"Alice," a Sci-Fi Channel Series, December 6-7, 2009. "Alice Hamilton" (Caterina Scorsone); "Queen of Hearts" (Kathy Bates, Brava!); "Hatter" (Andrew Lee Pons); "White Knight" (Matt Frewer); "Jack of Hearts" (Philip Winchester); "Dodo" (Tim Curry); "King of Hearts" (Colm Meany). Writer/Director Nick Willing (Excellent).
"Oh, I've had the most curious dream!"
I've always loved Lewis Carroll's Alice books. They are classic examples of literary works whose meaning is deliberately elusive. They were ostensibly written only after being narrated to three young girls accompanying the author and a friend on an afternoon rowing trip in 1862.
The transformations of the tales mirror the evolutions of the author, Charles Lutwig Dodgson, as he was transformed into "Lewis Carroll." John Fowles said that the essence of British identity is "hiding." Hence, the essential English myth is Robin Hood. Alice in Wonderland is about an adult's choice to "hide" in a myth of childhood bliss from the pains of a mature life in a complex society. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")
This wonderful children's story -- Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass -- is very much about "hiding." We are invited to play a game of "Hide and Go Seek." Is revelation through concealment the secret of British acting? Is this the mystery of literature? "Hiding" within another self for fun and profit? Is British theatrical genius, partly, a reaction to a class system that assigns narrow "roles" to everyone? How else would one escape such a narrow role except by becoming another person?
The same need to hide must be found in settings where gender-options are rigidly prescribed -- a subject needs to escape one self in order to become another persona. No wonder Mr. Dodgson often refused to accept letters written to Lewis Carroll. (Lurie, pp. 7-8. ) After all, Lewis Carroll was not a proper Victorian gentleman. Professor Dodgson certainly was a credit to his university and nation. Lewis Carroll could not be an Oxford man since he spoke of the terrible things that would have offended his Sovereign and all good moral opinion among the fine ladies and gentlemen in his society.
Carroll questioned social conventions and detested hypocrisy. If they had been understood properly, Carroll's children's stories might have provoked a violent response. What a dreadful person this Lewis Carroll must be since he is so filled with a suspicious "fancy." Fancy and imagination are dangerous things, especially among adults. Professor Dodgson would never shake the hand of Lewis Carroll.
"As one might expect from an Oxford don, the most thoroughgoing satirical attacks in the Alice books are directed at education. All the adults, especially those who resemble governesses or professors, [like Charles Dodgson?] are foolish, arbitrary, cruel, or mad. The only wholly decent and sensible person is Alice herself." (Lurie, p. 6.)
Professor Dodgson would be appalled to meet such a vulgar and marginal member of the bohemian classes as Lewis Carroll. Professor Dodgson was one of eleven children who became the nominal head of his family in his early teens. Childhood was taken from Mr. Dodgson abruptly and unfairly. Happily, the world of numbers and logical propositions was a Wonderland-like kingdom where just about anything became possible for the good professor and those he admired.
A television reviewer expressed bafflement at the Tim Burton film exploring the "Alice" myth. I have not yet seen Mr. Burton's movie, but on the basis of the increased age of the protagonist and her engagement to be married at the outset of the story, it seems clear that the film dramatizes the transition from girlhood to womanhood in terms of eros.
The descent into the collective subconscious ("Wonderland") is psychological "hesitation" -- through a return to childhood -- before erotic adventures make adulthood even more tempting than childhood bliss. The classic mythological version of this subject of girls becoming women is "Sleeping Beauty" and see my story: "The Sleeping Prince."
The social themes also clearly forming a subject matter of the Burton movie focus on questions of America's identity and the perennial attractions of war in our increasingly insane world. Mr. Burton's film is a genius child's protest against war and the expression of his hopes for love. I share in that protest and in his hopes for love.
F.H. Bradley found similar reasons (escapism) for developing the concept of the Absolute (surely, the Absolute is only another name for Wonderland) as distinct from the "evil" Professor McTaggart, who was always pressed for time even as he insisted that time is "unreal." Time's unreality would deprive Mr. Dodgson of his few golden moments with Miss Alice Siddell. "This would not do," as the Queen of Hearts would say, "it would not do at all." (I am referring to the Kathy Bates character in the t.v. series who is aptly associated with eros and tyranny.)
