israel's special relationship, election, with the LORD.
These texts were not read the way we read novels on a first read, where you can say, "well, yea, it has all those connotations when you get to those later parts, but you don't know that when you hear it earlier in the book." They were read the way we re-read a novel and say "Ahhhhhh, I see what that's eventually about now - the author foreshadowed it," and that changes what you see as the "meaning" even in the first instance. These texts were read again and again and again and again ... they were religious texts.
As a side note, this is where that scholar who said that it didn't have to be just land allotted or just familial recipients was going to come in handy. Indeed, the main material is land in the DH, and Israel is definitely conceived of as family. But this guy (Harold Forshey, who did his diss at Harvard in 1971 ... the year I was born) demonstrated a lot of contexts in historical records of nearby cultures in the Ancient Near East where spoils of war were divided among generals in the conquering army by the conquering king in texts describing those events using cognates (same word, different but close language, maybe some spelling differences) of the Hebrew term I was working ... which is pretty much the model into which the conquest, possession, and division narratives in the DH fit. Joshua was a military commander, and the people had to fight the former inhabitants for the land.
According to Forshey, the idea that an "inheritance" or allotment was to be handed down faithfully (a perpetual, trans-generational inheritance) was a result of the type of thing I am about to describe, not an original part of the meaning of the word.
The Central Thesis: The Land
So, what is the resultant "new meaning" I proposed? It goes back to the idea that a key way in which the LORD made Israel his special nation (a key constitutive element of the people as the unique people of the LORD, to use more academic lingo) was by giving them the land of Canaan. My theory said that it goes further than that. The use of the term metaphorically (which is poetic) would connect with all those descriptions of literal land being apportioned. The resulting idea would be that it wasn't just the giving of the land as a whole that constituted the people as the LORD's people; it was the giving of the land as apportioned in a particular way by the LORD (by casting lots before the holy Tabernacle).
For this reason, for the tribes to swap any land back and forth between them would be, in a way, to deny their very creation as the people of the LORD.
The World Further in Front:
Dissertations are lengthy things and need to be very thorough. I needed to work through all of the material in the Hebrew Bible, at varying levels, that used this term. But the one that would form the most central part of my thesis was the one that actually said, in actual legal material, that the tribes could not swap land between them (there is a lot of variance in the actualities behind this statement; I am simplifying a bit).
Some Background on Hebrew Bible Biblical Studies
The set of core theories that one has to learn in order to understand what was going to be said concern scholarship's picture of how the whole Hebrew Bible canon came into being. The longtime predominant theory (on which there is a consensus on the broader outline), is that the "Deuternomistic" corpus was the first big thing (Deut, Josh, Judges, 1-2 Sam, 1-2 Kings). Books like Jeremiah and some parts of the other prophets were in nascent stages at the time, but the first big thing was the DH. Then, after the Exile (which began in 587 when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and took the people captive), an author known as the Priestly author came along and put Genesis - Numbers together from a bunch of different sources and put that "tetrateuch" (book made of 4 books) in front of the DH, made Deuternomy to be the culmination of that unit, rather than primarily the intro to the DH, and gave us our present "Pentateuch" (book made of 5 books) - the Torah, the central and first section of the Hebrew/Jewish Bible.
The Book of Numbers
The book of Numbers is part of that tetrateuch and is about the events in the time between when, after the Exodus, the people got to Mount Sinai and the time when they reached the boarders of Canaan the second time and got ready to really go in. It contains material about the projected divisions of the land after entry and conquest. There are stories of proposed swaps, with Moses telling them it is not allowed. They even have to make some special provisions because of some women who inherit and then marry into another tribe.
So, basically, at a later date than the composition of Deut 32:8-9, it's inclusion into the Song, and the Song's inclusion into the Deuteronomistic corpus, these Priestly/Legal writers (authorized and authoritative compilers of the book using sources that had been handed down for generations in the religion) came along and codified this rule of not passing land allotments among the tribes. This would support the position that the idea of a prohibition had been around for a long time, and this in turn would support the idea that there was a reason why it was prohibited: because the way the land was given, as divided in a particular way among the tribes, was part of the very constitution of the people as the people of the LORD.
My thesis was to be that the way the meaning got there in the first place was through the conjunction of the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9 and all the repetitions of the literal use of the term for dividing the land in the conquest narratives.
A Late Development
The Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible actually does not use "sons of god"; it uses "sons of Israel." However, our main witness of the MT is Codex Lenigradensis, a text from around 1000 AD/CE. The Greek Septuagint (LXX) version has "sons of god," and we have much older witnesses of this text. We also have the Qumran material (the "Dead Sea Scrolls," dated to around the time of Christ), in which it is "sons of god." So, the more original reading is that of the LXX and Qumran.
The interesting question is why it was changed somewhere in the MT traditions. A first obvious reason is that later interpreters handling the transmission of the text wanted to avoid any confusion as to whether this passage supported polytheism. They would have assumed (correctly) that it did not, in the way in which it was used in the passage, support polytheism, but there might have also been a need seen for a slight redaction of terminology to make sure there was no confusion on that issue.
However, the change also provides another possible insight. Perhaps it seemed a more natural and less forced shift because the significance of the passage for them had always been connected with a divisioning according to the sons of Israel (the tribes descended from the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel). Perhaps election from among the nations of the world, as the special people of the LORD, was always connected with the giving of the land precisely as apportioned in a certain way by the LORD.
