On the mysteries of consciousness

I recently sent this Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum to a number of friends, and in response to the two following paragraphs,

Colin McGinn is particularly good in condemning materialist explanations of consciousness, pointing out that it's impossible to collapse the mind into the brain. Or, as he puts it: "[T]he mind is … meat neither more nor less." To the materialist the feeling of "pain, for example, is nothing more than a firing of certain fibers in the brain. The feeling of pain simply reduces to such physical processes. The two are not merely correlated; they are identical." To the materialist, Mr. McGinn continues, "the mind is the brain in disguise. The djinn is the lamp."

He goes on to point out that he could hypothetically "know everything about your brain of a neural kind …its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments … the position of every atom and its subatomic structure … everything that that materialist says your mind is. Do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind. I know nothing about which conscious states you are in … and what these states feel like to you..."

one of my friends (let's call him/her X, given his/her request that his/her identity be preserved) wrote the following long response:

Actually, I think we would. When we lose neurons, or glial cells, for any reason, we lose our minds and in the process we lose ourselves. Recently someone told me about how their mother, who suffered a brain tumor, progressively changed in personality as the tumor grew and she deteriorated. Through cerebral injuries we can selectively lose our memories, our acquired knowledge (forgetting how to read or write), even our awareness of self (some people stop recognizing their bodies as their own), our inhibitions ... Dementia is a wonderful example of how as we lose neuronal firings we lose the mind, the essence of the person. Another example is how electrolyte imbalances have profound neurological effects from which we may never recover. I mean a sudden depletion of K, of Na or of glucose and how they can alter mental status. How can this loss of self be explained if the self is not the brain? If the self is somewhere else? ...

The more interesting question that this paper raises for me is, why does the author want so badly for the mind to be different from the body? If there is no difference, does it mean human experience doesn't matter? Does it matter less? In any case why do we experience the world of ideas as different from that of the material? Are we intrinsic dualists?

I'm no neuro-expert, and I'm no philosopher either. But it seems to me that the materialist response, while entirely consistent with experiment and with everything we know about the brain so far, seems not to engage with Rosenbaum's interpretation of McGinn's philosophical issue. For the materialist, there is nothing other than the physical brain and its electroneurobiochemical state, from which the mind emerges. As I see it, McGinn's response is, "when you say 'the mind is the brain,' what does 'is' really mean?" (The typical philosophical response!)

But this really does conceal some issues here. For if the materialist means, "the mind is identical to the brain," then this is clearly false: the mind is not structured like the brain. Indeed, even though my mind can reflect upon itself, it has no awareness of its underlying brain structure; how could that be the case if it were precisely identical to a brain? However, as X says, what the materialist wants to say is "the mind is nothing more than the brain," so that there is nothing in the mind that does not relate to the brain quite directly. And X's examples show cases where alterations to a person's brain's state seem to alter that person's mind's state as well, sometimes quite permanently. Does this not utterly refute the philosophical case of the dualists?

[Full disclosure here: I'm not yet convinced that either position is the absolute correct.]

My friend's examples certainly prove that, as far as we can tell, there exist mental states derivable from brain states. (And I seriously doubt Rosenbaum or McGinn could dispute this.) However, this is not sufficient to prove the materialist argument, that all mental states derive from brain states. To do that, we would need to construct some sort of systematic and comprehensive mechanism by way of which every conceivable mental state can be mapped to a particular brain state (the converse not being necessary). And as far as I know, neuroscience is quite far from that point.

Here McGinn can raise a seemingly difficult problem: is this even possible? Can we really map every component of a typical mental state—every object I'm seeing, everything I'm smelling, every sound I can hear at this point, plus all the random thought floating through my head—precisely onto the brain's state at that point? This seems to be his claim when he states that even when he knows everything about a person's brain state, he cannot know their mind. But this is really less an argument about the distinctness of the mind from the brain than an argument about the existence of a mind-state --> brain-state mapping and its inverse brain-state --> mind-state mapping. The materialist is still safe so long as he or she can argue that such a mapping exists, even if its details are not fully fleshed out.

And I think there is a difficulty at that very point for the materialist: it seems to me that, contrary to its own claim, the materialist thesis cannot be experimentally verified. Why? Because a person's mind is not available to another for testing. We exist within our own minds, and we are conditioned by habit to think that other people's speech and actions are a window onto their thoughts, that their behavior is a reflection of their mind. But this is not strictly true. We can never really peer into somebody's mind and examine what's going on; if we could, psychologists would all be out of jobs.

As a result of this rather pedantic argument, X's examples are not as illustrative as X wants them to be—they prove that modifications to a person's brain state can modify that person's visible behavior, for that can clearly be observed, but they cannot prove that these modifications alter the person's mind-state, or that it is the person's altered mind-state that causes their altered observable behavior. This problem with the materialist thesis cannot be resolved by additional refinements to our knowledge of neuroscience, because it does not rely on an imperfect understanding of brain states. On the contrary, what it argues is that mind-states can never be truly observed or communicated in any manner, and hence cannot ever be truly mapped to brain-states. All that can be mapped are observable behaviors. [Note that this is not an argument about whether mind-states are distinct from brain-states, but one about whether we can ever know anything at all about mind-states.]

Now, the materialist may say that suffices. "How should it matter to me what my mind is thinking when I know that if I apply this particular level of electrical input to this particular neuron, I can consistently get my subject to sing 'Happy Birthday'?" From a clinical perspective, that's true. And it's quite possible to dismiss what I've said here as theoretical chatter that has no practical implications, or as pure sophistry. But from a philosophical perspective, it is not mere wordplay. Because all that we have managed to do is draw a sharp line between physical and mental events. We have not yet established if mental events do exist separately from physical events; indeed, we've made it all the more difficult for us to establish if they do exist at all! But we have not yet reconciled our phenomenological picture of the mind with the neurological picture, and there is as much philosophy here as there is biology.

