The Fact of Fiction

The following can be traced back to a conversation between Nate and myself. I thought that it should be written down at some point, some point being now. I can't remember whose part was whose, and furthermore I don't think it matters in matters of philosophy – chalk it up to the speech of Aletheia, if you must have a source. The question is, what is it that distinguishes fictional entities from real things?

The first answer might be to say, real things exist. But what does it mean to say that things exist? That I can touch and feel them? This might be true for physical things, but it at least makes logical sense to say that non-physical entities exist (does the number 2 exist? How about consciousness?). How about that there is something true about them? But it is true that Santa Claus rides his sleigh around the world, in a fashion of speaking. Social constructions such as Santa Claus have their own specific sort of existence in our shared stories, though I am not saying that I could wake up in the middle of the night and discover him on my roof after the rising of such a clatter. Maybe you don't want to call this “existence”, but then we need to see what existence is, as well as how “non-existent” things can have anything at all true about them.

We proposed the following: real entities are complete and consistent, while fictional entities are not. By complete I mean this: ask whatsoever question you will that is applicable, and there shall be an answer. If I ask about the mating habits of the rarest species of beetle, there is some truth to the matter. If I ask about the mating habits of dragons, however, I may very well be at a permanent loss. We encounter this phenomenon all the time when reading stories – we speculate about what happens, where the characters are coming from, what happens in the middle of plot holes, and we get frustrated when no answer in forthcoming. Think of a murder mystery that never reveals the killer. We feel that there must be an answer, but it may simply be unanswerable – there is a killer, this is true, but there is no truth to the matter about who the killer is.

Consistency may be a bit more tendentious, but I shall proffer it anyhow. I may read one story, and vampires melt when exposed to sunlight. In another story, which I shall now invent and which I have certainly never encountered through any medium, they glitter. Do vampires then melt or glitter in the sunlight? Both, it seems. Now, it might be argued that vampires melt in the first story and glitter in the second, and so there is no contradiction. But that would be saying that there are two sorts of vampires. The oddness of the second story comes about not because we are encountering a second sort of vampire, but because there is one sort of vampire, and they melt. And yet they glitter, too. There would be no possibility of cognitive dissonance without there being one entity between the different stories which has both the essential property of melting and the essential property of glittering without melting. Fictions can therefore be contradictory in a way that real things cannot.

But fictions are beings that are not, beings that are false. The opposite seems to hold as well: all of our falsities and delusions are fictions of a fashion. What is “being” then, by contrast? It is uncreated and imperishable, not one of our unstable fictions; whole and of a single kind and unshaken and perfect. It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous (Parmenides, Fragment 8, KRS). If it is complete, it is whole and does not exist as something that was and now is not (since answers to our questions about the past are currently answerable – history is a viable study), nor similarly is it something that will be yet now is not (the very power of prediction proves the possibility of encountering the future now). If it is consistent, it is all together, one, and continuous, since nothing contradicts anything else.

If this is correct, then the status of fictional entities is more than a study of books and legends. Fiction is the way we live life when it does not align with the above picture, whereas reality by contrast is something unitary and whole and the fertile ground out of which all of our fictions spring – since they too are part of reality in their own way.

What is "Non-conceptual"?

In my posts on religious experience, I had been focusing on how there might be dialogue about non-conceptual experiences specifically. As was pointed out to me, however, it is far from clear what "non-conceptual" might be. On the one extreme, it could refer to any experience. I cannot tell anyone what "red" is - they must see it for themselves. So if "conceptual" implies "communicable by means of speech/concepts alone", then most things (or perhaps all) would be non-conceptual.

That doesn't seem to help us too much, though, since there appears to be some content to "non-conceptuality". What about the nature of (fill in goal of particular religion here)? That is something neither experienced in this life, nor is it something we could put together from anything in this life presumably (heaven would always exceed our expectations, for example). Or how about "go to church/synagogue/mosque/temple/etc. and your life will make sense"? This one is more difficult. Presumably we will eventually be able to form concepts of an afterlife, and so it is only accidentally non-conceptual. The directive to do something for life to make sense is, by contrast, a command cloaked in the language of a statement. There might be a concept associated with it, but there is also a dissociation between the concept and the experience which one has by following the directive. This is actually a quite interesting topic, especially since it relates to much more than a rather specific form of experience such as I am discussing here. But it is not yet the type of non-conceptuality I am interested in.