The Role of the World Behind for the World in Front
I said above that I am cautious about neglecting the word behind the text, even though I think a corrective is often needed to a myopic preoccupation with historical detail for historical detail's sake. But language does not come from nowhere, including allusions. Even in a more radical reader response criticism, the reader has to have something to which to respond.
Concerning Deut 32:8-9, the "world behind the text" groundwork that some scholars did on the possibilities that the hidden referent of the passage was actual empiric divisions of territory (Assyria and Persia) is useful. It shows that geo-political apportioning was a prominent association for the terms used in the metaphor. This supports the idea that, when a religious audience were to hear these terms (in a "world in front of the text"), one of the immediate associations opened up for that audience as a possibility of meaning would be a real geo-political apportioning of land ... at least conceived of as real by the conquest narratives in the DH.
The Point of Insertion
I just described several later stages in the proposed development of the concept: the crafting of the legal material in the Pentateuch and the redaction of Deut 32:8-9 in the MT to read "sons of Israel." But the real focus of the dissertation was to be the presence of the concept in the earlier D material: the verses as part of the book of Deuteronomy and their connection with the conquest narratives in the Deuteronomistic History. The verses were taken to be rather old, drawn from polytheistic narratives preexisting the Song of Moses and inserted into it. The proposed order of events was as follows: The verses were inserted into the Song and then the song was inserted into the D corpus. My contention was that, in order for the metaphor to work as I would describe, the insertion of the Song had to be later, but not by much, than the formation of the D corpus, the DH with some shorter core of the book of Deuteronomy as a prologue.
(Excursus: Jules Wellhausen was the most prominent advocate [possibly the original one to come up with it, but I would have to look that up] of the theory that Deut 12-26 was the original law code [DL], pre-existing the DH and used as a interpretive key in its formation. To sum up a combination of several theories: the DL may have been compiled in the southern kingdom, Judah, during the reign of Hezekiah by a prophetic circle that came to the south immediately preceding the fall of the northern kingdom to Assyria, having accurately guessed at that kingdom's fate. Then, under the reign of Manasseh [which was later characterized by the DH as apostate], the book was hidden in the Temple for safe keeping and the prophetic circle went underground.When Josiah began his reign, found the book in the Temple, and instituted his reforms [possibly coinciding with and connected with his geo-political aspirations regarding reclaiming the northern territory], the immediate descendants of the prophetic circle reemerged and crafted the DH, with the DL as a prologue and interpretive key. This was a first edition, or redaction, that ended with the Josianic reform, portraying him as the greatest of the kings, the one who fully lived up to the the expectations of the king described in Deuteronomy [the only one to receive the full accolade conforming to the Shema in Deut 6, and bookended with Joshua and the most like him as a military leader who was also religiously faithful]. A second edition was then done by the further descendents of the prophetic circle [possibly connected now with the descendents of the disciples of Jeremiah] either in the exile or immediately after it, in which the basic changes were the insertion of the descriptions of the apostasy of Manasseh and the insertion of the last four kings, following Josiah, as bad kings to explain the exile. If Josiah was so obedient and such a hero, the descendants asked, why did God send the kingdom into exile as a punishment? Their answer was that, while Josiah was great, he could not undo the negative effect of Manasseh's apostasy, and the kingdom slipped back into errant ways with the four kings after Josiah, necessitating the punishment of exile.)
This present section of this presentation of the project is the most difficult to pin down. This is the case on at least two levels. The first is what the reading requires in order for the metaphor to work thus on a mechanical level, or rather why it requires it. My idea, as stated, was that the insertion of the Song had to be not long after the formation of the DH. In order for the metaphor to rely on the conquest narratives for its meaning, the Song into which it had been inserted had to be itself inserted into the larger whole at a point when those narratives were already in place to guide that meaning. The one inserting the Song with the verses had to be doing so with an eye to those narratives and their role in the DH.
However, the second level is probably the deeper one for this project as one done by myself. My director once asked why the point of insertion was so important, why I was focusing energy on it (she was not necessarily challenging it, I do not think, but rather trying to draw out the reasons and what role they played in my concept of the project). I have come to the conclusion that the real issue for me was my own commitment to a particular theory of Inspiration. This section is difficult to write because I have not fully worked out what that theory is, but I do believe my own motivation in writing is slightly different than that of many scholars whom I was studying, even if the only difference is that it is at level closer to conscious intention in my own project (although I do suspect some more fundamental differences theologically and philosophically).
More traditional language models of Inspiration appeal to (or at least are interpreted by some more conservative modern scholars as doing so) the idea of a singular personage as the author whose intentions define, or rather reveal, the divinely inspired content. I do not think that I am in agreement with this concept (I am not sure that the modern conservative interpretations accurately represent the actual traditional models that I hold to be normative when defined in Catholic magisterial teaching - in fact, I distinctly doubt it). But I also cannot accept a total removal of the concern for the content of divine communication (in short, the whole question of Inspiration) from the study of these materials, as it seems to me like some modern exegesis does, treating the investigation only as uncovering a purely human evolution of religious thought. I can see largely bracketing the question of Inspiration in order to focus on the human "author" content on its own ground (actually I think that it is necessary to do so in order to pay full attention to the human side of the equation, as I think is demanded by a fully Incarnational model of Inspiration ... but that position also needs much clarification that I do not have the space for here, even were I totally clear in my own thinking about it, which I am not), but I also think an openness and consideration must be given to whether and when the content of the historical critical investigation might impact the theory of revelation.