Much more on this tomorrow. I'm still thinking about this issue, and I've not yet engaged with X's second paragraph at all. And these positions are all tentative, as always. I reserve the right to change my mind (or should I say my brain?) at any time.

Why I am ashamed of Homo sapiens

This is why. I'm too angry and too upset to write coherently now.

Verses to enjoy

One from Sa`dī's گلستان :

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکر اند \ که در آفرینش ز یک گوهر اند

چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار \ دگر عضوها را نماند قرار

تو کز محنت دیگران بی‌غمی \ نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

Loosely translated:

"The children of Man are limbs of one body, for in creation they are of one essence /

When life brings pain to one limb, the other limbs cannot maintain their stability /

You, who feel no sorrow from others' sufferings, surely don't deserve the name 'man'."

And on the same theme in Sanskrit:

ayam bandhuḥ paro vêti gaṇanā laghu-cetasām

puṃsām udāra-cittānāṃ vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam

"The small-minded think, 'This one's a kinsman, that one's an outsider' /

For the noble-minded, the world itself is family."

While the broad sentiment expressed in these two verses is the same, there is an important difference: for Sa`dī, it simply is true as a matter of fact that all human beings share a common essence, and someone who lacks compassion is simply not a human being—s/he lacks humanity. In the Sanskrit verse, on the other hand, the conventional manner of dividing up the world into "ours" and "others" is described merely as "small-minded". (Of course, the idea that humans are limbs of one body is also present in Vedic literature in the famous Puruṣa Sūkta, but that image is commonly used to organize humans into a social or moral hierarchy, depending on your reading.)

"The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist", III: "Character, Time, Plot"

Apologies for not getting this post up earlier, but this has been a busy week for me. As a result of my schedule and of the time that has elapsed between now and the lecture, this post is likely to be shorter than the two earlier ones. (Is that a cheer I hear going up from the empty stands? :-) )

Pamuk's third lecture went against many of the prevailing assumptions on how to read a novel or what to look for in the novel, and it seemed to me that a number of people in the audience dissented from his opinion. (I couldn't stay for the Q&A at the end, so I don't know if anything particular came up then.) I'm going to try to keep this post as neutral as possible, so as not to inject too many of my ideas and thus obscure his point. [As always, square brackets indicate my observations or opinions, meant to be seen as verbalizations of my reactions to his words.]

Pamuk begins with the observation that although the novel aims to depict life with the utmost realism, it is nevertheless a piece of fiction, and moreover one that "takes life seriously." The lives depicted within even the most realistic novel are fundamentally different from our lives, for the reason that it's not often in real life that our actions or our thoughts or our decisions have the meaning [I almost want to say "weight"] they would have had we been characters in a novel.

Within the particular context of a closed society, this exaggerated importance given to every small detail or thought takes on an acutely political significance. Pamuk says [and given what little I know of the manner in which literature functioned in the Soviet bloc, I broadly agree with him] that in those closed societies where the novel does in fact arise, it becomes a tool of emancipation or, less poetically, an escape hatch for people trying to invest their lives with meaning. In such societies, by reading oneself into a different person or a different life, the reader really does feel the need to treat the novel as something even more important, even more meaningful than everyday life.

And it is precisely this use of the novel as "escape hatch" that terrified government censors. For the act of reading oneself into a different life, of deferring moral judgment and instead empathizing with another person as a human being, is a deeply political act that can and does undermine the authority of the state.

Pamuk insists that this particular feature is unique to the novel [which I don't entirely buy]. The great difference between the novel and the "epic" [to use the Bakhtinian distinction] is that the novel elevates the human being as a human being while the epic is concerned with the deeds of particular kings or heroes or saints. The novel fleshes out its characters much more fully than the epic (for Homer, "character" is a constant that a personage possesses, and it's not until after Shakespeare that Western literature focuses on a person's emotional complex as something that evolves over time), and as a result the reader is able to identify more or less fully with particular characters in the novel. After over two hundred years of reading the novel, this attitude comes more or less naturally to us.

And here is where Pamuk really gets up and grabs us, saying that this in fact makes the novel unrealistic. In real life, we do care about people's interiors, but certainly not in the manner and not to the extent that this happens in the novels. If we are to make the novel realistic, Pamuk argues, then what we should really care about in the novel is the landscape, the world as seen through the eyes of the personages in the novel. Character, as seen in the novel, is an element of fiction, and it is supremely naïve to think that such a complex entity exists in real life in a form that we can detect or comprehend the way we do in the novel. [You can see why some people were not very comfortable with the lecture at this point!]

What are the implications of this understanding for the author? Pamuk says that, from his personal experience as an author, that the common understanding—often perpetuated by authors themselves—that the author creates the protagonist of the novel who then "takes charge" of the story is highly unlikely. He claims that this idea, that the author "must learn from this character [the protagonist] what to narrate," is but a rhetorical turn.

Instead, Pamuk argues, the author takes events that she wants to write about, with personages she wants to write about, and writes about them :-) (He makes it sound so simple!) The art of writing the novel then lies in fitting all these pieces together—people, feelings, events, places—into a trajectory that does not seem artificial. This trajectory that connecting all these situations the author wants to write about is the plot of the novel.

Consciously borrowing from the Russian Formalists, Pamuk considers these situations to be built up from irreducible elements of narrative. Each situation is (re)told from the perspective of one of the personages of the novel who is near it in some way—the remote historic past or the epic-style absolute past are absent. The personage in turn must have the right sort of emotional make-up to justify his / her proximity to the particular situation, in order to maintain the realism of the novel. (This can go so far, Pamuk says, that people often project features or even entire characters for personages who are in proximity to a situation onto what was intended by the author to be a purely factual description of this situation.)

