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Geographiction?

By on November 15, 2009 10

The Wikipedia page for Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days comments that “Verne is often characterised as a futurist or science fiction author, but there is not a glimmer of science-fiction in this, his most popular work.”

Earth

Well, there is no generally agreed-upon definition of science fiction (see this list of proposed definitions; my own view is that it’s a family-resemblance concept for which no precise definition should be expected). Some definitions do require that the story’s milieu be different from our own as the result of scientific or technological advances – and by that standard Around the World indeed does not count as science fiction. But at least one popular definition or family of definitions focuses merely on the idea of a story that depends crucially on some point of science – without necessarily involving extrapolation to some alternative milieu. Given that the plot of Around the World turns on the fact that one gains or loses a day when crossing the international date line, the novel thus does count as science fiction by some definitions (geography being, y’know, a science), so the “not a glimmer” line is something of an exaggeration – perhaps yet another example (see here and here) of the bizarre resistance on the part of some Verne fans to seeing Verne characterised as a science fiction writer. At any rate, those who make these pronouncements seem oddly incurious about what the proper contours of the concept of science fiction might be.

I would add that Verne’s Captain Hatteras, generally not considered sf, has even greater claim than Around the World to the category, since it portrays a successful expedition to the North Pole at a time when this had not yet happened, and speculates (inaccurately, but not impossibly) as to what would be found there – thereby turning (unlike Around the World) not just on a point of science but on an extrapolated future development of a science (viz. geography); and similar remarks apply to Five Weeks in a Balloon and Measuring a Meridian. Those who deny it the title of sf are implicitly assuming, I suspect, that the only relevant extrapolations of science are those that involve new technology.

The Butler Did It

By on November 10, 2009 4

Butler Shaffer notes some corrections here to his list of pen names, but I have a few more corrections to add:

Jousting with pens

Mary Wollstonecraft (not “Woolstonecraft”) was Mary Shelley’s mother, not her secret identity. Shelley was the daughter’s married name. Although her maiden name was Godwin, not Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley went by “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” so this may be another case of a middle-name-mistaken-for-real-last-name.

“Ovid,” “Horace,” “Vergil,” and “Livy” aren’t pen names, since they never called themselves by those names; those are just the English versions of their names (just as, e.g., “Aristotle” and “Jesus” are the English forms of “Aristoteles” and “Yeshuah”).

“Montesquieu” wasn’t Charles Secondat’s pen name, it was his title of nobility: he was Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. (Like “John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.”) Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for Lord Kelvin.

(Also – does a name count as a pen name if one adopts it as one’s legal name? I believe Alisa Rosenbaum legally changed her name to Ayn Rand (to protect her family in Russia).)

Rothbard vs. Plotinus

By on October 26, 2009 39
Plotinus by Raphael

Plotinus by Raphael

Rothbard was a smart guy, but man, he really didn’t know anything about Plotinus.

Now it’s no crime to be ignorant of Plotinus – but as Rothbard himself says, it’s a bad idea to have a “loud and vociferous opinion” on things one is ignorant of. And unfortunately, Rothbard – evidently through reliance on Thomas Molnar and Leszek Kolakowski, neither of whom apparently knew a damn thing about Plotinus either – has uncritically picked up some loud and vociferous opinions on Plotinus.

Plotinus says that God, or the One, is “self-sufficing” and “utterly perfect above all,” and that it creates out of a kind of overflowing fullness, because it does not “grudge … to give of itself.”

But according to Rothbard, Plotinus’s view is that God is imperfect and “creates the universe out of loneliness, dissatisfaction, or …. felt need.”

Moreover, Rothbard tells us that according to Plotinus, “creation, instead of being wondrous and good, is essentially and metaphysically evil,” and that redemption will not come until the “painful state of creation is … over.”

By contrast, here’s what Plotinus actually says about the goodness of creation:

To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. … We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. … And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time. … What reflection of that [intelligible] world could be conceived more beautiful than this [material world] of ours? What fire could be a nobler reflection of the fire there than the fire we know here? Or what other earth than this could have been modelled after that earth? And what globe more minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered in its course could have been conceived in the image of the self-centred circling of the World of Intelligibles? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it is to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be.