Ms. Scorsone is adequate. Otherwise, the cast is superb. Tim Curry is always fun to see chewing the scenery and, if he gets his hands on them, also his fellow actors. Kathy Bates loves to be evil. The Hatter (Andrew Lee Pons) is wisely seen as a romantic lead in this version of the story.
What is it that this children's fable or myth is concealing?
Well, the author provides us with a scathing view of British academia and political society, as I have indicated, hypocrisies, falsehoods, the lies we adults create that are necessary to "preserve" society. He also tells us that there are philosophical puzzles associated with our use of language and unavoidable "residence in metaphor" that may be irresolvable. Mysteriously, Alice anticipates the quantum revolution and Wittgenstein's logic. How delightful this labyrinth of logical propositions will prove to be if we are going to hide from the nasty adults. Hogwarts anyone? Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), then David Bohm & B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).
The logic of games is illustrated with chess puzzles tucked away in the narrative as Alice makes her way to the "eighth square" in order to become a "queen" herself, like an adventurous pawn in a game that she is not playing, where writer and reader struggle to "checkmate" one another. Wittgenstein's meditations on language games are useful in interpreting the text. You must play the right game to enter this world. Is this the secret to understanding persons in Britain, especially? ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
For whom is each "proper" person's "performance" intended? Gordon Brown? Clearly, Mr. Brown is not a character one is likely to find in the real world. But then neither is David Cameron. Theresa May? Boris Johnson?
Many of the "characters" in British politics seem to have been invented by Lewis Carroll.
Was Carroll concerned to "hide" his improper sexual interest in this child?
I doubt it. Lewis Carroll is "Alice." The child that the author once was is judging the adult man and his dull world of "duty" which is found less than satisfactory. This is always the function of youth. Young people should find the adult world unsatisfactory and in need of improvements. I promise you -- if you are a young person -- that, however much you improve society, it will remain far from perfect when your children come along with a few suggestions for bettering the world.
"Penelope Lively described Dodgson to me as the first children's writer to write about the arcane and incomprehensible world from a childish perspective. She was also quite dismissive of the idea that he might have been a paedophile. At that time it was considered natural for the dons, who were all celibate, to seek the company of young friends." (Cartright, p. 134.)
We will also be told by Mr. Carroll, indirectly, all about those annoying men, Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone, who should both be sent to bed without their suppers. Also, we will encounter infuriating philosophers who presume to disagree with our author.
Professor McTaggart and his doubts about time cannot be refuted. This is quite unacceptable. "Off with his head!"
Charles Dodgson took Holy Orders in 1861 and was the son of a Deacon. Dodgson was concerned that the changes religion would need to undertake in order to adjust to developments in the sciences -- such as the work of Charles Darwin -- would produce painful social transformations in English life. These very adult themes are also a part of the Alice stories.
The writer and director of the Sci-Fi television series is aware of our precarious condition between Modernity and Postmodernity, between scientific conceptions of our nature and our traditional religious values. These concerns express themselves in the themes which the t.v. series has sought to emphasize that are derived from the original stories. The goal for Mr. Willing is to dramatize some of the suggested solutions to our philosophical and political dilemmas today -- dilemmas which are strikingly similar to what our Victorian ancestors faced at the end of the nineteenth century. ("How Can We be Modern Again?")
"I have been at pains to argue that the organizational principles needed to supplement the laws of physics are likely to be forthcoming as a result of new approaches to research and new ways of looking at complexity in nature. I believe that science is in principle able to explain the existence of complexity and organization at all levels, including human consciousness, though only by embracing the 'higher-level' laws. Such a belief might be regarded as denying a god, or a purpose in this wonderful creative universe we inhabit."
Physicist Paul Davies goes on to explain:
"I do not see it that way. The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness [and the possibility of meaning,] -- in other words that the universe has organized its own self-awareness -- is, for me, powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence." (Sim quoting Davies, pp. 160-161.) ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
I begin with a brief biography of Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson. I discuss some philosophical issues cleverly hidden in the story and (possibly) several snide insults of fellow logicians. I adore snide insults in literature and life. I will discuss the central theme of time's reality and fleeting nature. I will focus on the interweaving of time orders from one historical or intellectual epoch to another. I will next explore the conundrums identified by Mr. Willing, the writer and director of the t.v. series, together with the solutions offered to us at the "Mad Tea Party" depicted on all of our television screens.