I was talking with someone yesterday about math, and I think that there is something there which can come closer to what I am talking about (for a more detailed discussion, see here and perhaps here). We talk about infinite numbers in mathematics, but there is a sense in which all that they show is that we never really talk about the infinite. There is always a larger "infinite" numeral, in fact an "infinite" number of them (whatever that might mean). Any attempt to capture the infinite fails to truly capture it, but must always delimit it in some fashion. Our actual references to the infinite does not refer to the infinite in itself, but rather to the way in which we find that everything that we encounter in insufficient. We are always referring to finite things in describing the "infinite" (and even to talk about describing it is to allow an infelicity of speech).

In this sense, we never have a concept of the "infinite" in itself. Similarly, Heidegger's discussion of the "nothing" is not of an object (since it makes no sense to make "nothing" an object since it is not a thing), but rather of the "nihilation" of beings - that is, we are talking about a particular manner of what is, of how meanings slip away and things recede from us, and only in talking about beings can we in circumlocutions talk of "nothing". There is no way of having a referential concept of the "nothing" or of the "infinite".

So what would a "non-conceptual experience" look like? Not being a practicing mystic myself, I cannot quite say (although they say that they can't say either). Maybe we could think of it like this: even though we never truly find the mathematical infinite, we have some intuitive grasp of the paucity of concepts - not just of the concepts we do have, but of any possible concept we could have. There is a part of us that jumps out of the particular way of thinking about things and takes hold of the whole, even if only to immediately lose it. Any attempt to describe this whole then fails, and we can only think about it by looking at the parts, in their difference, their strife, and their lack. Even in having the experience, then, one does not have something they can conceptualize and refer to. Two mystics can refer to "the mystical experience", but any conceptual content even for them will still be of what happens to beings, to the finite, etc., and not of the ultimate and infinite. So perhaps "non-conceptual" would mean that, even if there might be a concept of it in a sense, such a concept has for content something other than its purported "referent"?

Cultural Values

The other day, I was talking with some people about foreign education. In particular, do we as Americans step in and give them our own educational system when we see fit? Or do we let them develop their own culture? I tended toward the latter option, and although it would need numerous caveats in a concrete situation (for example, would it be all right to give funding for them to develop their systems, and other issues), it made me think of broader cultural concerns.

Basically, the position I want to put forward is this: every culture has its own genuine vantage point on reality, and we need to work with that (if anyone is interested in listening to theoretical justifications for this, it is based on Parmenides and Neoplatonism – but that is a different post). When Americans champion values of freedom and independence, there is an actual good in that. We have seen something real about the world. There would be no way of subjectively and relativistically realizing anything unless reality allowed it – freedom could not be seen as a good, even "subjectively" - unless it actually does something for human, social reality. But at the same time (as I have been forced to acknowledge against my American intuitions), other societies that champion communal values and concrete regulations for guiding action have their own insights into reality which we often lack and which generally conflict with ours.

So there is room to say that American education should grow American values – there is something there worthwhile – but at the same time there should be, say, Islamic education growing Islamic values. There's good stuff within their own framework, and Muslims should be looking to their own roots (sometimes in recovering what has been left behind, such as struggling/ijtihad over legal canons, but still in a way genuinely Islamic).

Part one of the thesis, then, is that every culture has its own truth, or perhaps its own finite witness to truth if that is better - a truth neither fully absolute nor merely conventional, but real nonetheless. Part two is that it is better to work within a tradition than to syncretically combine them. Different traditions and cultures have spent hundreds and thousands of years melding material together. Sometimes this is done more effectively than others, but there is still more of an organic unity between elements of an established culture than one put together from whatever novelties excite people. Now, cultures are living and growing, and can incorporate new elements. But this still isn't done randomly. New elements must be grafted in to the old tree, worked in so that they work with the whole. Throwing American models of government into the Middle East causes problems, whether or not they are better models of government – they have consonances in the Euro-American system (including thought about the nature of the person, responsibility, role of government, states of nature, dissemination of knowledge, economics, etc.) which are completely lacking in other areas of the world. It is similarly difficult applying insights learned from other cultures to a contemporary American environment (for example, how hard is it to convince people of the benefits of available health care and public transportation?).

Part three is that, since cultures have their own witness to truth by their relation to reality (and so to Being), cultures that negatively define themselves lack a witness insofar as they negatively define themselves. Terrorist groups have relatively little cohesion outside of fighting against some common enemy. There might be some such cohesion, and to this extent they get something about the world, but a negative and merely relative identity keeps them from having anything to develop. Taking ones own race as the master race in opposition to all others is, again, merely a relation against others.