The best authors, just like the best readers, are both naïve and sentimental at the same time. One half of the author's brain engages in an almost child-like exploration of situations through the perspectives of different characters, while the other half analyzes the novel being written, often from the perspective of the ideal reader, and shapes the manner in which this exploration is written about. Consequently, we as readers should strive to read in the same manner, with part of us exploring the world of the novel through the eyes of the personages, and part of us reflecting on our manner of exploration.

Pamuk then returns to his analogy of Chinese shanshui landscape paintings to make the point that there is seldom an actual center from which the author surveys her verbal landscape in a Godlike manner, just as the painter who depict a complex landscape seldom does so after having climbed up a high peak and surveyed a landscape. Instead, we see theAn landscape through the eyes of the personages, and piece the pieces together. For Pamuk, the way to think about a book like Anna Karenina is to think of it not as an exploration of Anna's character (for there isn't in fact such a thing), but as a perspective onto a particular landscape, a particular world through the eyes of a personage whose name is Anna. For Pamuk, "the characters have been constructed to reveal the details of the landscape."

Time too plays an important role in this landscape. Here the shanshui analogy fails because the novel, as a textual structure, is linear in a way a painting is not. Regardless, Pamuk claims that just as the ideal author will prompt the ideal reader to seek an imaginary center for the novel, so too will the ideal author try to create the impression of an objective flow of time within the novel even though there is in fact no such thing. The perception of the passage of time comes from the reader's identification with personages, and from the narration of situations from the perspective of these personages.

I've tried to present as much as I can as neutrally as I can, without distorting Pamuk's ideas too much. My sense is that Pamuk was trying to push back against the idea (prevalent in the 19th century) that the novel is a realistic depiction of people's lives and interiors, for the simple reason that the extent to which such depiction took place in the early novels was itself unrealistic. Perspective seems to matter more to Pamuk than personality; the way the landscape holds itself together seems to be privileged over the portrayal of one individual's "interior".

Pamuk III ...

will be up within the next 48 hours. Please be patient with me; today has been rough and tomorrow is likely to be rougher. I promise to get the post up as soon as I can.

Something I need to work on

Silence is golden, and I sure need to learn this. 

http://www.swadharma.org/2009/02/06/silence-and-the-modern-guru/

New blog!

I've been invited to join Swadharma, the blogging community run by Harvard's undergraduate Hindu community. I will be posting there every Saturday, and will post trackbacks here from my posts there.

Mera Bharat Mahaan!

The New York Times has an article on Delhi's efforts to prepare for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Yes, it's what you'd expect; no, it's not particularly praiseworthy.

I'll post my reactions later.

"The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist", II: " 'Mr Pamuk, Did You Really Live All This?' "

The week flew by and Tuesday afternoon arrived even sooner than I thought it would. Sanders Theater filled up once again, although it certainly seemed like there were a few empty spots in the hall today, unlike the first lecture where there was barely enough room to take a full breath.

Pointless Babble—Read at your own peril

I did something today that I did not do last time which, I must sadly say, has compromised my ability to reproduce from memory the contents of Orhan Pamuk's lecture. The act of taking notes is troublesome at a number of different levels:

(1) It is difficult to take notes well, and to take notes well consistently, particularly when portions of the lecture are short readings from sources.

(2) It is especially hard to take notes in au auditorium where the only source of illumination, both literal and metaphorical, is the reflection off the podium. Still, it's nice to be able to honestly say روشن شدم :-)

(3) The act of taking notes splits my brain into a number of parallel tasks, one mechanical (governing the physical act of writing) and at least three cognitive (the act of actively listening to Pamuk's present words, the act of recalling Pamuk's words, and the act of composing notes on Pamuk's past words that will be decipherable in the future). Given how hopeless I am at maintaining focus even in the absence of distractions, it is inevitable that the quality of all four tasks degrades when performed simultaneously.

(4) And if that were not enough, I wish to question the whole enterprise of note-taking (in those contexts where it is not particular technical terms that matter, but arguments and processes that can be more generally described). If it is to sketch out a scheme of the lecture, or of the salient points, then I've already remarked how such an act, when carried out during the lecture itself, degrades one's comprehension of the lecture. And if it is to serve as an aid to memory following the lecture itself, well, it is not clear to me why human memory isn't good enough (in the very short term, at least). And in any case, the process of reading badly written, cryptic lecture notes itself involves considerable interpretation, head-scratching, and hand-wringing—not very different from the act of recollecting the lecture from memory. It seems to me the most effective mental exercise, particularly when dealing with such topics and in such manner as Pamuk does, is to simply pay deep attention to the lecture when it happens, and then to immediately pour out one's thoughts onto (e-)paper in clear, complete sentences.

Oh well. I do what little I can with what little I have. And as always, comments in [brackets] represent ideas that are consciously my own reflections on the content of the lecture; this is to distinguish them from the rest of the post, which consists of my unconscious reflections on and recollections of the lecture.

The Lecture Itself

But if you, Gentle Reader, are reading this, and if you're not me (if indeed there is someone other than me who reads this!), then you don't and you shouldn't care about my babble. What matters is what (I remember and what my notes remember of what) Pamuk said today, in the second of six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on "The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist." Today's piece was titled " 'Mr Pamuk, Did You Really Live All This?'," being based on a question that Orhan Pamuk was apparently repeatedly asked after his latest novel came out in Turkey last year. It is this conflation of author and protagonist, imagination and reality, truth and fiction, naïve and sentimental (you knew that one was coming!) that Pamuk addresses—What is it? Is the author complicit? How long has this been going on? What is it about the novel that (perhaps uniquely) enables it to take on this illusion?

