Lolita

[Sitaram]

I tried to write something autobiographical here:

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/fromtheauthor.htm

but it started to touch upon sex.... in a most tasteful manner, I hope...

but to keep on the Lolita thread, I think that at age nine I was a prime example of a male version of Lolita, perfectly capable of premeditated seduction.... in fact, I dont "think," rather I "KNOW" beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Yet in our society of today, if a child, such as I was, is ever successful, then it means a prison sentence for the adult.

[Rechka]

I have been staring at this quick reply for the longest time. I start writing something, then I see the contradiction, so I type delete and type delete again. When it comes to sex there is just too much contradiction so I am going to just stick by my other post. Is fiction, art in this case, subject to ethics?

[baddad]

... Art can have no ethic. Art is about vision........art is about new perspectives......ethics are about acceptance.......

[Scheherazade]

But surely the person who performs or creates the art has ethics? And those reflect in their work?

[Sitaram]

Oh, you mean like Baudelaire and Rimbaud? Or perhaps you were thinking of Truman Capote or F. Scott Fitzgerald? Hemingway perhaps?

Hmmm.... lets see. Policemen must always be good and honest, right? I mean, they enforce the law! Or, judges, who create the laws! Hard to imagine a corrupt judge.

I guess its only those politicians, that everyone votes for, and those clergymen that everyone looks to for guidance who become corrupt and get involved in scandals.

There are a lot of people in the world who "talk the talk" but do not "walk the walk."


Here is an interesting example from the links I posted yesterday on Lawrence Durrell.

http://www.50connect.co.uk/turner/cr...icismLD05.html

Alas, one can be a great writer and a sordid little sh!t. Specifically, though, can one write about love and not know anything about it? Durrell’s and Miller’s obsession with sex – Miller in his late eighties was canoodeling twenty year old Asian girls – seems adolescent, indeed retarded. At the level of emotional truth Durrell appears completely inadequate. He remains stridently anti-Christian, and in a way this is one’s entrée: what a massively selfish thing it is to be a writer. But is this necessarily so, or just a peculiarity of Durrell?


His marriages last until a child is born, then he becomes jealous, rejecting, aggressive. After Claude, who seems to have managed to type for and organise him, and to have created for a few blessed years the structure of a real family for herself, Durrell and their four children by other spouses, Ghislaine, his next wife, is humiliated and brutalised from the first elements of the wedding. Before, during and after these and his other marriages, Larry demonstrated clearly that he would sleep with anyone at all. This suggests compulsiveness, the absence of meaning. Tender and bountiful with friends, he seems never to have a made a success of any deeper relationship. I recall the books about Zen by Alan Watts, approved of by Durrell, and how the best commentary on these is a knowledge of his life (another sordid little sh!t). The words just do not tie up with the reality.

Perhaps we should turn everything around and ask, not whether art and artists have and reflect ethics, but rather may ethics be artistic, or may ethical dynamics and dissonance serve as the material or building blocks which an artist uses to create a fictive world in which there is a definition beauty or a definition of truth.


Consider Oscar Wilde and "Picture of Dorian Gray." Oscar Wilde was openly gay in a society and era during which such a lifestyle was criminalized and condemned. Oscar Wilde, in a sense, creates art by means of juxtaposing the ethics of a Christian Victorian society side by side with the hypocrisy of their actions. For Wilde, the very essense of the Christian message, forgiveness for all sins, is something most monstrous (as it was for Gandhi) in that it creates a Dorian Gray, all pure and innocent on the outside, but, somewhere else, locked away, a picture of a monster oozing stench and corruption.

[Scheherazade]

Ethics are set of beliefs which control our behaviour, right? Therefore everyone would have sets of beliefs;whether they would be morally admirable or acceptable in traditional sense is another question.
An artist's beliefs -or sometimes the ones s/he stands against- are bound to reflect in his/her work. To expect otherwise is to assume their minds to be empty and not affected by any prior experience.

[Sitaram]

Now, in the New Testament (which may certainly be considered a form of literature), when the devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness, it is obvious that the devil has a set of beliefs designed to control behavior, and the devil is sufficiently well versed in Biblical scholarship to be able to quote scripture in support of his beliefs.