"The child will be likely to interpret or make sense of his or her own situation in terms of Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk before he or she can begin to interpret or make sense of it in terms of psychology or sociology or economics. If we were to recognize this as a possibility, then it might be easier for us to recognize the possibility also that more objective or theoretical modes of explanation -- such as natural-scientific ones, which in effect determine much of what we experience, as well as of what we do, in a technological world -- may remain dependent on quite different, and ultimately more primitive, modes of comprehension which are essentially mythic." (Falck, p. 119.)
"All that is really worth doing is what we do for others."
"Charles Ludwig Dodgson, pseudonym of Lewis Carroll (1832-98) English writer, nonsense versifier and mathematician, born in Daresbury, near Warrington, the third of eleven children. His pseudonym [was] derived from his first two names: Ludwidge [Lutwig] is the same as Ludwig, of which Lewis is the Anglicized version, and Carroll is a form of Charles. ... He was educated at Rugby and Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics after 1855 and took orders in 1861. Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) ... are superficially similar: in each, Alice meets a succession of fantastic characters (Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Rabbit and the March Hare, Humpty-Dumpty) and each ends grandly, one with a trial, and the other with a banquet. Each has been translated into many languages and there have been innumerable editions, many illustrated by distinguished artists. Their success among Victorian children was doubtless due to the fact that Dodgson eschewed moralising. His other works include Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889 and 1893). Of his mathematical works Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) is still of interest. He was also a pioneer photographer, and took many portraits of young girls with whom he seemed to empathize particularly. His diaries appeared in 1953, and an edition of his letters in 1979."
Chambers Biographical Dictionary, p. 426. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
I am aware of allegations by psychoanalysts that Carroll was a would-be "child molester." I think, along with Ms. Lively, that these accusations are inaccurate. Furthermore, I am sure that they are based on a serious misreading of the literary stories and key events in the author's life. There is no eroticizing of the character of Alice. There could not be. I insist that "Alice" is Lewis Carroll.
The author's friendship with the child inspiring the fable may have served as a catalytic agent releasing a great deal of contained imagination with repressed memories of childhood as well as pain at the loss of that "wonderland" that he knew all-too briefly. ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review.")
Psychologists diagnose any philosophical opinion or statement of scientific theory as proof of some terrible anti-social malady. Worse, such a diagnosis is often reductivist, that is, labelling is usually an attempt to discover the most demeaning and foul interpretation of conduct, on the asumption that the truth is always deflating and disappointing. This is the legacy of Freud's Schopenhaurian pessimism which is part of the ideology of psychoanalysis.
Shrinks are not regarded as suitably disillusioned and scientific until they possess insulting as well as offensive interpretations of the actions and motives of their fellow human beings (if not of their own actions) in every historical period. Freud was struggling against Victorian prudishness. Today we are often struggling against the opposite of this nineteenth century ethos. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")
Aside from "Tweedledee" (Disraeli, McCain, Trump) and "Tweedledum" (Gladstone, Obama, Clinton), there are philosophical "issues" to be identified by clever readers of these classic children's fables:
" ... Humpty Dumpty [Benjamin Jowett?] exhibits a form of the Euthyphro dilemma" -- Carroll had absorbed Plato by way of Walter Pater (like me) -- "in his views on his authority over his words; the White Knight [who delivers much of the wisdom in the t.v. series] delves deep into the problem of names, [the Nominalist controversy] the White King takes 'nobody to be a person'; the snark is a 'topic-neutral object of a quest' (sometimes identified with [F.H. Bradley's] Absolute), and throughout the humor depends upon pushing logical and philosophical reasoning to absurdity. Carroll's paper 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles' (Mind, 1894) presents the classic statement of the need for rules of inference as well as axioms in formal systems."
Simon Blackburn, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 108-109. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power" and "Metaphor is Mystery" then "Serendipity, III.")
In Lewis Carroll's dream version of Britain, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy would be published by Cambridge University Press.
Compare Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998) with Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1946). Cassirer's discussion of "word magic" may be useful. Additional authorities agree concerning the philosophical importance of Alice in Wonderland:
" ... his Alice stories ... brim over with logical puzzles and absurdities and have been duly pillaged by philosophers. Coming at the tail end of the degenerating programme [sic.] of Aristotelean logic, his contributions to formal logic are inevitably insignificant[.]"