Pamuk says the immediate answer to the question is, of course, "No!" He is clearly not a figure walking around sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul, nor is he a Turkish poet exiled to Germany who gets stuck in the far eastern city of Kars, nor is he a coin or a dog or a horse or a tree or a corpse or any of the other narrators in My Name is Red. But, truly in the spirit of reading being a way to simultaneously hold contradictory ideas in one's mind, he goes on to say that it would be entirely understandable if the naïve reader conflated author and protagonist. And further, it may even be the case that the author wants the reader to make such an identification, and is thus writing in a fashion that subtly (or not) directs the reader towards such a conclusion.

Pamuk delightfully contrasts this non-linearity in the author-reader interaction by citing Borges' example of the letter Franz Kafka wrote to Max Brod, requesting him to burn all of Kafka's writings after his death. I don't remember the precise details of the story (damn note-taking!), but in essence Borges writes that for the ultimate outcome (Brod refuses to burn Kafka's writings) to have happened, Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings, and Brod in turn had to have thought that Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings, and Kafka in turn had to have thought that Brod had to have thought that Kafka had to have thought that Brod would have refused to burn the writings ... ad infinitum. This is not strictly true, of course—perhaps Kafka really did want Brod to burn them and Brod was just being contrary—but it is a lovely image of the potentially infinite loop of authorial – readerly expectations that one can so easily fall into.

The point was perhaps to illustrate Pamuk's claim, that the art of the novel (which, I presume, has to include both the writing and the reading of the novel) relies on an imperfect consensus of expectations between reader and author. The moment perfect consensus is achieved, the work is no longer a novel—not that it is no longer art, for it is still entirely possible to produce beautiful literature based on a system of shared conventional signs, but that it is no longer a novel [almost in the Bakhtinian sense of novelty]

Pamuk roots the question of conflation of author and protagonist in the birth of the novel, when the fictionality of novelistic writing is still debated. Daniel Defoe, for instance, claimed that Robinson Crusoe was a description of a real incident, and continued to make such claims of verisimilitude even after it came out that the book was a work of fiction. [It was almost as if Defoe wanted the artistic value of his work to be judged based on its realism, which could only work if he could convince his readership that such a situation could, indeed had, come about.]

Pamuk notes that the novel eventually rose to a position of great prestige in the modern West, and eventually entered other literary cultures too, swallowing and rendering obsolete pre-existing literary forms there too. Part of its extraordinary power [if you ignore colonial effects, of course] lay in its unique combination of the imaginary and the real: a dissident writer living under a repressive regime could write a novel that was a harsh critique of life while escaping scrutiny under the guise of being "merely" fictional. [Censors were smart on many occasions, but writers, the best ones at any rate, were always smarter.] In this case, the writer was in the tough position of having to argue to the authorities that her work was only "fictional" while simultaneously arguing to her readership that her work, although fictional, was nevertheless "real" and "truthful".

Pamuk argues that it is the novel's unique power of combining real and imaginary that on the one hand makes it such a potent tool in the hands of marginal or dissident writers, but that on the other hand also makes it prone to being questioned by naïve readers at the level of truth versus fiction. Such is also the case with other media, such as cinema, which claim similar levels of verisimilitude—they too fall victim to being questioned by naïve spectators. This situation is worsened when actors intentionally blurring the line between their on-screen personae and their real-life characters, something that I knew was pretty common in India [think of the Ramayana and Mahabharata TV serials and the apotheosis of the main protagonists to demigod status!], but which was apparently also pretty common in Turkish cinema in the seventies and eighties! The world is a small place sometimes, and not necessarily in ways of which we ought to be proud.

But what is it about the novel that allows it to combine real and imaginary so effectively, in precisely this particularly powerful manner? Pamuk's understated argument—one that I find quite persuasive and yet also one that I expect from an author in his particular position—is that it is novelistic detail: that particularly fine-tuned attention given to the smallest details of a large landscape painting that creates its interiors and gives it three-dimensionality, to use an image he evoked in the first lecture. Such novelistic detail arises only because the author is able to provide linguistic form to " expressions of sensory impressions": to convert her deeply felt personal experiences of both mundane and sublime into verbal form, and then to stitch them together into a novel. I'm expressing myself far less persuasively than Pamuk did in lecture, but in essence his point was that human beings experience, and respond to, sensory impressions in ways that are often universal, and yet express them in ways that are particular to their own place, time, and language. Out of this arises authorial style [and, I might add, cultural particularities], but as long as the experiences and the responses to them are universal, the writing can maintain novelistic detail.

Pamuk inserts an important note here: while the artistic consensus that exists between author and reader cannot be perfect, for then the novel would fail to be "novel", it also has to exist in some form of common, shared experience between author and reader. As the reader moves farther away from the author in space and time, the weight of meaningful, revealing novelistic detail falls away and the work begins to lose its tension-filled location in the gap between pure imagination and dreary reality, swinging instead towards the "fantasy" or "history" end of the spectrum.

Pamuk adds that the reader's quest for the real or imagined center of a novel—one of the primary pleasures in reading—also motivates the reader's desire to understand the author of the work. If it is indeed true that the author uses her skeins of accumulated sensory experiences to stitch together characters and situations and narratives in a novel, then it should also be possible for the astute reader to unwind those characters and discover those sensory impressions in the author. This is entirely different from discovering particular biographical details about the author, for it is at once more ineffable and more intimate. The example Pamuk gives is of a very detailed and entirely factually accurate autobiography which is presented to the public as a novel: inevitably, the sensitive reader seeks out a center, which may or may not correspond to something the author intended to portray or even recognized in herself. Part of the reader's desire to know whether "Mr Pamuk" really lived "all this" stems from a desire to compare their impression of the author with the author's self-perception.

And Pamuk semi-humorously closes with an admonition to stay away from two kinds of readers: the purely naïve, who reads everything as though it were literal truth and does not realize the fictionality of the novel, and the purely sentimental, who reads everything not for what it says but for what he thinks the author may have intended to say or to conceal in it [and in this category he would probably lump all those who read literature as flawed instantiations of their pet literary theory]. Neither group knows the real pleasure of reading the novel, he says, which is to simultaneously hold in tension real and imaginary, truth and fiction.