We see, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satin, a former angel, now caste out from heaven, say "Evil be thou my good."

Plato's Republic is quite an investigation of ethics. There are bad boys like Thrasymachus whose ethics are more or less "do good to our friends and get even with our enemies."

The hackneyed phrase "honor among thieves" is a way of saying that thieves have a form of ethics (the Mafia has a code of honor and a sense of disgrace in the face of betrayal.)

[Scheherazade]

The fact we do not agree with someone's ethics does not nullify their existence, surely?

[Sitaram]

The real point is that the devil has ethics, the mafia has ethics. Socrates said "every person by nature desires the good." "Ethics" does not equate to "good" or "virtue" ipso facto. We are lulled into a false sense of goodness and virtue, just as children have the naieve notion that all policemen and clergymen are good.

The artist literally creates a fictive world, with laws, ethics, a physics and chemistry all its own, where a certain kind of causality takes place. In fairy tales, it is a world where the wicked are punished and the virtuous are rewarded and live happily ever after. In some existential work, perhaps, the wicked prosper and prevail, and the innocent is mocked, tormented, destroyed.

Possibly, one might speak of the meta-ethics of the author from an omniscient vantage point.


The word "ethics" is a problematic word. We tend to confuse "ethics"
with "morality" and we tend to confuse "morality" with some notion of
absolute good.

The ethics of Oscar Wilde's time condemned homosexuality as a sin
and crime, and also considered the word "aint" as incorrect.

In my own lifetime, in the 1960's, the word "aint" was added to
dictionaries, so children might no longer taunt that "aint AINT in the
dictionary. Also, during the 1960's or 70s, homosexuality was
declassified as a mental illness or abnormality and removed from the
DSMIII-R (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.)


Below is a wonderful link which discusses the "ethics" of chemists.


http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/8-1/davis.htm

‘Ethics’ has at least five senses in
ordinary English. In one, it is a mere synonym for ordinary morality,
those universal standards of conduct that apply to moral agents
simply because they are moral agents. Etymology fully justifies this
first sense. The root for ‘ethics’ (‘ethos’) is the Greek word for custom
just as the root of ‘morality’ (‘mores’) is the Latin word for it.

Etymologically, ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are twins (as are ‘ethic’ and
‘morale’). In this first sense of ‘ethics’, chemists and engineers must
have a common ethics. This sense of ethics would make our question
trivial. Since the question does not seem trivial, this is probably not
the sense of ‘ethics’ that concerns us.


In four other senses of ‘ethics’, ‘ethics’ is contrasted with ‘morality’. In
one, ethics is said to consist of those standards of conduct that moral
agents should follow (what is sometimes also called ‘critical
morality’); morality, in contrast, is said to consist of those standards
that moral agents actually follow (what is also sometimes called
‘positive morality’). ‘Morality’ in this sense is very close to its root
‘mores’; it can be unethical (in our first sense of ‘ethics’). ‘Morality’ (in
this sense) has a plural; each society or group can have its own moral
code, indeed, even each individual can have her own. There can be as
many moralities as there are moral agents. But even so, ethics
remains a standard common to everyone (or, at least, may be such a
standard, depending on how ‘critical morality’ gets cashed out).


‘Ethics’ is sometimes contrasted with ‘morality’ in another way.
Morality then consists of those standards every moral agent should
follow. Morality is a universal minimum, our standard of moral right
and wrong. Ethics, in contrast, is concerned with moral good, with
whatever is beyond the moral minimum. Ethics (in this sense) is
whatever is left over of morality (in our first – universal – sense, which
includes both the right and the good) once we subtract morality (in
this third – minimum right-only – sense). Since (as we shall see)
professional ethics consists (in large part at least) of moral
requirements, this cannot be the sense of ‘ethics’ with which we are
concerned.


The second (or ‘should’) sense of ethics is closely related to the
fourth, a field of philosophy. When philosophers offer a course in
‘ethics’, its subject is various attempts to understand morality (all or
part of morality in our first sense) as a rational undertaking.

Philosophers do not teach morality (in our first, second, or third sense)
– except perhaps by inadvertence. They also generally do not teach
critical morality, though the attempt to understand morality as a
rational undertaking should lead students to dismiss some parts of
morality (in its second, descriptive, sense) as irrational or to feel more
committed to morality (in its first or third sense) because they can
now see the point of it.

