La Science de la Plénitude: Partie Un (French Edition)

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Obviousness does not stand tantamount to verity for Wittgenstein , nor does simply the formulation of an idea stand tantamount to hypothesis for Popper. I remember fondly, one night staring out the back sliding glass doors of my childhood home, my father engrossed inside his nightly television routine nearby in the den of our house. I was seven years old, as to my recollection the leaves were colorful and newly removed from the trees surrounding the house, which we had also newly occupied. Our pregnant cat scurried urgently about examining every nook and cranny in the entire house for some amazing plot on her mind.

This late hour and bare tree condition allowed me to observe and ponder again the nighttime sky for the first time in several months. Summer was ending and that exciting cyclical period of life where I was able to stay up past dark had commenced once again. School was the place where uber-rules-followers used social demeaning as a tactic of class stratification not that I used those words then. A tactic which some immature instructors even bought into as well. I was barely a C-average student every year of my young life until the day that I scored at a college junior year level in science, in my fifth grade achievement tests.

Again in seventh grade I scored a perfect score on the science achievement tests. After asking if I had cheated both times , my school finally broached the idea that perhaps I needed to be taught in a different way. So ended the track of memorizing spelling words and formulas and facts, and thus inaugurated the track of pursuing projects, ideas, goals and research. The spelling, facts and Laplace Transformations simply fell into place along the way.

Rather allow me to explore my passions through journalism, and I will teach you how to write a journal. Tolstoy is a far better teacher of grammar than is sentence diagramming. Such folding of reality inside out transitioned me from January of my soul into vernal brightness — an evolution of elegant whisper kissing my forehead and changing my life, forever.

I was invested from a young age into ideas, and not simply social protocols and procedures. This is part of my nature as a philosopher. Thankfully there existed standardized tests in those days, or I would have been relegated to a dunce track. No, this perception on my part is not in any way seeking to impugn specific jobs nor career tracks, as fake skeptics are wont to suggest; rather merely to point out that such a track would have been unfulfilling to me.

All a result of my failure to comply with the standard mold they so sought in education. My dad apparently regarded my sliding glass door observation to constitute a pretty astute question. He was a trial lawyer and enjoyed skills in the art of argument. I learned the nature of argument from him, and him alone. That made sleeping so much more a pleasant experience. Wow, God set all this up just for us. So there we had it. The three alternatives inside of which I was imprisoned for the next 15 some odd years of my life. There are finite sets of stars and time, god set up the stars and time just right, or — maybe the assumptions which I brought to the argument were incorrect in the first place.

It was probably around age 12 or so where I began to protest against the concept of finite-ness as compared to infinity. For how could one then truly define a boundary, much less find it? Such a boundary was rendered absurd in an existential context, surely only a boundary-state a brane or transition if not and not indeed the end of infinity. McCoy got it on with some hott alien chick, but also because this issue was touched.

One should bear in mind that in certain contexts, an appeal to infinity is no more scientific than is an appeal to God. It just appears more scientific to the non-philosopher. Perhaps the best take-away from that Star Trek episode is one which I carry to this very day. The universe is at least in part incomprehensible. It is not that it is simply unmeasurable, as this claim actually constitutes an organic untruth. The fact is that we cannot seek to measure that which we do not comprehend in the first place.

Our skills of measure are not as limiting for man, as are our skills of comprehension — that is our boundary, our dome of deceit after all, and not this fictitious field-of-measurability which nihilists claim they have identified. Embrace the unknown, embrace the absurdity. Do not substitute a pretense of knowledge as a methodology towards feeling better about the unknown — this is no different than appealing to God.

Your mind does not yet possess the tools to survey reality from the right perspectives. Such were the whispers which reverberated in my mind each night.

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Accordingly, began my track of leveraging the bookends of infinity the absence of finite-ness in contrast with the finite-ness of the hand of God. All these things are anathema to sound science. It is not that the contentions founded upon an appeal to infinity are necessarily and existentially incorrect, rather simply that the appeal itself is premature under the definitions of what constitutes good science. But you will observe social skeptics appealing to infinity as if they are applying good science.

This is not correct in the least. The context in which infinity is abused as an obvious scientific alternative or worse, apologetic employed in order to leverage social conformity pseudoscience , are outlined inside what is called the Appeal to Infinity error:. A closure of scientific argument and refusal to consider other alternatives, especially when an appeal to infinity hypothesis is unduly regarded as the null hypothesis — and further then is defended as consensus science, without appropriate underlying reductive science ever actually being done.