Human irrationality and the purpose of a liberal arts education

There's a very interesting post by Lane Wallace at the Atlantic, called "All Evidence to the Contrary".

In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.

So where does education come into the picture? Obvious enough:

A liberal education, [UCLA professor Mark] Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.

Very, very interesting. Read the whole thing! (Yes, I have more work than I can get done, and I'm procrastinating.)

Thinking About Afghanistan

Thinking About Afghanistan

The United States has a deep interest in the emergence of a stable, modernizing, economically integrated, peaceful South Asia—by which I mean the region that is centered on India, but which also encompasses Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan. [...] In strategic terms, the Afghan war is in some ways a sidebar to the main event in the region. Elsewhere in South Asia, in Pakistan and in India, American influence is at best indirect. Even so, these regional American interests at issue in the Afghan war are very powerful; to confirm this, consider the alternative of Pakistan’s failure at the Taliban’s hands.

(Shared via AddThis)

Interesting argument, even though I don't entirely buy it:

• If the reason for pushing forward in Afghanistan is to somehow protect US interests in India or Pakistan, why not get India or Pakistan directly and transparently involved in the project? (India in fact already recognizes Afghanistan as something to tackle, and I remember reading somewhere that India has already invested a billion-odd dollars in Afghanistan, mainly for infrastructure development. Why not just help this investment along?)
• Historically speaking, this isn't very different from the British argument for entering Afghanistan: "The Tsar is coming!" --> "We must protect our investments in India" --> "Let's 'protect' the Afghans to protect our investments." Of course, most of the foot-soldiers to fight in Afghanistan were Indian; after all, it was our future that was being "safeguarded"!
• The many Taliban-esque groups that exist in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, including, apparently, in the heartlands of the "enterprising culture of Punjab", have complicated ties with the villages and cultures from which they spring. Military presence alone cannot tackle the root of the problem. [Since I have no ideas on what can actually tackle the problem, I'm not going to say anything further.]

That said, there are a few things in the article that I like and want to emphasize:

1) The fact that there has to be a functional peace between India and Pakistan for all of South Asia to prosper. (There are Indians out there who disagree with this, and I think they are just plain wrong.)

Because of India’s economic dynamism, and because of the common, enterprising culture of Punjab that straddles the Indo-Pak border, if that border were opened, and if the two governments normalized relations (they do not require a romanticized or complete peace, only a pragmatic and functional one) a broad, positive, and durable political-economic change would likely occur in South Asia within a generation.

It is along this modernizing pathway that American policy should concentrate its most ambitious investments.

2) The fact that this functional peace requires a stable Pakistan. (There are Indians out there who disagree with this, and I think they are just plain wrong.)

American officials and outsiders like myself often wring their hands about Pakistan. The Army and intelligence services in that country are a powerful and regressive force, as evidenced by their self-defeating support for the Taliban and other Islamist networks. Civil-military relations in Pakistan are very poor and constitute, since independence, a dismal history of chronic interventions and failures. Constitutional democracy in Pakistan, while technically present, is badly undernourished; it often seems on the verge of imminent collapse.

I think it's in India's best interests to not to anything that will interfere with the development of a stable, civil society in Pakistan. And I think it's in both India's and Pakistan's best interests to work together to help Afghanistan along. This has to be done carefully, without stepping on any toes, and without doing anything that may infringe local sovereignty. (And this is something we Indians have to be particularly sensitive to. We are often seen as overbearing and imposing, even on those occasions when we actually do have good intentions. Call it the "curse of the regional hegemon," or more accurately, the "curse of being the playground bully.")

Think me naïve or sentimental, but I think concrete civil assistance efforts by regional actors, mediated by the presence of neutral international parties, are better in the long run for all parties—the Afghan people and government, the Pakistani people and government, the Indian people and government, the United States, and all the other countries neighboring Afghanistan. Certainly better than playing whack-a-mole in the mountains.

Honestly guys, why can't we all just get along and live happily ever after? Aren't bhangra and cricket stronger than superglue in binding cultures together? (And yes, I know there is an India-Pakistan cricket match going on right now, and yes, I know not all Pakistanis and not all Afghanis and certainly not all Indians do bhangra :D )

A beautiful verse from Hafez

I love Hafez, I really do. (In the interests of scholarly scrupulousness, this is taken from Thackston's grammar.)

گر چه منزل بس خترناک‌ است و مقصد ناپدید

هیچ راهی نیست کورا نیست پایان غم مخور

"The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist", I: "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

"6 Norton Lectures by Orhan Pamuk," say the posters plastered throughout Harvard Yard. And, judging by the crowds lining up to get into Sanders Theater today, plastered throughout New England. I would have never forgiven myself had I missed this, the very first in the sequence of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures to be delivered by Pamuk this year at Harvard, and so I made sure I got there about two hours in advance. I didn't take notes at the time, not wanting to disturb the solemn silence of the attentive audience with the sound of a keyboard being tapped away, and not being able to see my notepad clearly enough in the dim light to actually write anything down. As soon as the talk ended, I rushed to the nearest café with a power outlet to get online and pour out my memories onto paper (of a sort, at least)—to capture the image painted by Pamuk's words in my own before it faded away into the dim halls of memory; to recreate, with my own words, the painting I saw with my own ears (a metaphor for the appreciation of poetry that I borrow from Prof. Steven Hopkins's work on the Haṃsa-saṃdeśa of Vedānta Deśika). If what follows is garbled, it is because of the difficulties of translation: from Pamuk's mind to Turkish words to English words to my ears to my mental image to my words online, it is a long and tenuous chain and no doubt much is lost, much more is corrupt. And yet I do hope that some of what he was trying to say comes through in this hastily written, unedited, stream-of-consciousness entry.