‘Ethics’ can be used in yet another sense, to refer to those special,
morally-permissible standards of conduct governing members of a
group simply because they are members of that group. In this sense,
Hopi ethics are for Hopi and for no one else; business ethics, for
people in business and for no one else; and professional ethics, for
members of a profession and for no one else. Ethics – in this sense –
is relative even though morality is not. But ethics (in this sense) is not
therefore mere mores. Ethics must at least be morally permissible.
There can be no thieves’ ethics or Nazi ethics, except with scare
quotes around ‘ethics’.

As I think on these matters, I would venture to say that the driving
force of fiction and art is often the dissonace and conflict of
ethics/morality/conscience verses personal desires and the good of
society. On the one hand, military service and patriotism are noble,
but on the other hand we have artistic expressions such as Picasso's
"Guernica" painting, and novels like "The Red Badge of Courage" and
"All Quiet on the Western Front."

e.e. cummings has a wonderful line about "the dilemma of flutes." It
is our own existential dilemma, torn between conflicting ethics and
allegiences, which powers and drives drama.


Some of you might find it interesting to read an essay I wrote entitled
"Good, Evil and Ideas Which Transform"


http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page005.htm

Imagine, if good and evil were analogous to those high and low energy molecules in the atmosphere. A certain balanced measure of both constitute a normal atmosphere while an imbalance creates a moral dilemma.

I am very fond of an old saying from India: "The cow and the bee and the viper all drink the same water from a pond, and yet the cow transforms that water into soothing milk, while the bee transforms the very same water into honey, yet the viper transforms the water into a deadly poisonous venom." How may we see molecules of good and evil in the water which surrounds us, and in what manner do we personally transform the world around us as we pass through this life?

......

In Genesis, we see that at the end of each day of creation, God looks and sees that "It is GOOD". But when the entire work of creation is finally completed, God looks and sees that "it is VERY GOOD". Jewish tradition sees within this "very good" the "yetzer harah", the natural human tendency or inclination towards evil which may be spiritually harnessed as an energy and redirected towards GOOD. For example, the man with a tendency towards greed may become greedy for Torah knowledge or spiritual wisdom.

R. Nahman said in R. Samuel's name: BEHOLD, IT WAS VERY GOOD refers to the Good Desire; AND BEHOLD, IT WAS VERY GOOD, to the Evil Desire. Can then the Evil Desire be very good? That would be extraordinary! But for the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children; and thus said Solomon:

"Again, I considered all labour and all excelling in work, that it is a man's rivalry with his neighbour." (Koheleth/Ecclesiastes IV, 4)

The translators have rendered yetzer hara literally, as "evil desire," but as a recurring concept from classic texts, I would think of it as "selfish" or "egocentric" rather than "evil" in its ordinary sense. Thus the midrash works something like this: all of creation is "good" in that it fits together in a harmonious scheme, and is beautiful, bountiful, and reflective of its Source. Basing itself on two textual variations from the other days- the "and" and the "very" - R. Nahman points out that humans have an extra or additional aspect, different from the rest of creation. We have the capacity to be altruistic or selfish, good or evil, generous or stingy. Human beings are neither inherently good nor bad, but are given the impulse and desire for either direction.

If the midrash stopped there, we'd have a fairly straightforward point: humans possess a moral consciousness that animals don't, and are thus morally responsible for our choices. R. Nahman, however, goes a step further, and points out that things that we might think of as self-centred can actually produce great things. The human drive for achievement might be based in ego, but without it, the world would be poorer.

From the Sufi's, we read the following:

"What is Fate?" Nasrudin was asked by a scholar.

Nasrudin answered: "An endless succession of intertwined events, each influencing the other."

The scholar objected, "That is hardly a satisfactory answer. I believe in cause and effect."

"Very well," said Nasrudin, "look at that." He pointed to a procession passing in the street."That man is being taken to be hanged. Is that because someone gave him a silver piece and enabled him to buy the knife with which he committed the murder or because someone saw him do it or because nobody stopped him?"

[Scheherazade]

So do you agree with

... Art can have no ethic. Art is about vision........art is about new perspectives......ethics are about acceptance.......

or not?