A double appeal to infinity involving convincing a target regarding the personal experience involved in a remote happenstance.

A million dollars just fell out of the sky in neat little stacks and then subsequently, you just happened to be the first person to walk by and observe it — two appeals to infinity stacked upon one another. Often used as a sales pitch or con job. Omnifinity — any argument which ascribes to a theoretical god, such powers, knowledge and capability such that the god in question is simultaneously able to do anything, and at the same time evade any level of comprehension on our part.

This type of god is simply a placeholder argument the ultimate special pleading which is a parallel argument to the Infinity of the Gaps argument below. These are twin arguments, which contrary to superficial appearances, are the same exact argument. Neither one constitutes science. Infinity is as convenient a deep well of logic transmutation, as if god itself. This is never a form of being semantically precise, despite a temptation to regard these types of extreme definitions as such. Rather is simply form of equivocation based explanitude.

I am sure that I will never truly understand neither infinity nor finite-ness. It makes it very difficult however, to stomach abiogenesis now, knowing that life began right on the heels of the Heavy Bombardment period for Earth — and no, an Appeal to Infinity falls hollow in the face of such a tightening window of finite-ness. Nor however, will I gain fully an explanatory alternative to the prevailing beliefs of abiogenesis and consciousness.

It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called "North", where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what's really going on.

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Literary magic realism originated in Latin America. Writers often traveled between their home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin, and were influenced by the art movement of the time. The theoretical implications of visual art's magic realism greatly influenced European and Latin American literature. Italian Massimo Bontempelli , for instance, claimed that literature could be a means to create a collective consciousness by "opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality", and used his writings to inspire an Italian nation governed by Fascism.

Rather than follow Carpentier's developing versions of "the Latin American marvelous real", Uslar-Pietri's writings emphasize "the mystery of human living amongst the reality of life". He believed magic realism was "a continuation of the vanguardia [or avant-garde ] modernist experimental writings of Latin America". Mexican critic Luis Leal summed up the difficulty of defining magical realism by writing, "If you can explain it, then it's not magical realism. To me, magical realism is an attitude on the part of the characters in the novel toward the world," or toward nature.

Leal and Guenther both quote Arturo Uslar-Pietri , who described "man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of another name could be called a magical realism. When academic critics attempted to define magical realism with scholarly exactitude, they discovered that it was more powerful than precise.

Critics, frustrated by their inability to pin down the term's meaning, have urged its complete abandonment. Yet in Pietri's vague, ample usage, magical realism was wildly successful in summarizing for many readers their perception of much Latin American fiction; this fact suggests that the term has its uses, so long as it is not expected to function with the precision expected of technical, scholarly terminology.

The critical perspective towards magical realism as a conflict between reality and abnormality stems from the Western reader's disassociation with mythology , a root of magical realism more easily understood by non-Western cultures. Guatemalan author William Spindler 's article, "Magic realism: European "metaphysical" magic realism, with its sense of estrangement and the uncanny, exemplified by Kafka 's fiction; "ontological" magical realism, characterized by "matter-of-factness" in relating "inexplicable" events; and "anthropological" magical realism, where a Native worldview is set side by side with the Western rational worldview.

There are objections to this analysis. Western rationalism models may not actually describe Western modes of thinking and it is possible to conceive of instances where both orders of knowledge are simultaneously possible.

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Alejo Carpentier originated the term lo real maravilloso roughly "the marvelous real" in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this World ; however, some debate whether he is truly a magical realist writer, or simply a precursor and source of inspiration. Maggie Bowers claims he is widely acknowledged as the originator of Latin American magical realism as both a novelist and critic ; [1] she describes Carpentier's conception as a kind of heightened reality where elements of the miraculous can appear while seeming natural and unforced.

She suggests that by disassociating himself and his writings from Roh's painterly magic realism, Carpentier aimed to show how—by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, politics, myths, and beliefs—improbable and marvelous things are made possible. In both, these magical events are expected and accepted as everyday occurrences.