The title of Pamuk's lecture series is borrowed from Friedrich Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, described by Thomas Mann as one of the most beautiful essays in German, in which Schiller argues that there are two kinds of poetry that he terms (surprise surprise!) the naïve and the sentimental. This is, in a manner of speaking, the distinction between unselfconscious and self-conscious artistic creation; one other contrast that comes to mind that may not in fact be a good example is the distinction between poetry as art and poetry as craft. Pamuk reads Schiller as saying that, while naïve poets record immediately, effortlessly, and without intermediary what they perceive in nature, sentimental poets are acutely aware of their own thoughts and emotions, perhaps even feeling a sense of alienation from nature, and bring this acute self-reflection to the fore in their work. Noting the importance of this work in his own thinking and writing, Pamuk argued that although he considered the naïve to be inferior to the sentimental in his youth, he has now moved to what he believes is a honest balance between these two poles of poetic excellence.

But I digress. Using the mandate of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures to study Poetry "interpreted in the broadest sense," Pamuk is trying to apply Schiller's poetic insight to the novel in particular, and this first lecture in the series was titled "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels."

Drawing from his own obsessive reading of novels in his youth, Pamuk painted a picture of reading as studying and entering a landscape painting. (His artistic inclination towards "naïve" painting, as he put it, comes out most vividly in his use of words as a paintbrush, but also through his powerful use of such metaphors throughout both his writing and this lecture.) We may read lightly, from a distance; we may read intensely, immersing ourselves into the narrative; we may read logically, seeking a single continuous path through the landscape; we may read reflectively, always standing outside the picture—regardless, we paint for ourselves a picture as we read, and it is this act of recreating a landscape using the novelist's words that, it seems to me, constitutes reading for Pamuk.

Furthermore, Pamuk claims that just as a novelist may write naïvely or sentimentally, so too may a reader read naïvely (accepting what the novel says, believing in the authenticity of the characters, trusting in the narrative) or sentimentally (reflecting on the act of reading, consciously injecting one's own feelings and sentiments into the work); and, for Pamuk, either extreme is dangerous. The beauty of reading lies in the creation of a new landscape that exists outside our own, one that we can trust and believe in. To read too naïvely is to treat this landscape as a part of reality, to confuse the literary and the mundane; to read too reflectively is to never let this landscape truly get off the ground, to mark off the literary as so obviously fictional that the pleasure of reading is itself killed. (When I heard Pamuk bring up this distinction, I couldn't help but be reminded of my favorite passage from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler on reading. Calvino, incidentally, was also the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, but died before he could present his lectures.)

Pamuk argues for balance here between these two extremes of naïveté and sentimentality, and he offers the analogy of reading a Chinese shanshui painting, where a mountainous landscape is represented as if through a fog, often with a solitary figure in the foothills climbing up a tortuous path. The landscape is to be seen not as a faithful depiction of an actual natural scene, but as an object in the painter's mind, as seen through the eyes of the solitary figure. (I'm not entirely making sense here, I know.) The heart of reading, then, is to be able to recreate such a landscape, holding more than one contradictory thought in our minds simultaneously.

Pamuk then outlines a nine-step process of reading that, he claims, happens every single time a reader reads a book attentively. Furthermore, he argues that each of these stages occurs either naïvely or sentimentally, depending on the reader, and that some stages can occur simultaneously or even out of order. This is where I am most likely to have deviated from the actual content of the lecture, so, gentle reader, I humbly seek your forgiveness.

1) Following the narrative

When one gets into a novel, one really has to follow the plot to see what is happening. Now this is most obvious in cheap detective or spy novels, but it holds true for the best literary works too, and while it may not entirely hold for sophisticated, fancy, atmospheric novels where "nothing" really happens, even there the reader must follow the chain of descriptions to build a progressively sophisticated picture of the work.

2) Going from word to image

That metaphor takes us to the second stage, where the reader sees "beyond" the words, in a sense, and begins to (re)create, slowly, painstakingly, piece by piece the mental landscape of the novel. This includes not just the physical setting, but also the characters, their exteriors and their interiors, and their own miniature mental landscapes of (what is to them) their reality. Here the naïve reader really gets into this mental landscape, perhaps seeing themselves a participant in it (even if just a voyeur), whereas the sentimental reader constructs it while remaining aware of its fictionality.

3) "How much of this is fantasy?"

4) "How much of this is reality?"

The question of fictionality raises the question of how much of the work is fantasy. This is particular true for those landscapes that the author claims are representations of a fictionalized history (as Pamuk himself has done on multiple occasions). Similarly, the question of how much of the setting and the interiors of the characters is taken from reality also eats away at the reader. Both of these questions work together, and Pamuk posits that the very fact that the reader poses these questions says something about why we read novels: it is because we expect to find some element of reality in them, something that, although occurring within a fictional, imagined landscape, is nevertheless acutely relevant to life as we live it. (Pamuk drew a sharper distinction between the two, but my memory fades and I can no longer be sure how much of this is his and how much of it is mine.)

5) Enjoying the beauty of the novel

Notwithstanding the reader's (un?)self-conscious immersion in the mental landscape created by the novel, the fact remains that the novel is a text, made up of sentences made up of words. Part of the pleasure of reading lies in the discovery and appreciation of these textual, linguistic elements: word-play, unexpected rhymes or other aural figures of speech, powerful themes or evocative juxtapositions of images.

6) Judging the characters and the Author

As the reader gets deeper and deeper into the novel, (s)he begins not just to create interiors for the characters but also to reflect upon them as (s)he reads along, it being irrelevant to Pamuk at this point whether the reader does so consciously or not. We readers judge characters for their actions and emotions, and we judge the author too for inducing the characters to act in particular ways and for fashioning situations in which the characters cannot help but carry out certain actions. Such immersive critique, Pamuk avers, is not always helpful in appreciating the text for itself, but I think he would concede that it is extremely difficult to restrain oneself from engaging in it.