While I do not think I can agree with a "single author" locus of Inspiration (at least in the simplistic forms sometimes offered by a "conservative" interpretation of magisterial teaching on Inspiration ... and it may be that those teachings draw differences between the process by which Inspiration of the Old Testament and New Testament happened, differences not accounted for by such "conservative" interpretations of the teachings, just as some conservative scholars working to reconcile those teachings with a positive role for the Historical Critical Method read them as differentiating between the modes of historicity of the OT, on the one hand, and the NT, on the other), I do feel a need to find some acceptable model of Inspiration that accommodates critical theories of multiple sources and redactional history. Such a theory as I seek, while not placing the locus of Inspiration in a single author, would provide some locus in the human process at which Inspiration occurs. For this project, I think I was looking to place that locus in the redactor who inserted the Song in the D material and intended the metaphor with the meaning I was proposing. For my religious/theological commitments, this "author" or series of "authors" would need to somehow have institutionally guaranteed authority, an authority based in and concretely passed down from a unique revelation to Moses on Sinai (necessitating a belief in a historical Moses, even though there may be significant clarifications needed in whether or not we judge the "historicity" of the biblical accounts by the modern scientific standards of "historicity").
I am not saying here that my theory (even if I could pin it down further right now) would be right and defensible either philosophically or theologically in general, or in accordance with Catholic magisterial teaching. I am mainly trying to find clarity on how my concern for this was the real source of my concern for pinning down the point at which the Song was inserted into the D corpus relative to the compiling and redacting of the conquest narratives into a coherent whole narrative.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. I don't have anything else to say in wrapping it up, really. Except maybe that I kind of wish I had made it further in seeing if it was a viable thesis. I mainly wrote this for my own edification, to set it down in some complete, even if very abbreviated, form, since I spent a few years pouring energy into thinking about it. Who knows, maybe I wrote it as closure. But it feels good to have written it. Maybe I wrote it as a "once and future" kind of thing ... a boy can dream.
Intro
The project was to examine a metaphor used in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 (part of Deut 32 as a whole, which is a section known as the "Song of Moses"), where Israel is referred to as the "inheritance" of the LORD. The word can also mean "allotment." In its literal use, it is a term for physical material being divided among people, but I will go into more detail on that below. For here, what I will say is that the basic idea of the metaphor is that, just as something physical like land or other property can be divided into parcels, the world could be divided into different nations. Among all these nations, the one that belonged to LORD was Israel, also referred to as Jacob, the collective entity of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob the patriarch.
The resulting idea for this religious context (Israel's and Jewish thought on its place in the world of other nations and on its the relationship to LORD, especially what is constitutive of that relationship) is that Israel is "elect." Among all the nations of the world, Israel has a special relationship with the LORD.
I am discussing things in a certain order here. I am not going to give the central thesis here and risk a particular temptation I have to go on digressions by trying to work everything into the key thesis now, pretty much writing the whole thing in the introduction, but in a very jumbled manner. I am, instead, going to give the central thesis after I have built up to it by describing central elements systematically. The central thesis is labeled below if one wants to go see it now, if it makes it easier to read the elements if you know what they are leading to. This is just how I have to write it to stay as organized as I can (which is sometimes not too organized).
Paul Ricoeur's Literary Theory as the Conceptual Rurbic
One can look up Ricoeur on one's own to get a more detailed overview (herafter in this post I may just refer to him as "R." for ease in writing). He was a French philosopher in the 20th century. I read all 400 pages of his work, "The Rule of Metaphor" (French= The Life of Metaphor), for my PhD comprehensive exams. It is dense and loaded. His thought, in two instances, was to be the conceptual framework for my examination of the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9.
Ricoeur on Metaphor:
The first aspect of his thought to be used was his work on metaphor. There is way too much of it to give even an overall glance (he does a very thorough overview of the history of thinking about metaphor, from Aristotle up through the 20th century, but he gives it across the whole of his book, not just as an introduction, and each thinker he examines provides a distinctive piece of his own theory of how metaphor operates). But the key aspect of metaphor for the dissertation project was that he talked about metaphor as producing new meaning. This means that it does not just convey something already conceived of the thing spoken of through metaphor (in this case Israel), but actually generates new ideas about it.
Think about the common phrase of "water under the bridge," which is metaphorical in nature, even if it has been used so often that we forget it is a metaphor. (This is actually the nature of our language - it all originally starts off in metaphor, and then the metaphors "die" by becoming so common we no longer realize them as metaphors; the elements become parts of dictionary definitions - they become "lexicalized.") What people usually mean by "water under the bridge" is that the things of the past have gone by and are no longer present to irritate relationships. But people don't think that metaphor all the way through when they use it. Literal water under literal bridges takes soil with it, which is called erosion. So, while the issues have been carried away by the flow of time like water, they have also impacted the relationship negatively. When we use the metaphor, we usually think of only the first aspect (passing, no longer present), but we have opened the door for all the possible aspects of the literal situation that could be applied, opened our expression to a meaning we did not intend, a new meaning.
Ricoeur's "Worlds" around the Text
This second tenet of Ricoeur's thought does not come from The Rule of Metaphor, but form other of his works. Rather than me piecing them together here, it is easier to send a reader to Walter Breugemann's Theology of the Old Testament, in the Intro, on pp 57-58, where he gives a brief overview. There, he describes R.'s concept of there being, for every text (meaning every utterance or communication), a world "behind" the text and a world "in front of" the text, with the world "of" the text being the connector. Hopefully the what is meant by the world in front and the world behind will be come clearer s I describe what they are in this instance, Deut 32:8-9.
R. said two main things (at least main for this discussion): (1) The world behind the text has been largely lost, or at least the reader cannot really connect with it, and (2) The consequence of 1 is that the world in front of the text is the real world for the reader ... in the case of metaphor (or at least this is my own interpretation of his thought), the world of the new meaning is the only real world for the reader. I don't know that I agree with him on the extent to which the world behind the text is lost (I was, after all, in Biblical Studies, a field which is historical in nature and largely concerned with retrieving the world behind the text), but for the dissertation, the focus was on the new idea that was the literary world in front of the text created by the metaphor as created by the historical world in front of the text, those reading it and receiving the meaning in their own historical religious world.
The basic gist of the project was to say that the world behind the text had been explored very thoroughly. While the work was valuable in and of itself, I felt like those projects had obscured working on the world in front of the text.
(At the time of my proposal, and even at the time I stopped working on the dissertation, I don't think I had incorporated this second element from Ricoeur. If I had, this might be being written in a different venue ... but who knows)
The World Behind This Text
The metaphor of Deut 32:8-9 had a background. The verses probably had a background further back than their being inserted into the Song of Moses (chapter 32 as a whole), and thus older than the insertion of the song in the book (actually in the work known as the Deuteronomistic History [the DH, for short], which, according to the DH theory, was originally a single work made up of Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings, with Deuteronomy at the beginning as a sort of introduction containing the key concepts for interpreting the rest - the division into "books" with these names was later, rather than the work being a compilation of boos that already existed).
The verses were borrowed form a polytheistic context (although not used in a polytheistic emphasis now that they were inserted into the Song and the larger work, which is why I was using R. for metaphor, because he focused on a new meaning ... the author's of the song were distinctly working contra polytheistic cultures). Deut 32:8-9 does not say just that the world can be thought of as divided into nations; it says that it actually had been divided thus, with each nation being given to a particular "son of god/s" ... in other words, each god got a nation. My initial formulation of my thesis was that I wanted to loosen the hold of a long standing debate over exactly where the authors (or the compilers who inserted the verses into the song) fell on the spectrum between ploytheism and monotheism.
The Term Itself
If the polytheistic background of those two verses was a first element in the "world behind the text," a second was the literal uses of the term itself ("inheritance/allotment," in Hebrew, nachalah) before the writing and reading the metaphor in Deut 32. The term had often been taken by scholars to be one of landed inheritance: the estate of a patriarch, upon his death, was divided between his heirs, one portion going to each (there are myths in the Ancient Near East of the world being originally divided among the gods this way; I mean actual myths we know of from actual cultures, not just the implication of these two verses).
Scholars usually took perpetual inheritance (being passed down from the heir to his own heirs) as a key idea in the term, but I began to sort of agree with the American scholar who had, in his own dissertation, done the most extensive study I had seen of the term. He said that it did not have to be just land and that it did not have to be division among familial heirs (and that the idea of perpetual inheritance was relatively late in the development of the term). It could be, according to him, any property divided by a superior for dispersal among his inferiors For instance (and an aspect very fitting for the particular Hebrew Bible material I was studying), it could be the spoils of war (land, livestock, money, and even, in those cultures, slaves and servants, all of it) divided by a conquering king among his generals who participated in the conquest, perhaps as reward for their role (although not necessarily).
The Allotments of the Then-Known World as the "world behind the text"
A further element from the world behind the text was dividings of the known world other than an original allotment among the gods. The idea of scholars who did this work was that the metaphor had behind it thoughts about particular divisions of empire territories by super-powers in that time, that it was sort of "code" for the world political situation at the time of the author. Which one a given scholar might say was behind it depended on what time period the scholar thinks the composition (and insertion into the Song and the DH) happened. One, who proposed an early date, thought that it was really about the division Assyria made of its territories. Another, who advocated a later date, thought its secret referent was the division of the Persian empire.
An important one was on a smaller scale, all the more important to my study because of the particular smaller scale. It was based on the theory that the conquest narratives I will describe in a little bit were formed together as a work (the DH) under the reign of King Josiah of Jerusalem in the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom when the kingdom of the people divided into two, a north and south. The theory is that the work described an original united kingdom because Josiah wanted to claim the land of the northern kingdom after it had been wiped out by the Assyrians, so the people who put it together (the literary work ... out of a larger body of sources they had inherited ... sort of their religious library) made a picture of the whole land being divided among the people at the time of the conquest. In other words, the original twelve-tribe division of the land was a retro-jection. But the most important point was that the model they used (according to this theory) was the real-world, present (at the time of Josiah) division of the Kingdom of Judah into twelve provinces ... the authors sort of projected that allotment schema onto a larger land that included both kingdoms (that's this theory anyway).
The World Immediately in Fronto f the Text
My own work (or at least the work I proposed to do), was to focus on what the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9 made of all this in its present context. What did it mean for those reading it in the religious context of hearing an authoritative text talk about their own history as a religious people?
The DH
The first thing that has to be kept in mind is that those listeners were not hearing Deut 32 in isolation. Whether or not the DH theory (formulated by Martin Noth in the mid 20th century) was accurate, both that audience and all those down through the ages after heard the Song and the whole book of Deuteronomy as coming right before, and very much preluding, the people's entrance into and taking of the Promised Land, Canaan (the book is staged as one long speech by Moses on the verge of entering the land). The entrance and taking of the land is called the "Conquest narratives." And a central part of these narratives was that the land was divided among the twelve tribes in a particular way, a way "given" by the LORD by casting lots before the Tabernacle tent. Each tribe's portion was a nachalah, the same term used in Deut 32:8-9 to describe Israel as the LORD's "inheritance."