However, the marvelous world is a unidimensional world. The implied author believes that anything can happen here, as the entire world is filled with supernatural beings and situations to begin with. Fairy tales are a good example of marvelous literature. The important idea in defining the marvelous is that readers understand that this fictional world is different from the world where they live. The "marvelous" one-dimensional world differs from the bidimensional world of magical realism, as in the latter, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world arriving at the combination of two layers of reality: Critic Luis Leal attests that Carpentier was an originating pillar of the magical realist style by implicitly referring to the latter's critical works, writing that "The existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American literature".

Daniel categorizes critics of Carpentier into three groups: Criticism that Latin America is the birthplace and cornerstone of all things magic realist is quite common. The Hispanic Origin Theory: If considering all citations given in this article, there are issues with Guenther's and other critic's "Hispanic origin theory" and conclusion. By admission of this article, the term "magical realism" first came into artistic usage in by German critic Franz Roh after the publication of Franz Kafka's novella " The Metamorphosis ", both visual and literary representations and uses of magic realism, regardless of suffix nitpicking.

All this further called into question by Borges' critical standing as a true magical realist versus a predecessor to magic realism and how the dates of publications between Hispanic and European works compare. Magic realism has certainly enjoyed a "golden era" in the Hispanic communities.

It cannot be denied that Hispanic communities, Argentina in particular, have supported great movements and talents in magic realism. One could validly suggest that the height of magic realism has been seen in Latin American countries, though, feminist readers might disagree. Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Charlotte Perkins Gilman being excellent critical challenges to this notion of Hispanic magic realism as a full and diversely aware aesthetic.

Allende being a later contribution to this gender aware discourse. Frida Kahlo, of course, being important to this as well but also at a later date than Woolf and Gilman. This feminist mapping, however, is unnecessary in identifying a basic truth.

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Kafka and Gogol predate Borges. They may each have their own forms of magic realism, but they are each by the broader definition solidly within this article's given identification: This issue of feminist study in magic realism and its origination is an important discourse, as well. It should not be ignored. Given that magic realism, by nature of its craft, allows underrepresented and minority voices to be heard in more subtle and representational contexts, magic realism may be one of the better forms available to authors and artists who are expressing unpopular scenarios in socio-political contexts.

Again, Woolf, Allende, Kahlo, Carter, Morrison and Gilman being excellent examples of diversity in gender and ethnicity in magic realism. To this end, Hispanic origin theory does not hold. Gender diversity aside, magic realism's foundational beginnings are much more diverse and intricate than what the Hispanic origin theory would suggest as defined in this article.

Early in the article, we read a broader definition: Woolf's, Kafka's and Gogol's work. Later, we read another definition and seeming precedent to the Hispanic origin theory: The Hispanic "continuation" and "romantic realist tradition of Spanish language" subset certainly identifies why magic realism took root and further developed in Hispanic communities, but it does not set a precedent for ground zero origination or ownership purely in Hispanic cultures. Magic realism originated in Germany as much as it did in Latin American countries. Both can claim their more specific aesthetics, but to identify the broader term of magic realism as being Hispanic is merely a theory unsupported by the citations within this article.

Perhaps it is time to identify each as its own as part of a broader and less biased umbrella. Magic realism is a continued craft in the many countries that have contributed to it in its earliest stages. Germany being first and Latin American countries being a close second. There are certainly differences in aesthetics between European and Hispanic magic realists, but they are both equally magic realists. For this reason, the Hispanic magic realists should really have proper designation as such but not the overarching umbrella of the broader term as this article suggests.

Taking into account that, theoretically, magical realism was born in the 20th century, some have argued that connecting it to postmodernism is a logical next step. To further connect the two concepts, there are descriptive commonalities between the two that Belgian critic Theo D'haen addresses in his essay, "Magical Realism and Postmodernism". Concerning attitude toward audience, the two have, some argue, a lot in common. Magical realist works do not seek to primarily satisfy a popular audience, but instead, a sophisticated audience that must be attuned to noticing textual "subtleties".

There are two modes in postmodern literature: A singular reading of the first mode will render a distorted or reductive understanding of the text. The fictitious reader—such as Aureliano from Years of Solitude —is the hostage used to express the writer's anxiety on this issue of who is reading the work and to what ends, and of how the writer is forever reliant upon the needs and desires of readers the market.