So is Plotinus a “reabsorption theologian”? Sure, in some sense. But Plotinus is constantly trying to reconcile the sense in which creation needs to be transcended with the sense in which it needs to be embraced – just as, y’know, orthodox Christianity does too. (And although the Gnostics are interestingly different from Plotinus, what Rothbard says doesn’t apply to them either – mainly because for them, while the material universe is indeed evil (by contrast with Plotinus), God does not create the material universe, and so a fortiori does not create it out of a lack of self-sufficiency – and the immaterial universe that God does create is not evil.) Reabsorption theology is a lot more subtle and nuanced than the cartoon version you’re going to get if you’re relying on a Catholic apologist who wants to use it as a cudgel to beat the Gnostics with and a postmodernist who wants to use it as a cudgel to beat the Marxists with.

Mystery Speaker, Part 2: Mystery Resolved

By on October 25, 2009 17

Roderick in dunce cap

Oops!

Well, embarrassingly enough, it turns out that last March I did receive, and accept, an invitation to speak at ISIL’s upcoming January conference.

I guess my financial crisis over the summer completely blew it out of my memory, and so I most unfairly took the fault to lie with ISIL rather than with your humble correspondent.

Well, I’m glad I noticed the announcement on the website, or I wouldn’t have made plans to attend! Now I will.

And at least now you know I haven’t been kidding about my conical hat….

Mystery Speaker

By on October 23, 2009 4

mystery speaker

I was looking at this interesting list of speakers for an upcoming ISIL conference, when I noticed with surprise that one of them was … me.

I don’t know whether the other speakers on that list were actually contacted and asked to speak, but apart from seeing my name on that list I’ve heard nothing about it and – at $600 a pop – have not been planning to attend.

I’ve dropped them a puzzled note, and will report more when I learn more.

 
Update: I’ve learned more

Hugo Mexicano

By on October 11, 2009 2

Ayn Rand always preferred stories in which the main conflict is between noble and heroic figures (though one or both may be tragically misguided) rather than between heroes and villains; this is one of many things she liked about Victor Hugo, whose works evince the same preference. I was reminded of this last night on TCM when I caught the 1939 film Juarez, which I greatly enjoyed. (Amazon seems to have it only in vhs; another outfit offers it in dvd, but I suspect the recording may be of inferior quality.)

Juarez and Lincoln (top); Carlota and Maximilian (bottom)

Juarez and Lincoln (top); Carlota and Maximilian (bottom)

The film officially stars Paul Muni as Mexican president Benito Juárez (so I guess Tom Russell was wrong) and Bette Davis as Empress Carlota, but despite both billing and title, the actual lead is Brian Aherne, doing a terrific and subtle job as the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. (We also see Claude Rains as a somewhat too forceful Napoléon III, and John Garfield as a much too likable Porfirio Díaz.)

In Rand’s introduction (reprinted in The Romantic Manfesto) to Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three, she praises Hugo for portraying the two chief anatagonists – the monarchist leader Lantenac and the republican leader Cimourdain – as equals in “spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication,” even while deploring the weakness and vacuity of the political arguments Hugo has his characters make on behalf of their respective ideologies. In both these respects Juarez is remarkably Hugoesque.

The two chief antagonists, Maximilian the fey otherworldly idealist and Juárez the canny Yoda-like enigma, couldn’t be more different (Misesian alert: one is a Habsburg who regards monarchy as the best guarantor of individual liberty, while the other is a democrat who worshipfully carries around an icon of, and dresses to imitate, Abraham Lincoln), but both command our sympathy and respect for their “spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication” (though, unlike in Ninety-Three, we, rather frustratingly, never get to see a personal confrontation between the two). Likewise, Maximilian’s case for the independence of kings from faction is both an historical and a theoretical absurdity, while Juárez’s brief for popular rule confuses individual with collective self-government. But don’t watch the movie for political philosophy, watch it for a clash between two really cool characters.

P.S. – Oh, and here’s a truly awful trailer for the movie (proving, inter alia, that back in 1939 they didn’t know the difference between “flaunt” and “flout” either). The movie really is much better than one would guess from this trailer.

P.P.S. – Some connections: The film’s director, William Dieterle, also directed Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and Rand’s Love Letters, while its top-billed star, Paul Muni, hailed from Mises’s hometown of Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv.

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