The One True Path to Success in the Wily Korean Wilds

Here are photos that Sun-Ae and I managed to bring back from our Bonghwasan hunt stalking a wild Emanation.

Seeing the Emanation before it saw us, we quietly sneaked up on it . . .

. . . but it then saw us . . .

. . . and distanced itself . . .

. . . then turned its back to us and flew to another bench.

It then fluttered toward a growth of tall, thick grasses . . .

. . . but approached us carefully, seemingly curious . . .

. . . but soon backed off again toward the thick grass . . .

. . . where it lingered, as if to bolt into the safety of the tall, thick stalks and blades.

Off it then suddenly went again, so we followed till it reached a dry gulch . . .

. . . where it again stopped, and looked around . . .

. . . as if to reflect on the paradox of streambed with no stream.

Baffled at that, then at tree roots above ground . . .

. . . the Emanation opted to fly away, though I nearly succeeded in plucking it from the air!

It managed to escape, however, for my reach exceeded my grasp, and it flew to a nearby tree, where it perched precariously.

Then, spreading its wings,  it flew from the tree to a bench . . .

. . . then to another tree . . .

. . . then to yet another tree . . .

and another, where it remained . . .

. . . a while, then left for good . . . or for ill.

After all, who knows what good or ill might be accomplished by a book as complex as an Emanation?

Especially when it's called "Emanations."

John Milton's Reason says: "Eat it, just eat it."

Weird Al Yankovic
You Tube

I posted yesterday on John Milton's faculty psychology, and I do so again today, but in more humility, quoting from my comments on the Milton List:

I've had second thoughts about how Milton's faculty psychology works.

Yesterday, my point was that even though reason is addressed as though it works on its own, it can be tricked, and thus Adam and Eve have to remain firm and not allow reason to mislead.

But remain firm how?

One might think they would do so through their will, which is free, but the text says the will is free when it follows reason. Milton instead implicates memory as the faculty that reminds one of what God has expressly forbidden. Adam is to remind Eve, and Eve to remind Adam.

Moral reasoning seems to require a community that remembers moral laws - though, presumably, one could also remind oneself.

But only one thing in the garden is expressly forbidden by God - the fruit of the tree of knowledge - and what could reason dictate to the will about that negative command? Aside from the command, reason would find nothing wrong in Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. By reason alone, the tree and its fruit are good. "Eat it, just eat it," says reason (echoing Weird Al Yankovic). Memory countermands that advice.

So, how does Milton's faculty psychology work? From Five Senses to Fancy to Reason to Will, but from Memory back to Will?

Professor Todd Wayne Butler corrected my speculation:

In response to Jeffery's query on how Milton's psychology works, I'd hesitate to offer memory direct access to the will (or vice-versa). Rather, it's through the imagination that the information stored in the memory is recollected to reason. Once the past is thus again immediately present, reason can (much as it does with sensory data) assess this information and, if it chooses, direct action.

I then asked:

So "Fansie" - to borrow Milton's term - is the faculty through which both sense impressions and memories pass to reach "Reason"? . . . Does Milton somewhere make the point that memories pass through Fansie, or is this inferred to Milton's views from what is otherwise known about faculty psychology?

Professor Butler responded:

I'm not aware of any other places where Milton is explicit (at least in detail) about the cognitive mechanics of remembering, though the inference is supported by more specific explications of faculty psychology found elsewhere.

I therefore need to learn more about faculty psychology . . .

Stranger than paradise?

Mickey and Minnie?

Google Images

Carolyn Arends, writing an article titled "When God Wears a Costume" (Christianity Today, January 8, 2014), tells of being a teenager babysitting a 2-year-old girl squirming in a high chair and whom she tried to pacify by holding up the little girl's laminated placemat featuring a photo of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and the following dialogue took place:

"Is this a picture of Donald and Daisy Duck?" I asked.

"€œNo," she giggled.

"Is it Goofy and Pluto?"

"Nuh-uh!" she squealed.

"Well, who are they?" I asked, gearing up for the inevitable right-answer celebration. But her reply caught me off guard.

"Strangers in costumes."

Ms. Arends says that she's been reflecting on Laura's pragmatism as a toddler already capable of offering a no-nonsense view of the world, inadvertently providing an example "of what sociologist Philip Rieff and philosopher Allan Bloom both" termed a "€œlow symbolic hedge," i.e., a maze formed with hedges, such that a low one would be too easily seen through and solved. One need not use imagination to find one's way, so imagination remains undeveloped. Thus, because "our culture lacks potent symbols" and has merely Mickey Mouse symbols, we suffer a paucity of imagination.

Well, maybe, but there's a sense in which that two-year-old toddler Laura was using her own burgeoning imagination to demystify a mundane reality behind a prominent, powerful cultural image.

The kid deserves some praise . . .

C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Truth

C. S. Lewis
Wikipedia

Here, in the final paragraph of Lewis's essay "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare" (complete on pdf), is something to ruminate on:

It will have escaped no one that in such a scale of writers the poets will take the highest place; and among the poets those who have at once the tenderest care for old words and the surest instinct for the creation of new metaphors. But it must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. I said at the outset that the truth we won by metaphor could not be greater than the truth of the metaphor itself; and we have seen since that all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor. And thence, I confess, it does follow that if our thinking is ever true, then the metaphors by which we think must have been good metaphors. It does follow that if those original equations, between good and light, or evil and dark, between breath and soul and all the others, were from the beginning arbitrary and fanciful -- if there is not, in fact, a kind of psycho-physical parallelism (or more) in the universe -- then all our thinking is nonsensical. And so, admittedly, the view I have taken has metaphysical implications. But so has every view.

I came across this quote by chance, and I've had time only to skim the essay, so I have nothing significant to say about this . . . but I wanted to save it for further reflection on the relation of truth to metaphor.

I can add that Lewis offers some good advice on writing a couple of pages earlier:

[H]e who would increase the meaning and decrease the meaningless verbiage in his own speech and writing, must do two things. He must become conscious of the fossilized metaphors in his words; and he must freely use new metaphors, which he creates for himself. The first depends upon knowledge, and therefore on leisure; the second depends on a certain degree of imaginative ability. The second is perhaps the more important of the two: we are never less the slaves of metaphor than when we are making metaphor, or hearing it new made.

Good advice, as I said, and connected -- as in everything Lewis wrote -- with his larger views on imagination, reason, and truth.