Wendy Faris, talking about magic realism as a contemporary phenomenon that leaves modernism for postmodernism, says, "Magic realist fictions do seem more youthful and popular than their modernist predecessors, in that they often though not always cater with unidirectional story lines to our basic desire to hear what happens next. Thus they may be more clearly designed for the entertainment of readers.

When attempting to define what something is , it is often helpful to define what something is not. It is also important to note that many literary critics attempt to classify novels and literary works in only one genre, such as "romantic" or "naturalist", not always taking into account that many works fall into multiple categories. Realism is an attempt to create a depiction of actual life; a novel does not simply rely on what it presents but how it presents it.

In this way, a realist narrative acts as framework by which the reader constructs a world using the raw materials of life. Understanding both realism and magical realism within the realm of a narrative mode is key to understanding both terms.

Magic realism

Magical realism "relies upon the presentation of real, imagined or magical elements as if they were real. It relies upon realism, but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits". As a simple point of comparison, Roh's differentiation between expressionism and post-expressionism as described in German Art in the 20th Century, may be applied to magic realism and realism. Surrealism is often confused with magical realism as they both explore illogical or non-realist aspects of humanity and existence.

There is a strong historical connection between Franz Roh's concept of magic realism and surrealism, as well as the resulting influence on Carpentier's marvelous reality; however, important differences remain. Surrealism "is most distanced from magical realism [in that] the aspects that it explores are associated not with material reality but with the imagination and the mind, and in particular it attempts to express the 'inner life' and psychology of humans through art".

It seeks to express the sub-conscious, unconscious, the repressed and inexpressible. Magical realism, on the other hand, rarely presents the extraordinary in the form of a dream or a psychological experience. The ordinariness of magical realism's magic relies on its accepted and unquestioned position in tangible and material reality.

Where magic realism uses fantastical and unreal elements, imaginary realism strictly uses realistic elements in an imagined scene. As such, the classic painters with their biblical and mythological scenes, can be qualified as 'imaginary realists'. With the increasing availability of photo editing software, also art photographers like Karl Hammer and others create artistic works in this genre. Fabulism traditionally refers to fables, parables, and myths, and is sometimes used in contemporary contexts for authors whose work falls within or relates to Magical Realism.

Though often used to refer to works of magical realism, fabulism incorporates fantasy elements into reality, using myths and fables to critique the exterior world and offer direct allegorical interpretations. Austrian-American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggested that fairy tales have psychological merit. They are used to translate trauma into a context that people can more easily understand and help to process difficult truths.

Bettelheim posited that the darkness and morality of traditional fairy tales allowed children to grapple with questions of fear through symbolism. Fabulism helped to work through these complexities and, in the words of Bettelheim, "make physical what is otherwise ephemeral or ineffable in an attempt Author Amber Sparks described fabulism as blending fantastical elements into a realistic setting. Crucial to the genre, said Sparks, is that the elements are often borrowed from specific myths, fairy tales, and folktales.

Unlike magical realism, it does not just use general magical elements, but directly incorporates details from well known stories. While Magical Realism is traditionally used to refer to works that are Latin American in origin, fabulism is not tied to any specific culture. Rather than focusing on political realities, fabulism tends to focus on the entirety of the human experience through the mechanization of fairy tales and myths.

Lewis , who was once referred to as the greatest fabulist of the 20th century. His novel Till We Have Faces has been referenced as a fabulist retelling. This re-imagining of the story of Cupid and Psyche uses an age-old myth to impart moralistic knowledge on the reader. A Washington Post review of a Lewis biography discusses how his work creates "a fiction" in order to deliver a lesson. Says the Post of Lewis, "The fabulist Italo Calvino is an example of a writer in the genre who uses the term fabulist.

Calvino is best known for his book trilogy, Our Ancestors , a collection of moral tales told through surrealist fantasy. Like many fabulist collections, his work is often classified as allegories for children. Calvino wanted fiction, like folk tales, to act as a teaching device. Gussow defined "The New Fabulism" as "taking ancient myths and turn ing them into morality tales. He wrote that the Fabulist style allowed Serban to neatly combine technical form and his own imagination. Through directing fabulist works, Serban can inspire an audience with innate goodness and romanticism through the magic of theatre.

Prominent English-language fantasy writers have said that "magic realism" is only another name for fantasy fiction.