Thus, my theory was going to say that, in the world immediately in front of the text, all those repetitions of this tribe's and that tribe's and the other tribe's 'inheritances' (actually, two terms were used in Deut 32:8-9, both appearing heavily in the conquest narratives as well) would feed back into the metaphorical use of the term in Deut 32:8-9 to describe Israel's special relationship, election, with the LORD.
These texts were not read the way we read novels on a first read, where you can say, "well, yea, it has all those connotations when you get to those later parts, but you don't know that when you hear it earlier in the book." They were read the way we re-read a novel and say "Ahhhhhh, I see what that's eventually about now - the author foreshadowed it," and that changes what you see as the "meaning" even in the first instance. These texts were read again and again and again and again ... they were religious texts.
As a side note, this is where that scholar who said that it didn't have to be just land allotted or just familial recipients was going to come in handy. Indeed, the main material is land in the DH, and Israel is definitely conceived of as family. But this guy (Harold Forshey, who did his diss at Harvard in 1971 ... the year I was born) demonstrated a lot of contexts in historical records of nearby cultures in the Ancient Near East where spoils of war were divided among generals in the conquering army by the conquering king in texts describing those events using cognates (same word, different but close language, maybe some spelling differences) of the Hebrew term I was working ... which is pretty much the model into which the conquest, possession, and division narratives in the DH fit. Joshua was a military commander, and the people had to fight the former inhabitants for the land.
According to Forshey, the idea that an "inheritance" or allotment was to be handed down faithfully (a perpetual, trans-generational inheritance) was a result of the type of thing I am about to describe, not an original part of the meaning of the word.
The Central Thesis: The Land
So, what is the resultant "new meaning" I proposed? It goes back to the idea that a key way in which the LORD made Israel his special nation (a key constitutive element of the people as the unique people of the LORD, to use more academic lingo) was by giving them the land of Canaan. My theory said that it goes further than that. The use of the term metaphorically (which is poetic) would connect with all those descriptions of literal land being apportioned. The resulting idea would be that it wasn't just the giving of the land as a whole that constituted the people as the LORD's people; it was the giving of the land as apportioned in a particular way by the LORD (by casting lots before the holy Tabernacle).
For this reason, for the tribes to swap any land back and forth between them would be, in a way, to deny their very creation as the people of the LORD.
The World Further in Front:
Dissertations are lengthy things and need to be very thorough. I needed to work through all of the material in the Hebrew Bible, at varying levels, that used this term. But the one that would form the most central part of my thesis was the one that actually said, in actual legal material, that the tribes could not swap land between them (there is a lot of variance in the actualities behind this statement; I am simplifying a bit).
Some Background on Hebrew Bible Biblical Studies
The set of core theories that one has to learn in order to understand what was going to be said concern scholarship's picture of how the whole Hebrew Bible canon came into being. The longtime predominant theory (on which there is a consensus on the broader outline), is that the "Deuternomistic" corpus was the first big thing (Deut, Josh, Judges, 1-2 Sam, 1-2 Kings). Books like Jeremiah and some parts of the other prophets were in nascent stages at the time, but the first big thing was the DH. Then, after the Exile (which began in 587 when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and took the people captive), an author known as the Priestly author came along and put Genesis - Numbers together from a bunch of different sources and put that "tetrateuch" (book made of 4 books) in front of the DH, made Deuternomy to be the culmination of that unit, rather than primarily the intro to the DH, and gave us our present "Pentateuch" (book made of 5 books) - the Torah, the central and first section of the Hebrew/Jewish Bible.
The Book of Numbers
The book of Numbers is part of that tetrateuch and is about the events in the time between when, after the Exodus, the people got to Mount Sinai and the time when they reached the boarders of Canaan the second time and got ready to really go in. It contains material about the projected divisions of the land after entry and conquest. There are stories of proposed swaps, with Moses telling them it is not allowed. They even have to make some special provisions because of some women who inherit and then marry into another tribe.
So, basically, at a later date than the composition of Deut 32:8-9, it's inclusion into the Song, and the Song's inclusion into the Deuteronomistic corpus, these Priestly/Legal writers (authorized and authoritative compilers of the book using sources that had been handed down for generations in the religion) came along and codified this rule of not passing land allotments among the tribes. This would support the position that the idea of a prohibition had been around for a long time, and this in turn would support the idea that there was a reason why it was prohibited: because the way the land was given, as divided in a particular way among the tribes, was part of the very constitution of the people as the people of the LORD.
My thesis was to be that the way the meaning got there in the first place was through the conjunction of the metaphor in Deut 32:8-9 and all the repetitions of the literal use of the term for dividing the land in the conquest narratives.
A Late Development
The Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible actually does not use "sons of god"; it uses "sons of Israel." However, our main witness of the MT is Codex Lenigradensis, a text from around 1000 AD/CE. The Greek Septuagint (LXX) version has "sons of god," and we have much older witnesses of this text. We also have the Qumran material (the "Dead Sea Scrolls," dated to around the time of Christ), in which it is "sons of god." So, the more original reading is that of the LXX and Qumran.
The interesting question is why it was changed somewhere in the MT traditions. A first obvious reason is that later interpreters handling the transmission of the text wanted to avoid any confusion as to whether this passage supported polytheism. They would have assumed (correctly) that it did not, in the way in which it was used in the passage, support polytheism, but there might have also been a need seen for a slight redaction of terminology to make sure there was no confusion on that issue.