*edit*

Just realised you have editted your previous reply

I know that you like playing, please excuse the expression-no offence meant, devil's advocate but can you simply tell me whether you personally -based your own ethics - agree with baddad's statement or not? Yes or no?

[Sitaram]

There is mathematics, but then there is the metamathematics of mathematician Kurt Godel.

There are philosophies, but then there is the metaphilosophy of Hegel's "Phenomenology."

There are ethics, and then there is metaethics.

There is a formal study of ethics, with professors and books, so obviously, since they analyze and compare different ethical systems, there is an "ethics of ethics."

We must never be too hasty to agree to anything. Santayana said that doubt and scepticism are like our virginity; we must not be anxious and willing to surrender it to the first person (or idea) which somes along.

There are those who feel that things are simple, straight forward, cut and dry, and they are anxious to quickly arrive at agreement with "yes or no" questions, and they feel vulnerable and out of control if they cannot quickly pidgeonhole issues.

Then there are others who want to delve deeper, to peel away ever greater levels of complexity, and hold judgment in abeyance.


I am thinking now about Samuel Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stow. In their time and society, slavery was legal, and there was a certain "ethos" in place.

The artist/author stands back and surveys the ethics of time and places, and has the "vision" to see through or beyond it, and critique it with a metaethics.
Each work of art has its own ethics, or metaethics, but it is often attacked by its contemporary society and culture.

People attacked Picasso because "women do not have three breasts, and certainly not on the forehead." Well, for Picasso, breaking THEIR rules became his rule.

People tend to attack, criticize and reject what is new and different, but gradually it becomes accepted, and ultimately it becomes classical and perhaps irreproachable.

[Scheherazade]

Yet, sometimes we face the risk of delving too deep into things, so much so that we cannot find the way back home... or even forget why we have been delving, losing the sight of the question and answer all at the same time.

[Sitaram]

I will take drowning in the depths over dog-paddling in the shallows any day. I like taking risks. But that's just "me." Besides, digging deep is hard work, and sometimes there are rewards.

I am reminded of the perennial feud between Hemingway and Faulkner. Faulkner said, "Hemingway was never known to send his reader to a dictionary." Hemingway had his own rebuttal to Faulkner. But Faulkner also criticized Hemingway, saying "He found a certain niche, voice, style, at which he was quite excellent. BUT, he never ventured out of that style. For me, it is better to strive for something beyond, even if it means failure."

I suppose I am more of a Faulkner than a Hemingway.

What can I say. We live in a free society where we are free even to be fools, if that is what freedom leads to. But I do not demand that anyone follows me, or that they agree with me.

I don't believe I have in any of my posting to date told anyone what they should or should not do or think, or insisted that they agree with me (at least I sincerely hope I have not.)

[Scheherazade]

Being different in our views makes neither of us fools but simply... different.

[Sitaram]

Consider how this thread on Nabokov's "Lolita" started.

Some people were reading it when suddenly society (the moral majority which are neither moral nor a majority) looked over their shoulder and said, "Oh, how wicked of you to read such a book, since it deals with pedophilia."

Seems pretty cut-and-dry, "yes or no", true or false. Surely you are not in favor of pedophilia! Surely you do not approve of genocide! Tsk, Tsk, how politically incorrect of you!

In school, we used to taunt one another with "damned if you do and damned if you dont" questions, like "does your mother know you do wicked things when your alone?" (I cleaned up the example). The charm of such a question is that it poses itself as a simple "yes or no" question, but it is not a valid "yes or no" question. If I give you a cup of tea and say "do you care for sugar, yes or no?" then that is a valid yes or no question. But then, if you were to have ME to tea, and present me with such an allegedly simple and straight-forward "yes or no" question, I would protest and say: "Well, I am diabetic, so I cannot have sugar, but I want my tea to taste sweet, so I request aspartamine (but not splenda)", but THEN when I realize that the tea you are giving me is Lapsang Suchong, with its smokey flavor, ruined by sweeteners, I would put back the packet of "Equal" and take the tea straight.
Wittgenstein was correct to observe that there are some things we must pass over in silence.



Nothing that is of profound philosophical or artistic or theological significance lends its self to simple "yes or no" or "true or false."