This was the consensus based on Russell's and Moore's revolution in logic, a revolution which is now subject to serious doubts in the early years of the twenty-first century due to developments in the sciences and the hermeneutic turn in Continental thought resulting from the works of Gadamer and Ricoeur:
" ... their only lasting value being their testimony to [Carroll's] talent for devising extraordinary syllogisms. Carroll's most important philosophical article is the characteristically quaint and deceptively light 'What the Tortoise said to Achilles' (Mind, 1895). He hints at a deep problem about the epistemology of inference, while demonstrating that the acceptance of rule inference cannot be identified with the acceptance of a conditional proposition."
T. Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 122.
The most important subject examined in these stories from the point of view of a child-reader-writer is the problem of time. Professors McTaggart and F.H. Bradley are set beside each other, without being named, and the author is clearly more impressed by Bradley. The unreality and mystery of time must be a concern to Lewis Carroll (if not to Mr. Dodgson), since Carroll was in search of lost time because, clearly, he is utterly homeless in the adult world. This was true even in the "wonderland" that is the "city of dreaming spires," or Oxford University. The ultimate source of these idealist understandings of time may be found in the works of Kant (Critique of Pure Reason 1781) and Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit 1807), then T.H. Green's critique of empiricism leading to Bradley and McTaggart.
I will focus on the problem of time in these stories before examining the postmodern turn which involves the abandonment of linear time as temporality becomes a spiral or mandala. A pause to consider the jurisprudence of the trial scene will prove useful when we examine the postmodernist twist on this fable. This discussion leads to the Hollywood-sized "Alice" depicted in the t.v. series. The "hospital for dreams" (religions?) and the dream manufacturers in the casino (Entertainment-chemists), where persons are kept narcotically "happy" must cope with irrational authority expressed in the state's increased assumption of the power to define reality: "Off with their heads!" has become: "Off with their brains!" We must join the resistance.
Alice's psychological tortures at the hands of our politicians, conservative (Tweedledee) and liberal (Tweedledum), reflects the images from Abu Ghraib and America's now world-famous flirtation with psychological torture and the technologies of social control. Among those technologies must be included induced frustration techniques such as you are witnessing at these blogs.
"What a funny watch," Alice remarked.
J.M.E. McTaggart is still a subject of scholarly attention for his notorious skepticism concerning the "reality" of time. McTaggart lived in a Newtonian universe whose physics did not yet include Einstein's theory of relativity. Much of McTaggart's argument would become conventional wisdom from a scientific direction only after developments in twentieth century physics.
Astonishingly, Bradley and McTaggart anticipated -- through philosophical argumentation alone -- important scientific discoveries, also crucial insights emerging in later Continental thought concerning language and interpretation. Bradley and McTaggart "foreshadow" the best of Wittgenstein work -- not the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein" and Derek Jarman's "Wittgenstein.")
McTaggart understood -- at a "moment" in history when there was no precedent for the insight -- that time is not best thought of as an objective and fixed aspect of the universe that we encounter, but a kind of fiction that is the product of a meeting (or "tea party") between the self and its world. This is the most Kantian-Hegelian side of McTaggart's thinking. However, McTaggart is also solidly based in British empiricism and the whole of his native tradition of thought. Berkeley and Hume are essential predecessors and sources for the Cambridge philosopher's ideas. Moreover, I am certain that McTaggart's equally brilliant and important theory of love is not unrelated to his provocative view of time. This is a theory of love as meaning and destiny for humanity which is unsurpassed in Western thought. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
Since McTaggart's and Bradley's idealism (the latter's Principles of Logic dates from 1883 and the Presuppositions of Critical History from 1874) are of concern in the Alice stories -- for presuming to anticipate Dodgson's (if not Carroll's) similar ideas -- it may be wise to examine McTaggart's "shocking" philosophy of time which suggests that childhood can never be lost because our "angel selves" remain, eternally, past, present, and (best of all!) future:
"Past, present, and future are incompatible determinations. Every event must be one or the other," McTaggart writes, "but no event can be more than one. If I say that any event is past, that implies that it is neither present nor future, and so with the others. And this exclusiveness is essential to change, and therefore to time. For the only change we can get is from future to present, and from present to past."
Here things get very interesting:
"The characteristics, therefore, are incompatible. But every event has them all. If M is past, it has been present and future. If it is future, it will be present and past. If it is present, it has been present and will be past. Thus all of the three characteristics belong to each event. How is this consistent with their being incompatible?"
The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Bk. 5, Ch. 33 (1921, then 1927).
This leads to McTaggart's much-quoted conclusion:
"I believe that nothing that exists can be temporal, and that therefore time is unreal."
The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Bk. 5, Ch. 33 (1921, then 1927). ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Steven Hawking is Right on Time.")
These ideas were developed by Professor McTaggart in dialogue with colleagues since the 1890s as well as earlier in relation with the work of F.H. Bradley. These ideas were known to Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson when he was writing and revising the "Alice" stories.
McTaggart's comments on time should be contrasted with the veiled philosophical analysis found in "Alice in Wonderland" then with the discussion by Bradley and also the contemporary analysis of time by particle physicist Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. (E.J. Lowe, at pp. 84-105.)
Einstein's "theory of relativity" dates from 1915, then 1918. Mary Whiton Calkins' parallel ideas also predate Einstein.
"The Hatter was the first to break the silence. 'What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear."
"Alice considered a little, and then said, the fourth.'"
"'Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. 'I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added, looking angrily at the March Hare." (emphasis added!)
Spring is both a season in the stories and the master-symbol of "Wonderland" as well as childhood possibilities. Fittingly, "Alice in Wonderland" first appeared in winter, at Christmas time, Charles Dodgson's middle age? Lewis Carroll always lived in an "Enchanted April." ("Beauty and the Beast.")
Tim Burton's much-expected movie version of the stories has appeared in Springtime, as flowers are blooming and birds are singing -- even in New York.
" ... Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity: 'What a funny watch!' she remarked. 'It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!' ..."
"'Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. 'Does your watch tell you what year it is?'"
"'Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: 'but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'"
"'Which is just the case with mine,' said the Hatter."
For Lewis Carroll (if not for Professor Dodgson) it "stayed the same year for such a long time":
"Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. 'I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could."
Lewis Carroll, "Chapter VII: A Mad Tea Party," in Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 54-55.
Notice the latest thinking in physics concerning time along with science's confirmation of the crucial idealist insight as to the contributions of the human mind to knowledge and "reality":
"The perplexing thing is that no one has discovered any such law. What's more, the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up until today, show a complete symmetry [emphasis added] between past and future. Nowhere in any of these laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not in the other. Nowhere is there any distinction between how the laws look or behave [metaphor?] when applied in either direction in time. The laws treat what we call past and future on a completely equal footing." -- like Tweedledee and Tweedledum! -- "Even though experience reveals over and over again that there is an arrow of how events unfold in time, this arrow seems not to be found in fundamental laws of physics."
Brian Greene, "Chance and the Arrow," in The Fabric of the Cosmos, pp. 144-145. ("Metaphor is Mystery" dramatizes, among other things, entangled relations in the quantum realm.)
Do laws "behave," Professor Greene? Is it true that the laws of gravity and space-time (they are twins) have become very naughty? Terence Hawkes, Metaphor, p. 85. ("Metaphor and the Science of the Concrete"), then George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, at pp. 69-76 ("Causation: Partly Emergent and Partly Metaphorical"). ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author," then "Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")
Have scientists been reading the forbidden works of Jacques Derrida?
The idealists -- especially McTaggart and Bradley -- developed the picture of the universe suggested by quantum physics long before the science demonstrating the validity of these insights was conceivable:
"But why, a detractor asks, should fundamental physics be so closely tied to human awareness? If we were not to observe the world, would wave functions never collapse, or perhaps, would the very concept of a wavefunction not exist? [Berkeley] Was the universe a vastly different place before human consciousness evolved on planet earth? [Kant] What if, instead of human experimenters, mice or ants or amoebas or computers are the only observers? [Spielberg's "A.I."] Is the change in their 'knowledge' adequate to be associated with the collapse of a wavefunction?" ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism.")
The Fabric of the Cosmos, at p. 207.
Erroll E. Harris' (Kantian/Hegelian) logic suggests an analogy to psychological experiments that parallel these idealist-quantum physics "principles" among persons undergoing unusual emotional-intellectual states akin to the intensity of great intellectual effort.
Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms is also highly relevant to these developments, even more so the fusion of aesthetics and metaphysics in American Susanne K. Langer's thinking. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
The images in profound dementia or psychosis experiences, for example, are analogous to the adventures of Alice.
Joseph Cambell notes frequently in his works the parallels between mythic journeys and the illusions or hallucinations experienced by persons undergoing profound psychotic breaks as does Carl Jung in his examination of symbols and archetypes from global mythology.