However, the change also provides another possible insight. Perhaps it seemed a more natural and less forced shift because the significance of the passage for them had always been connected with a divisioning according to the sons of Israel (the tribes descended from the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel). Perhaps election from among the nations of the world, as the special people of the LORD, was always connected with the giving of the land precisely as apportioned in a certain way by the LORD.
The Role of the World Behind for the World in Front
I said above that I am cautious about neglecting the word behind the text, even though I think a corrective is often needed to a myopic preoccupation with historical detail for historical detail's sake. But language does not come from nowhere, including allusions. Even in a more radical reader response criticism, the reader has to have something to which to respond.
Concerning Deut 32:8-9, the "world behind the text" groundwork that some scholars did on the possibilities that the hidden referent of the passage was actual empiric divisions of territory (Assyria and Persia) is useful. It shows that geo-political apportioning was a prominent association for the terms used in the metaphor. This supports the idea that, when a religious audience were to hear these terms (in a "world in front of the text"), one of the immediate associations opened up for that audience as a possibility of meaning would be a real geo-political apportioning of land ... at least conceived of as real by the conquest narratives in the DH.
The Point of Insertion
I just described several later stages in the proposed development of the concept: the crafting of the legal material in the Pentateuch and the redaction of Deut 32:8-9 in the MT to read "sons of Israel." But the real focus of the dissertation was to be the presence of the concept in the earlier D material: the verses as part of the book of Deuteronomy and their connection with the conquest narratives in the Deuteronomistic History. The verses were taken to be rather old, drawn from polytheistic narratives preexisting the Song of Moses and inserted into it. The proposed order of events was as follows: The verses were inserted into the Song and then the song was inserted into the D corpus. My contention was that, in order for the metaphor to work as I would describe, the insertion of the Song had to be later, but not by much, than the formation of the D corpus, the DH with some shorter core of the book of Deuteronomy as a prologue.
(Excursus: Jules Wellhausen was the most prominent advocate [possibly the original one to come up with it, but I would have to look that up] of the theory that Deut 12-26 was the original law code [DL], pre-existing the DH and used as a interpretive key in its formation. To sum up a combination of several theories: the DL may have been compiled in the southern kingdom, Judah, during the reign of Hezekiah by a prophetic circle that came to the south immediately preceding the fall of the northern kingdom to Assyria, having accurately guessed at that kingdom's fate. Then, under the reign of Manasseh [which was later characterized by the DH as apostate], the book was hidden in the Temple for safe keeping and the prophetic circle went underground.When Josiah began his reign, found the book in the Temple, and instituted his reforms [possibly coinciding with and connected with his geo-political aspirations regarding reclaiming the northern territory], the immediate descendants of the prophetic circle reemerged and crafted the DH, with the DL as a prologue and interpretive key. This was a first edition, or redaction, that ended with the Josianic reform, portraying him as the greatest of the kings, the one who fully lived up to the the expectations of the king described in Deuteronomy [the only one to receive the full accolade conforming to the Shema in Deut 6, and bookended with Joshua and the most like him as a military leader who was also religiously faithful]. A second edition was then done by the further descendents of the prophetic circle [possibly connected now with the descendents of the disciples of Jeremiah] either in the exile or immediately after it, in which the basic changes were the insertion of the descriptions of the apostasy of Manasseh and the insertion of the last four kings, following Josiah, as bad kings to explain the exile. If Josiah was so obedient and such a hero, the descendants asked, why did God send the kingdom into exile as a punishment? Their answer was that, while Josiah was great, he could not undo the negative effect of Manasseh's apostasy, and the kingdom slipped back into errant ways with the four kings after Josiah, necessitating the punishment of exile.)
This present section of this presentation of the project is the most difficult to pin down. This is the case on at least two levels. The first is what the reading requires in order for the metaphor to work thus on a mechanical level, or rather why it requires it. My idea, as stated, was that the insertion of the Song had to be not long after the formation of the DH. In order for the metaphor to rely on the conquest narratives for its meaning, the Song into which it had been inserted had to be itself inserted into the larger whole at a point when those narratives were already in place to guide that meaning. The one inserting the Song with the verses had to be doing so with an eye to those narratives and their role in the DH.
However, the second level is probably the deeper one for this project as one done by myself. My director once asked why the point of insertion was so important, why I was focusing energy on it (she was not necessarily challenging it, I do not think, but rather trying to draw out the reasons and what role they played in my concept of the project). I have come to the conclusion that the real issue for me was my own commitment to a particular theory of Inspiration. This section is difficult to write because I have not fully worked out what that theory is, but I do believe my own motivation in writing is slightly different than that of many scholars whom I was studying, even if the only difference is that it is at level closer to conscious intention in my own project (although I do suspect some more fundamental differences theologically and philosophically).
More traditional language models of Inspiration appeal to (or at least are interpreted by some more conservative modern scholars as doing so) the idea of a singular personage as the author whose intentions define, or rather reveal, the divinely inspired content. I do not think that I am in agreement with this concept (I am not sure that the modern conservative interpretations accurately represent the actual traditional models that I hold to be normative when defined in Catholic magisterial teaching - in fact, I distinctly doubt it). But I also cannot accept a total removal of the concern for the content of divine communication (in short, the whole question of Inspiration) from the study of these materials, as it seems to me like some modern exegesis does, treating the investigation only as uncovering a purely human evolution of religious thought. I can see largely bracketing the question of Inspiration in order to focus on the human "author" content on its own ground (actually I think that it is necessary to do so in order to pay full attention to the human side of the equation, as I think is demanded by a fully Incarnational model of Inspiration ... but that position also needs much clarification that I do not have the space for here, even were I totally clear in my own thinking about it, which I am not), but I also think an openness and consideration must be given to whether and when the content of the historical critical investigation might impact the theory of revelation.