When we look at the brilliance of Nabokov, his language, his message, and we look deeply into the personality of the characters, and then we say "hey this might be of great artistic importance with some profound message, perhaps its not so pornographic after all."

You ask me for a simple "yes or no" but I have never been a simple "yes or no" kind of person. That is part of my "style." If you will notice, I never once use any kind of "smiley" icon. Its "not my style." I want to depend solely upon words and ideas to make my points. I rarely address myself to particular individuals, and solicit their personal opinion or agreement. I feel that one great error of our culture and heritage is using common majority consensus as a touchstone for truth or justice. I am preoccupied with ideas, not individuals or personalities. In a brief hundred years from now, all of us who post here will be dead. It shall not matter if Sally agreed with Joe. If any of our words, posts survive, then it is the words and ideas which shall stand on their own merit or demerit in the minds of future readers, yet unborn.

In 1998 I had a dialogue with a fanatical Christian which I posted
under the title:

Beware the Simple Answer YES or NO

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page006.htm

In that dialogue, I attempt to explain what I see as the deficiencies in "yes or no" questions and a linear type of Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning of the form: A implies B (wouldn't you agree, "yes or no?"), B implies C.... X implies Y (ohhh and I already got you to say yes to "Q implies R" so dont try to wriggle out of this now).... and finally Y implies Z, so therefore I have forced you to agree that God exists (or some such conclusion.)

I do not see the world in terms of "yes or no" or "true or false."

I see the world in terms of an ancient Jain logic term, "anekantavada" (sometimes called "many-pointedness") which simply translates as "no one single point of view." It means that any attempt to capture the "truth" in words is but a partial statement of the truth as seen from only one perspective. Wittgenstein got into this sort of thing.

In the ninth century C.E. a theologian by the name of Shankaracharya arose in India, and converted all of India back to Hinduism from Buddhism. Shankaracharya wrote one hymn which starts "Oh Thou, from whom all words recoil." Apophatic means "speaking away" from a subject. The writings of so-called Dionysius the Areopagite gave apophatic theology a firm foundation. It is difficult to say what something (such as God, or Justice) IS, so we shall be apophatic in our approach and say all that IT IS NOT, and perhaps somehow we shall sneak up on God, or truth, or beauty or justice just as calculus sneaks up on an incommensurable area by approaching the limit of an infinite sum.

As I reconsider the original phrase which started all this, namely "Art can have no ethic," I see room for refinement, qualification.

Indeed, an author and a work has its own internal ethics, physics, karma.
A book might be saying "its ok to be gay" for example. When we say "Art can have no ethic" I think what we are really trying to say is that the prevailing arbitrary "ethic" of our particular society and times has no right to silence the artistic voice. This is freedom of speech in a democracy. Books such as Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer were "banned in Boston" until around the 1950s when certain high court decisions proclaimed that it was "ok" to publish such books. In the early 1900s, a certain woman in America was publishing Ulysses in serialized form in her magazine. The scene which got her in trouble with the law was a beautiful passage describing a young man and woman at a fireworks display. As the young woman leaned farther and farther back to follow the course of a roman candle in the sky, the young man was peeking up her dress and admiring her charms. By todays standards the passage seems harmless.

The mistake of the "moral majority" and all those Texan fundamentalists is that they equate our democratic republic only with "majority rule." What they conveniently forget is that our Constitution is as much about protecting the rights of the minority as it is about soliciting the consensus of the majority.

We may dislike pornography, but when we try to suppress it, we run the risk of replacing it with something far more filthy and ugly, namely the repressive book-burning mentality of a theocracy with blasphemy laws, enforcing an external morality with torture and amputation.

===========

I have re-read this entire thread a number of times this morning (which started for me at 4:30am and it is now 9am)

I see a statement posted by Rechka:

"Is fiction, art in this case, subject to ethics?"

A possible refinement is "SHOULD fiction be subject to ethics." OF COURSE, it IS subject, or should I say subjectED to the ethics of the moral majority all the time or to the tastes of whining critics who have never written anything of their own which is profound. Everytime a manuscript is rejected by a publisher, it has been sujected to MONITARY ethics. This Internet is kind of a revolution to all this censorship because it allows any fool (like me) to get a site for a few dollars a year, and speak their mind to the world, infiltrating the search engines.