Gene Wolfe said, "magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish", [55] and Terry Pratchett said magic realism "is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy". However, Amaryll Beatrice Chanady distinguishes magical realist literature from fantasy literature "the fantastic" based on differences between three shared dimensions: In fantasy, the presence of the supernatural code is perceived as problematic, something that draws special attention—where in magical realism, the presence of the supernatural is accepted.

In fantasy, while authorial reticence creates a disturbing effect on the reader, it works to integrate the supernatural into the natural framework in magical realism. This integration is made possible in magical realism as the author presents the supernatural as being equally valid to the natural. There is no hierarchy between the two codes. To Clark Zlotchew, the differentiating factor between the fantastic and magical realism is that in fantastic literature, such as Kafka's The Metamorphosis , there is a hesitation experienced by the protagonist, implied author or reader in deciding whether to attribute natural or supernatural causes to an unsettling event, or between rational or irrational explanations.

In Leal's view, writers of fantasy literature, such as Borges , can create "new worlds, perhaps new planets. This twofold world of magical realism differs from the onefold world that can be found in fairy-tale and fantasy literature. Artist and photographer Frank Van Imschoot first used the term "faux surrealism" in to describe the genre of some of his photographs. The term was used by Pepetela [59] and Harry Garuba [60] to be a new conception of magic realism in African literature.

While science fiction and magical realism both bend the notion of what is real, toy with human imagination, and are forms of often fantastical fiction, they differ greatly. Bower's cites Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World as a novel that exemplifies the science fiction novel's requirement of a "rational, physical explanation for any unusual occurrences". Huxley portrays a world where the population is highly controlled with mood enhancing drugs, which are controlled by the government. In this world, there is no link between copulation and reproduction. Humans are produced in giant test tubes, where chemical alterations during gestation determine their fates.

Bowers argues that, "The science fiction narrative's distinct difference from magical realism is that it is set in a world different from any known reality and its realism resides in the fact that we can recognize it as a possibility for our future. Unlike magical realism, it does not have a realistic setting that is recognizable in relation to any past or present reality.

Although critics and writers debate which authors or works fall within the magical realism genre, the following authors represent the narrative mode. The novel's protagonist, Tita, is kept from happiness and marriage by her mother.

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In turn, people who eat her food enact her emotions for her. For example, after eating a wedding cake Tita made while suffering from a forbidden love, the guests all suffer from a wave of longing. Perhaps the best known is Rushdie, whose "language form of magical realism straddles both the surrealist tradition of magic realism as it developed in Europe and the mythic tradition of magical realism as it developed in Latin America".

Dimitris Lyacos 's Poena Damni trilogy, originally written in Greek, is also seen as displaying characteristics of magic realism in its simultaneous fusion of real and unreal situations in the same narrative context. The painterly style began evolving as early as the first decade of the 20th century, [65] but was when Magischer Realismus and Neue Sachlichkeit were officially recognized as major trends. This was the year that Franz Roh published his book on the subject, Nach Expressionismus: Eventually under Massimo Bontempelli guidance, the term magic realism was fully embraced by the German as well as in Italian practicing communities.

New Objectivity saw an utter rejection of the preceding impressionist and expressionist movements, and Hartlaub curated his exhibition under the guideline: The style was roughly divided into two subcategories: One, conservative towards Classicism, taking roots in timelessness, wanting to sanctify again the healthy, physically plastic in pure drawing after nature The other, the left, glaringly contemporary, far less artistically faithful, rather born of the negation of art, seeking to expose the chaos, the true face of our time, with an addiction to primitive fact-finding and nervous baring of the self There is nothing left but to affirm it [the new art], especially since it seems strong enough to raise new artistic willpower.

Both sides were seen all over Europe during the s and s, ranging from the Netherlands to Austria, France to Russia, with Germany and Italy as centers of growth. Further afield, American painters were later in the s and s, mostly coined magical realists; a link between these artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the s was explicitly made in the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, tellingly titled "American Realists and Magic Realists.

When art critic Franz Roh applied the term magic realism to visual art in , he was designating a style of visual art that brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter, revealing an "interior" mystery, rather than imposing external, overtly magical features onto this everyday reality. We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston writes, "Roh, in his essay, described a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists.

Roh used this term to describe painting that signaled a return to realism after expressionism 's extravagances, which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.

One could relate this exterior magic all the way back to the 15th century.

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