While I do not think I can agree with a "single author" locus of Inspiration (at least in the simplistic forms sometimes offered by a "conservative" interpretation of magisterial teaching on Inspiration ... and it may be that those teachings draw differences between the process by which Inspiration of the Old Testament and New Testament happened, differences not accounted for by such "conservative" interpretations of the teachings, just as some conservative scholars working to reconcile those teachings with a positive role for the Historical Critical Method read them as differentiating between the modes of historicity of the OT, on the one hand, and the NT, on the other), I do feel a need to find some acceptable model of Inspiration that accommodates critical theories of multiple sources and redactional history. Such a theory as I seek, while not placing the locus of Inspiration in a single author, would provide some locus in the human process at which Inspiration occurs. For this project, I think I was looking to place that locus in the redactor who inserted the Song in the D material and intended the metaphor with the meaning I was proposing. For my religious/theological commitments, this "author" or series of "authors" would need to somehow have institutionally guaranteed authority, an authority based in and concretely passed down from a unique revelation to Moses on Sinai (necessitating a belief in a historical Moses, even though there may be significant clarifications needed in whether or not we judge the "historicity" of the biblical accounts by the modern scientific standards of "historicity").
I am not saying here that my theory (even if I could pin it down further right now) would be right and defensible either philosophically or theologically in general, or in accordance with Catholic magisterial teaching. I am mainly trying to find clarity on how my concern for this was the real source of my concern for pinning down the point at which the Song was inserted into the D corpus relative to the compiling and redacting of the conquest narratives into a coherent whole narrative.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. I don't have anything else to say in wrapping it up, really. Except maybe that I kind of wish I had made it further in seeing if it was a viable thesis. I mainly wrote this for my own edification, to set it down in some complete, even if very abbreviated, form, since I spent a few years pouring energy into thinking about it. Who knows, maybe I wrote it as closure. But it feels good to have written it. Maybe I wrote it as a "once and future" kind of thing ... a boy can dream.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Arnofsky's Pi afterthought: Economics
It's going on 5 am and I haven't been able to sleep ... so might as well write and amp the hypomanic thought patterns up a little more so I really can't sleep lol
But, seriously, speaking of hypomania and over the top ... I think I have written on Arnofsky's Pi here before. If I haven't I will have to do that ... but I think I did when I wrote about the Person of Interest episode that used Pi.
Anyway, here is the thought I had while playing text-twist and solitaire trying to get sleepy:
The number is all these different things: the silicon identity of a nascent and still-born AI, the 216 digit name of G-d embedded in the Torah, and the secret to figuring out and picking the stock market. But I think it is interesting to ask which of them came first.
The stock market did. That is Max's project that led to the whole thing. So, what is the stock market? It's all about economics. I'm sure people much more erudite than I will ever be able to become in my life can say many things and make many clarifications about whether it's a cause of economic movements, or a gauge, or location of the movements etc. But, one way or another, it's about economics.
So, what is economics? Is it just "money"? What is money? Is it gold or minted dollars or bit coins or whatever? Money has only ever been a stand in for power ... the ability to acquire what you want or need. That's why I always laugh when people talk about those who seek only money and power, because they're really the same thing. So, is this post a ranting moralistic diatribe about power-hungry people, or how the search for power always leads to pain (Max's drill to the head etc)? No.
Let's examine it from another angle - the etymological angle. "Economic" comes from two Greek words: "oikos" (house) and "nomos" (law). So, it is "household law" (I got this from a professor while I was working on my MA). It's how things work in our day to day lives really, if you take the "house" as the whole society/civilaztion/culture/fill in the blank. It's the system of how we leverage what we have to get what we need to survive (whether physical survival by getting food, or emotional survival by observing or participating in the arts, what have you).
My main point of interest is that the whole thing in Pi begins with trying to figure out this practical-level system of how people use what they have to go about getting what they need (or think they need etc) to live, which is what economics really is. Max's search begins with the practical.
We live day to day doing what we do without really thinking about it that much on the theoretical level, how the system all really works in its interconnected complexity (a butterfly farts in Tanzania and it makes my team lose Sunday's game, that sort of interconnectedness thing). BUT, that is a survival mechanism. If we start to think too much about it on the meta-level like Max does, it can crush us, as it does him.
Just a thought. I don't know if it means anything. I guess it could be just a word of caution, or maybe a pet peeve being voiced about people praising understanding too much, and if some of us who have some hypomanic tendencies and feel a bit of a tug sometimes in the direction of Max and John Nash (think of that scene in Beautiful Mind where the numbers start coming of the screen at him), people sometimes act like we're crazy, maybe even immoral (with tropes that ease the mind, like how "we" are truly virtuous for seeking understanding, versus "they" who do not etc ... the same thing can happen with "honesty" - too much honesty can kill you because your own mind is actually very hard to understand, so it can become debilitating to try too hard to understand enough of it to be "honest" about what you're thinking, and then guilt complex ensues from feeling like a fraud ... these are real experiences for some phobics and anxiety patients who have gone un-counseled in a religious setting that offers only moral categories for interpretation).
Keep in mind that when I speak of understanding, I am thinking in terms of the thought of Paul Ricouer, who said that we exist in continual flux between the two poles of understanding and explanation. Understanding is "getting it" on an intuitive level, what the Greeks called "nous" (one immediate vision). Explanation is trying to communicate it discursively, scientifically. To see the difference, think about a joke ... you get the joke, but when you try to explain it, it becomes way less funny, because you have moved away from understanding, from the experience of "getting it."