7) Complicity

One of the common "dangers" of reading is, in effect, a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The reader grows to trust the narrator, and more often than not invests part of their own self into the narrator, and gradually paints a rather more sympathetic figure of the narrator than would have been the case had the narrator's character not been the narrator. This may lead the reader to forget, whether consciously or not, important pieces of the landscape that would otherwise color the narrator more darkly. Pamuk mentions that this makes the choice of narrator a very powerful instrument in the hands of the author. And although he doesn't say it, I took this sense of complicity to imply something else about the act of creating a mental landscape: no two readers paint exactly the same landscape from reading the same novel.

8) Self-congratulation

Another emotion that we commonly experience is one of self-congratulation, particularly upon completing hard texts or portions of texts. We set ourselves the challenge of understanding something, and upon doing so, rejoice and celebrate our achievement. This emotion may be one of our inducements for reading; conversely, the fear of failing to attain this state may discourage us from reading. (Pamuk said more here that I can't remember.)

9) The "center" of the novel

And that self-congratulation occurs because we all take every novel we read to be a nut that needs cracking, whether we consciously think so or not. For Pamuk, this is at the very heart of reading: the quest for the center of the novel, that core of the text that may or may not exist in fact, but which we all seek nevertheless. We may meditate on one word, one sentence, one passage, or the novel as a whole as we seek to discover that which we think imparts all meaning to the novel. Whether or not such meaning exists, and whether it exists in the surface arrangement of the words or in the mental landscape invoked in the reader's mind by the words, or whether it exists beyond any landscape, it is the quest to find such meaning that motivates us to go on reading.

As is his wont, Pamuk self-referentially uses the Bildungsroman as a metaphor for the act of reading itself: the journey of a youth through the trials and tribulations of life, all the while facing new challenges and learning to master them, and all the while growing in inner strength and maturity. The character's quest for maturity mirrors our quest for the center of the novel, which in turn is a manifestation of our striving to understand the meaning of life.

And that's all I remember at this point. More next time!

<UPDATE>

One thing I forgot to mention earlier: why the novel in particular? Pamuk claims that it is the novel, unlike, say, epic verse or medieval romance, which truly fleshes out the interiors of characters; to return to his shanshui analogy I would say that only a novel has the power to create such a three-dimensional landscape in the reader's mind. It is this three-dimensionality, this creation of perspective [in both the literary and the visual sense] that gives the novel (the illusion of) a center.

</UPDATE>

From al-Ash`arī's "Vindication of Kalām"

This is a very interesting statement that al-Ash`arī makes when defending the practice of kalām against those who argue that it is a needless, unimportant, irrelevant, or misleading innovation (bid`a) because the Prophet said nothing about it.

"But when new and specific questions pertaining to the basic dogmas arise, every intelligent Muslim ought to refer judgment on them to the sum of principles accepted on the grounds of reason, sense experience, intuition, etc. For judgment on legal questions which belong to the category of the traditional is to be based on reference to legal principles which likewise belong to the category of the traditional. And judgment on questions involving the data of reason and the senses should be a matter of referring every such instance to (something within) its own category, without confounding the rational with the traditional, or the traditional with the rational."

(p. 131, The Theology of al-Ash`arī, translated by Richard J. McCarthy)

It seems that al-Ash`arī considers the intellectual world to be sharply divided between reason and tradition, with each having its own domain of operations. Let's see how well that intuition holds up as I continue to read. I can sense one wrinkle already: how does one come to agree on what, precisely, the "tradition" constitutes? Only the Qur'ān? The Qur'ān and the Sunna? Are all the various madhhabs of jurisprudence included in this? And so on. I'm very eager to see how this turns out.

Islamic Philosophy and Theology, VII: Life under the `Abbāsids

First, apologies for not updating this series of posts in a while. I've been busy with a few other things, but am going to try to squeeze in as many posts as I can before school starts.

Let me mention that my reading net has broadened to include Wikipedia as well. This is officially no longer a simple note-taking exercise while reading a book, but a full-fledged endeavor to understand as much as I can, using what few resources I have access to. I'm not going to be linking to Wikipedia since there are enough links as it is and a simple Google search will get you there anyway. I will, however, continue to cite my book sources as accurately as I can, out of respect for their authors' intellectual labor and in order to encourage you, gentle reader, to get your own hands on the books too!

I'd left off earlier with the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphs in 750 CE at the hands of the `Abbāsids, mentioning briefly that the latter had smartly articulated their message to appeal to disaffected Shī`ites (including Zaydites), Qadarites of different flavors, and the mawālis, who were mostly Persian converts to Islam. With this defeat, the caliphate officially passed to the hands of the `Abbāsids, and the remnants of the Umayyads fled to Spain to establish another kingdom there. 

The major social players during the `Abbāsids

Lots of important things happen during the effective reign of the `Abbāsids (that is to say, during the period within which the `Abbāsids were not merely puppet caliphs but actual overlords), foremost among which are the hardening of the divide between the Sunnis and the Shī`ites, and what Watt describes as the "first wave" of Hellenic thought to influence Islamic theology, and the development of distinct approaches within Islamic philosophy, rational theology, and jurisprudence. The connections between these changes and the rise and fall of new social / political groups are also interesting.

From the social perspective, two groups acquired great importance. First, the old Arab patron - Persian client (mawāli) power dynamic that had been so important under the Umayyads changed in some important ways. The administration of the empire remained in the hands of the ethnically Persianate bureaucrats, descendants of the sophisticated Sassanid aristocratic administration, and they continued to resent the prominent positions held by Arabs in the Muslim empire. Watts notes that these bureaucrats had mostly been Zoroastrians under the Sassanids, with some Christians in the mix. During the Umayyad and early `Abbāsid periods, most of them converted to Islam; a cynic might observe that this would probably have been due to the universal tendency of bureaucrats to gravitate towards whatever is most likely to advance their careers. Whatever the reason, the `Abbāsid era saw the rise of the Shu`ūbite (from sha`ab, meaning "nation") movement in literature, where government officials began to produce works design to denigrate and insult all things Arab. One of the most important consequences of this movement was the redemption and revival of Persian literature, especially in far eastern Khorāsān, as `Abbāsid power waned.

