A few years ago I got impatient with Christmas letters and wrote one declaring that I'd fallen love with a Samoan man half my age who had come to Browning because he wasn't so obviously different if he lived among Blackfeet, some of whose families included Mexicans. I met him at a party, I claimed, and he was charmingly funny and had a high body temp, a big advantage around here. So we were going to get married and go live with his mom in Hawaii.
The shocking part was how many people believed this nonsense or so it seemed. I've been looking at a philosophy essay about what is true, a lie, an irony, a joke, and etc. Beyond those categories, we're acutely aware that everything Trump says is false and self-serving. His lies can't be classed as perjury because he's not lying under oath. He's not capable of understanding the basic concept of an oath to tell the truth. We have to struggle to figure out what he's really saying, which may be damaging. A criminal lawyer wrote this tweet which I think some people thought might be true.
Clark Neily tweeted as @ConLawWarrior
· Jan 7
Replying to @adribbleofink
"I wrote a report about aardvarks in 2nd grade and got so into them that I wrote a letter to a stuffed-animal co. suggesting they add one to their lineup. About 6mos later, I got a big box w/ a stuffed aardvark and a letter saying “We took your suggestion, and we named it Clark.”"
I pointed out that real aardvarks are pretty big, too big to mail, and that only plush animals are properly referred to as "stuffed". If Neily means an aardvark made from the skin of the real animal he should say "mounted." But if they made a little plush version of an aardvark and sent it to a 2nd grader, that would be kind of cute. So which is it?
An essay on Aeon (link: https://www.iep.utm.edu/fict-par/) took me to
Colin Radford, now deceased, a philosopher of "linguistics" who wrote a famous essay about the shades of truth. We could think of him while considering situations between a criminally demented president and a cute child anecdote.
"How is it that we can be moved by what we know does not exist, namely the situations of people in fictional stories? The so-called "paradox of emotional response to fiction" is an argument for the conclusion that our emotional response to fiction is irrational. The argument contains an inconsistent triad of premises, all of which seem initially plausible. These premises are (1) that in order for us to be moved (to tears, to anger, to horror) by what we come to learn about various people and situations, we must believe that the people and situations in question really exist or existed; (2) that such "existence beliefs" are lacking when we knowingly engage with fictional texts; and (3) that fictional characters and situations do in fact seem capable of moving us at times." (Colin Radford)
When I showed to my mother the story that the Heart Butte 7th grade class and I wrote together, which reflected their lives but was fiction, she said, "I didn't expect to be engaged, but I was." When someone in town read "12 Blackfeet Stories" that I wrote, she said, "I wept." I took that to be a complement. I know people, mostly women, who read four or five novels a week, many of them rather contrived, but have very little happening in their own lives. They KNOW these novels are fiction, but they respond to them as though real.
At the other extreme, philosophers of science tell us that true reality can't be perceived by human beings, who are limited by only having access to the universe through our senses and the coded messages our neurons transmit to our brains where we compose a virtual picture, unless our brains have been split to address epileptic fits or something -- in which case we compose TWO virtual pictures that are not disclosed to each other.
Then there's the problem presented by Clinton at HIS impeachment hearing in which he declared he didn't have "sexual relations" with "that woman" because his definition of "sexual relations" was penetration. Rape defenses have used that argument. When is a definition a lie?
Another situation. Indigenous people, who have been mythologized and made virtuous in fiction, now declare that even though the 19th century world when they were obviously from a different culture has long since been diluted and reinvented, they still own those qualities and that no one else may exploit them in fiction. Only enrolled people -- defined in different ways by different tribes -- can legitimately write about indigenous people. This is bitterly serious, with much money and emotion involved. What is truth in this case?
When we try to vote in elections or sit on a jury in a court hearing or trial, we try to understand what in this particular case is "true," that is, a fact that can somehow be verified by documents or eyewitnesses or experts. And all the time we throw up fantasies and sentimentalities and things that are true in one context and deliberate fantasy in another. How can we make any definitions or generalizations that can stand alone, apart from what we want them to be? Can senators who have plainly been living in fantasy possibly do this?
Maybe we have to go case-by-case. Maybe we have to think of consequences. Maybe we have to do a bit of self-talking about what our emotions are while we hear or read or watch this situation.
I don't know which of my respondents to my invented Christmas letter were taking it seriously in case it was true, or which ones were just playing along, or which ones scoffed at the very idea that I could form a relationship with a Samoan half my age or anyone else. Personally, I enjoyed this fantasy which I thought of as Jason Momoa coming to save me from myself and take me someplace warm.
By the way, if you're looking for a stuffed toy aardvark, they exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment