Magic Fiction

Beyond Good and Evil, 16.

"There are still harmless self-observers who believe that
there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as
the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though
cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the
thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either
on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it,
however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as
"absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a
CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from
the misleading significance of words!"

The Gay Science, 54.

 The consciousness of appearance.— How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer,—I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the conciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is "appearance" for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence,—what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown X or remove from it! Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o'-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more,—that among all these dreamers, I, too, the "knower," am dancing my dance, that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve [aufrecht zu erhalten] the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.


paragraph 5 from the following book
 Nietzsche and Jung: the whole self ... - Google Book Search
 
At the risk of being foolishly audacious, I'll disagree (at least partly) with Nietzsche here.

In the quote from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche comes out against believing in "immediate certainties" and cognition getting hold of its object "purely and simply as 'the thing in itself' without any falsification taking place..." and "absolute knowledge." Well, I don't believe in any of these things either. As I spelled out at greater length in my original post, I think there is a reality beyond our apprehension of it, but I don't think we'll ever fully access or understand this reality. In other words, no certainties, no cognition without falsification, no absolute knowledge.

I really love the quote from The Gay Science; it goes very well with what we're talking about in this thread. I agree with the spirit of it but not with how far Nietzsche wants to drive his conclusion. I completely agree that one can't say anything about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance, but I don't necessarily agree that appearance must be the "opposite" of some essence. I think appearance is merely a distorted or partial perception of an essence; I would talk about difference rather than opposition. And "essence" isn't the word I'd use, because it sounds too much like some immaterial, timeless Platonic form. I'm talking about physical reality, nothing metaphysical -- just a physical reality that (because of our creaturely limitations) we can never fully know.

Nietzsche seems to go from saying that all we can know is appearances (I agree) to saying that, therefore, appearances alone are what reality is. Each human does experience only certain appearances, and each non-human animal experiences different kinds of appearances, and scientific instruments shows us still different kinds of appearances -- but these various appearances that we are aware of are not radically incommensurable. They seem to be in reference to a common reality that we can investigate further. Therefore I think we can infer an objective reality that we are having some partial experiences of. There is a philosophical concept called "inference to the best explanation." That's what I'm doing here.

The linked passage from Nietzsche and Jung says "Nietzsche rejects the existence of a metaphysical world for its manifestation must be within a world of appearance, the world that it necessarily negates." Again, I'm not contrasting appearance with a metaphysical realm, only with physical reality that is only partially knowable by us. Maybe I misunderstand Kant, but I thought that was all he meant, too. We don't know whether anything metaphysical exists; given the lack of evidence for this, I disregard any supposed existence of the "metaphysical," which is why I'm an atheist.
 
A few more examples of fictional realities, but believed to be true by many, are: "The Bermuda Triangle" and "Atlantis". Regarding the Triangle, read the following paragraph (from Wikipedia): "Some disappearances had in fact, never happened. One plane crash was said to have taken place in 1937 off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of witnesses; a check of the local papers revealed nothing." We have once more, a reality that does not exist but many believed to be true. Yes, and of course the day Orson Welles make thousand of Americans believe that an invasion from Mars was really happening, that it was reality.
 
In the course of gathering material for my soon-to-be-written BA thesis, I came across a book which could be relevant to this discussion: Escapism by Yi-Fu Tuan. According to an Amazon reviewer,
[w]e tend to think of the way we live as "reality". Yet all human culture - from the smallest object to the grandest ideological-religious system - is a form of escape. Indeed, argues Tuan, it may well be the defining feature of humans, as a species, that we have this capacity to imagine and implement transformative projects; that we can turn the world to our will (or try to), rather than remaining the victim of Nature or of our own natures. "Escape" or "the imagination" is value-neutral, argues Tuan, as he explores the methods by which we attempt to escape from animality, and how it can lead us into both the grotesque and the sublime.​
I have my doubts about the possibility of "the sublime", but otherwise this work looks very promising. Escapism is worth taking seriously.
 
Allow me to post these two "Gedanken experiments", my own creation from my first and only year studying Philosophy at a University.

There are two cities, and that is the whole Universe. Cities A and B. City A is about to propagate a virus by air, to which all its inhabitants are immune, and nothing cannot be done to stop it. City B, on the contrary, has a 70 % probability of any of its inhabitants of getting infected and in consequence death. What is Good and Evil for these two cities? For City B is to destroy the origin of the virus. The scholars of the city have determined that 70 % probability of dying means, that 70 % of the people could die, or 20 %, or everyone. 70 is a probability, and not a certainty. Therefore, City B decides to kill the inhabitants of City B and stop the virus. For the scholars of City A, city that has no defense against an air strike, Good is the opposite, "let us live, don't blame us, blame Life itself". Basically, I was trying to show, adding numbers to morals, that Good and Evil do not exist as Platonic ideas because there are no such immaterial entities or ideas. A similar example would show that Reality too is a probabilistic notion, and it doesn't exist beyond our minds.