Second, the mainstream religious intellectuals who had opposed the Umayyads and supported the `Abbāsid uprising began to organize themselves better into a class of scholars well versed in Islamic knowledge (`ilm), the `ulamā' (sing. `ālim). Watt argues that the struggle between the bureaucrats and the `ulamā' eventually hardened into the divide between Shī`ism and Sunnism, respectively, saying

"where the Shī`ites in difficulties sought a divinely-inspired leader, an imām, their opponents held that salvation came through carefully following the divine law as expressed in the Qur'ān and in the sunna or example of the Prophet. Since the ulema were accepted as the accredited interpreters of the divine law, the Sunnite position gave them great power." (p. 34)

Now I don't find this terribly convincing. Perhaps it's just the manner in which Watt has phrased it here, but I think this statement as it stands grossly oversimplifies the considerable diversity in positions held by the `ulamā'. To argue that scholars who held diametrically opposed views on, say, God's qadar or the (un)createdness of the Qur'ān, were all Sunni simply because this position gave them more "power" seems terribly weak to me. Moreover, it glosses over the ethnic dimension of the situation—surely not all `ulamā' were of pure Arab origin? There certainly seems to be much more scope for overlap between the Shu`ūbite movement and many theological questions than Watt seems to acknowledge.

The major intellectual players

Within the Islamic intellectual movement itself, a number of terms crop up that I want to list here, for their histories are so intertwined that I found Watt's normally clear, historically driven narrative somewhat confusing. The first is falāsifa (sing., faylasūf), the students of Hellenic philosophy who translated these works into Arabic; most, but not all of the, were Muslim, and not all of them chose to reconcile the tensions between their philosophical work and their religion. (This last is a sense I got from a preliminary skim, and may be inaccurate.) The second is kalām, literally, "speech" in Arabic. Wolfson states at the very beginning of his work that

"the term kalām, which literally means "speech" or "word," is used in Arabic translations of the works of Greek philosophers as a rendering of the term logos in its various senses of "word," "reason," and "argument." The term kalām is also used in those Arabic translations from the Greek in the sense of any special branch of learning, and the plural participle, mutakallimūn (singular: mutakallim), is used as a designation of the masters or exponents of any special branch of learning." (p. 1)

However, kalām also has a more restrictive sense, when it is applied to a particular school ("method" may make even better sense) of Islamic philosophical thought that is to be contrasted with the falāsifa. In this more restrictive sense, the mutakallimūn are Islamic theologians who explicitly see themselves as Muslim, and who embark upon the ambitious task of reconciling reason and revelation. The two great schools of kalām that flourished during the `Abbāsid period were the Mu`tazilites and the Ash`arites. 

In addition to these two groups of philosophers, a number of schools (madhāhib) of jurisprudence (fiqh) grew up during the `Abbāsid period. Watt broadly refers to them as the Ahl al-Ḥadīth, since their primary motivation seemed to have been the desire to systematize the collection and study of the various ḥadīth of the Prophet along with their chains of transmission (isnāds), in order to justify and substantiate legal positions for which no direct Qur'ānic corroboration could be found. The fāqih al-Shāfi`ī first articulated the common principles of jurisprudence (usūl al-fiqh), which he arranged in the hierarchical order:

1) the Qur'ān

2) the Ḥadīth of the Prophet, systematized most prominently into the ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and of Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj

3) qiyās, or analogy (and not all schools accepted this)

4) ijmā`, or the consensus (whether of scholars or of the active, devout community of Muslims)

The four most prominent Sunni schools, all founded during the `Abbāsid era and all surviving until today, are the Ḥanafite, the Shāfi`ite, the Mālikite, and the Ḥanbalite. The most important Shī`ite school is the Ja`farite.

It's important to note that theology and jurisprudence were distinct fields, and that in general a particular theological position did not necessarily bind a mutakallim to any madhhab, or vice versa. The one exception was the Ḥanbalite madhhab, which had its own small theological school. Broadly speaking, though, the "rational" study of the mutakallimūn was rejected by the fuqahā', who held that it was only through thorough study of the usūl al-fiqh that a Muslim could lead a good life. (This is an oversimplified, overgeneralized position, to some extent.)

Watt mentions one term as rising in use only much later, but whose referent is recognizable even during `Abbāsid times. This is the ahl al-Sunna, or the Sunnis, the term given to the mainstream of Islamic practice once certain concrete beliefs are generally agreed upon. These beliefs are positive statements that also serve to distinguish other groups as not being part of the "mainstream", and this "adversarial" sense of the components of the ahl al-Sunna is captured in Watt's prose here:

"Against the Khārijites (and with the Murji'ites) it was agreed that sinners whose intellectual belief was sound were not excluded from the community because of their sin. Against the Shī`ites it was agreed that the first four caliphs were genuine caliphs, and that the chronological order was the order of excellence. Against the Qadarites and Mu`tazilites it was agreed that all events are determined by God. It was also agreed that the Qur'ān was the uncreated word or speech of God, though there were differences about the human utterance of the Qur'ān." (p. 59)

The only other thing to note at this point is that the Shī`ite position is clarified during the `Abbāsid era largely along Imāmite (the so-called "Twelver" or ithnā`ashariyya) lines. The two other flavors of Shī`ite thought, the Ismā`īlite and the Zaydite, gain prominence under other dynasties (for the former, most prominently under the Fāṭimid caliphs of North Africa).