I've sometimes thought of this "arc" Ricoeur talks about in terms of language - poetic language is understanding and scientific language is explanation. We always begin with poetic language (all the great epics are in verse, the Hebrew Bible is the first place we really find a development of religious prose). But we always strive towards scientific language to try to communicate ... an objective medium by which to be sure that the other person has "gotten it" too. And we always gravitate back to poetic language because the scientific has to have something to describe.
I guess what popped into my head tonight (or this morning now, or whatever time it is) was two-fold. The first thing is that the drive towards scientific language is a survival instinct. The second is that one of the ways too much understanding kills is by solipsism. Too much staying inside the private languages of one's own act of understanding without making the attempt at communication through explanation kills one. We see this in Max going nuts and the answers offered by those around him. Devi (the really cute mid-eastern neighbor woman) tells him he needs to get out more. Sol tells him to take a bath, like the Archimedes - who finally listened to his wife.
Anyway, there you have it, for what it's worth ... maybe a PB and J will help me sleep.
But, seriously, speaking of hypomania and over the top ... I think I have written on Arnofsky's Pi here before. If I haven't I will have to do that ... but I think I did when I wrote about the Person of Interest episode that used Pi.
Anyway, here is the thought I had while playing text-twist and solitaire trying to get sleepy:
The number is all these different things: the silicon identity of a nascent and still-born AI, the 216 digit name of G-d embedded in the Torah, and the secret to figuring out and picking the stock market. But I think it is interesting to ask which of them came first.
The stock market did. That is Max's project that led to the whole thing. So, what is the stock market? It's all about economics. I'm sure people much more erudite than I will ever be able to become in my life can say many things and make many clarifications about whether it's a cause of economic movements, or a gauge, or location of the movements etc. But, one way or another, it's about economics.
So, what is economics? Is it just "money"? What is money? Is it gold or minted dollars or bit coins or whatever? Money has only ever been a stand in for power ... the ability to acquire what you want or need. That's why I always laugh when people talk about those who seek only money and power, because they're really the same thing. So, is this post a ranting moralistic diatribe about power-hungry people, or how the search for power always leads to pain (Max's drill to the head etc)? No.
Let's examine it from another angle - the etymological angle. "Economic" comes from two Greek words: "oikos" (house) and "nomos" (law). So, it is "household law" (I got this from a professor while I was working on my MA). It's how things work in our day to day lives really, if you take the "house" as the whole society/civilaztion/culture/fill in the blank. It's the system of how we leverage what we have to get what we need to survive (whether physical survival by getting food, or emotional survival by observing or participating in the arts, what have you).
My main point of interest is that the whole thing in Pi begins with trying to figure out this practical-level system of how people use what they have to go about getting what they need (or think they need etc) to live, which is what economics really is. Max's search begins with the practical.
We live day to day doing what we do without really thinking about it that much on the theoretical level, how the system all really works in its interconnected complexity (a butterfly farts in Tanzania and it makes my team lose Sunday's game, that sort of interconnectedness thing). BUT, that is a survival mechanism. If we start to think too much about it on the meta-level like Max does, it can crush us, as it does him.
Just a thought. I don't know if it means anything. I guess it could be just a word of caution, or maybe a pet peeve being voiced about people praising understanding too much, and if some of us who have some hypomanic tendencies and feel a bit of a tug sometimes in the direction of Max and John Nash (think of that scene in Beautiful Mind where the numbers start coming of the screen at him), people sometimes act like we're crazy, maybe even immoral (with tropes that ease the mind, like how "we" are truly virtuous for seeking understanding, versus "they" who do not etc ... the same thing can happen with "honesty" - too much honesty can kill you because your own mind is actually very hard to understand, so it can become debilitating to try too hard to understand enough of it to be "honest" about what you're thinking, and then guilt complex ensues from feeling like a fraud ... these are real experiences for some phobics and anxiety patients who have gone un-counseled in a religious setting that offers only moral categories for interpretation).
Keep in mind that when I speak of understanding, I am thinking in terms of the thought of Paul Ricouer, who said that we exist in continual flux between the two poles of understanding and explanation. Understanding is "getting it" on an intuitive level, what the Greeks called "nous" (one immediate vision). Explanation is trying to communicate it discursively, scientifically. To see the difference, think about a joke ... you get the joke, but when you try to explain it, it becomes way less funny, because you have moved away from understanding, from the experience of "getting it."
I've sometimes thought of this "arc" Ricoeur talks about in terms of language - poetic language is understanding and scientific language is explanation. We always begin with poetic language (all the great epics are in verse, the Hebrew Bible is the first place we really find a development of religious prose). But we always strive towards scientific language to try to communicate ... an objective medium by which to be sure that the other person has "gotten it" too. And we always gravitate back to poetic language because the scientific has to have something to describe.
I guess what popped into my head tonight (or this morning now, or whatever time it is) was two-fold. The first thing is that the drive towards scientific language is a survival instinct. The second is that one of the ways too much understanding kills is by solipsism. Too much staying inside the private languages of one's own act of understanding without making the attempt at communication through explanation kills one. We see this in Max going nuts and the answers offered by those around him. Devi (the really cute mid-eastern neighbor woman) tells him he needs to get out more. Sol tells him to take a bath, like the Archimedes - who finally listened to his wife.
Anyway, there you have it, for what it's worth ... maybe a PB and J will help me sleep.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)