To prove it, I have another "Gedanken experiment". Where is the music that is coming out from the radio? It is in the copper wire, yes, it is. Music is the vibration of electrons in the copper (simplified version of it). Music is also the vibration of a membrane, called a speaker. Music is also the vibration of molecules in the air, in fact without air there is no sound. Music is the vibration of something (I don't remember exactly what) in my ears. Music is the convertion of mechanical vibration to electrical information done by my ears, through nerves, and finally neurons. Finally, Music is my representation of what it is, my knowledge, my memories of what Music is. So, where is the Music I hear? Music is all that, from the vibration in the copper to my ultimate representation of it. There is no Music out there without me, easily seen if I am deaf. And being me part of the process, it doesn't really matter much if there is "Music in itself", but my representation of it, and that representation is all what it is (I briefly summarized Nietzsche here).

There is no Reality. This is no Escapism, it is in fact real, the fact that reality, ultimate reality, finally depends on us to have meaning.
 
I agree that "Good" and "Evil" are human evaluations and don't exist independently of these evaluations.


I also agree that it wouldn't make much sense to talk about "music in itself," as if it were an independently existing reality. Music is a human interpretation of the physical processes you described. Music is a certain kind of human experience of these processes. But I don't think our representations are all that there is, because our representations are not (and most likely can't be) complete representations of these processes. We can interpret these processes as music (melody, etc.) or as physics (vibrations, etc.)


Physicists do aspire to a complete understanding of these things, but it seems unlikely that they will ever attain it, because of our creaturely limitations. In other words, it seems unlikely that physicists' representations of physical processes will ever be adequate to fully explain the processes. But the representations aren't all that there is. Physicists are investigating things outside of their own representations or models; otherwise it wouldn't be helpful for them to build particle accelerators to see how subatomic particles behave. After finding out more about reality outside their own representations of it, physicists modify their representations to (hopefully) make them more accurate.


Physical processes preexisted sentient animals for billions of years (unless you doubt all the evidence for this). Sentient animals developed through physical processes and are made of physical processes. The meanings and representations that sentient animals construct are not the only reality. These meanings and representations are the only way that sentient animals can experience and understand physical reality, but that's saying a different thing.



​
 
On a thread here: Secret Horror Writers , I said last night, 'tongue in cheek': This was because HPL had come up in this dicussion with controversial views about his writing.[/SIZE]

Followed this morning by:
/www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/clipart/happy.gif[/IMG]
However, it is true to say that my real-time reviews have a tendency to seek codes in syntax, graphology and phonetics as well as semantics ... all very relevant to magic fiction and fiction as religion.
The parthenogenesis of reality from artifice.>
 
Nemonymous said:
The parthenogenesis of reality from artifice.>
Click to expand...

Good phrase. I've recently been reading Henri Michaux, and many of his short fictions are pure enactments of "the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice." An example is "The Jetty" (trans. Richard Ellmann):
During the month that I was living at Honfleur I had not yet seen the sea, for the doctor made me stay in my room.

But last night, tired of being so isolated, I built, taking advantage of the fog, a jetty as far as the sea.

Then, right at the end of it, letting my legs hang down, I looked at the sea, below me, which was breathing deeply.

A murmur came from my right. It was a man sitting like me with legs swinging and looking at the sea. "Now that I am old," he said, "I am going to pull up everything I put there during the years." He began to draw things up by means of pulleys.

And he brought up riches in abundance. He brought up captains from other ages in dress uniforms, chests studded with all sorts of precious things, and women dressed lavishly but as they no longer dress. And as he brought each being or thing to the surface, he looked at it carefully with high hopes, then without saying a word, while his face fell, he pushed it behind him. So we filled up the entire pier. I don't remember exactly what there was, for I have no memory, but obviously it was not satisfactory, in everything something had been lost which he hoped to recover and which had faded away.

Then he began to throw everything back into the sea.

Like a long ribbon it fell and, when it wet you, froze you.

A last piece of junk which he was pushing off dragged him in too.

As for me, shivering with fever, I wonder how I was ever able to get back to my bed.

​
 
I would like to thank those who have recently and substantially and thoughtfully exhumed and extended and revivified the FICTION AS RELIGION thread here: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=668&page=5
I had not noticed these till now (started coincidentally on my birthday this year). I am acknowledging this fact here on a companion thread, as I do not (yet) think I am ready to directly interrupt or divert its inspiring flow. I am still managing to be busy with gestalt real time reviewing of fiction in the shadow of these two TLO threads.
Thanks again.
 
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