C.D. Broad -- an expert on McTaggart and other philosophers commenting on the phenomenologists and idealists since the sixties -- develops a number of fruitful associations: See the discussion at Erroll E. Harris, "Psychological Time," in The Reality of Time, pp. 64-65. Ian Hacking, "Memory," in Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, at pp. 198-209. ("What is Memory?")
The concept of time and its plasticity are structural to the experience-construction of human memory as it unfolds in linguistic/cinematic-time. The most difficult and dangerous stage of the "metanoia" journey, especially for those making the trip more than once, is the so-called "return." The enchantments of philosophical and aesthetic "wonderlands" can be seductive. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review" and the Philip K. Dick story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which inspired "Total Recall." Finally, see the British t.v. series "Life on Mars.")
Human memory is a magnificent editor and creative artist, a co-conspirator and rival of other powers of the mind -- a White Knight -- intent upon rescuing the imperiled children that are affections, needs, unhealed wounds and compensating for irreparable losses, often by sheltering fragile memories of unbearibly painful loves and keeping them safe. Far from hurting children I am sure that Charles Dodgson managed to rescue the one imperiled child that he knew, "Lewis Carroll," with the assistance of Miss Alice Siddell. Professor Dodgson managed this trick by slowing down time in order to allow time to successfully complete an Oxford tutorial session concerning "meanings." (Colin Radford, at pp. 257-306.)
Creative intellectual work, physics, higher mathematics, philosophy, making movies are ways of "adjusting" to difficult realities and not things to be denied to people. Denials or refusals of these activities will often bring about emotional or psychological collapse. This may be the goal of some powerful entities -- entities seeking to keep education and the arts from most persons in the world, including the people shutting off my computer at irregular intervals. The eternal cry of the middle-brow bully is "adjust to reality." This means accept the current unjust arrangement of things. I suggest that you never "adjust" to an unjust world, but always struggle to make it a better one. Never "accept" injustice, cruelty, or evil. ("'Irrational Man': A Movie Review.")
F.H. Bradley's logic of judgment was read, I am sure, by Professor Dodgson, who was certainly aware of his Oxford colleague's (Bradley's) Ethical Studies. Dodgson would have been aware of T.H. Green's earlier critique of empiricism and all empirical concepts, such as the concept of time. Walter Bagehot's efforts to reconcile Darwin and God with Queen Victoria must have been known to Professor Dodgson.
McTaggart, like all "evil" intellectuals, was found at Cambridge University. Slitherin House? David Cameron is (clearly) a an evil wizard. Perhaps this passage from Bradley's discussion of time and the "looking-glass" nature of identity in the later Appearance and Reality will reveal some of the motivation for the paradoxical relation between Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson:
"And if we chose to be fanciful, we might imagine something more. We might suppose that, corresponding to each of our lives there is another individual. There is a man who traverses the same history with ourselves, but in the opposite direction. [Reversing the arrow of time.] We may thus imagine that the successive contents, which make my being, are the lives also of one or more other finite souls. The distinctions between us" -- adult and child? selves and missing lovers? -- "would remain, and would consist in an additional element, different in each case. And it would be these differences which would add to each his own way of succession, and make it a special personality. The differences, of course, would have existence; but in the Absolute, ["Wonderland"?] once more, in some way they might lose exclusiveness."
Appearance and Reality, at p. 217. ("Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")
There is a bit of Fitzgerald's "Benjamin Button" in Lewis Carroll, searching eternally for the lost and wounded boy that he once was in a magical kingdom -- a kingdom that contains a mirror-image, a female other-self, who knows and understands him because she is also lost and wounded. ("The Forest of Arden.")
Please see the greatest cinematic exploration of what physicists call "mirroring-relations" in the human realm Kieslowski's masterpiece "The Double Life of Veronique." And for a recent variation of both the Alice myth and mirroring relations in Western thought, I urge you to read Sophie's World. Finally, I invite Gore Vidal fans to discover the exploration of selfhood as temporal-duality in Two Sisters. ("Then" and "Now" become "Eric" and "Erica.")
The lost boy for whom Mr. Dodgson searched in vain was, of course, Lewis Carroll/Alice.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
Carroll's satire of forms of logic and reasoning that he regarded as suspect or hypocritical -- like the analogical thought processes of barristers and judges (who are so boringly adult at all times) as well as the pompousness of politicians and academics -- provides a clue to his sly purposes in the story.
The jurors deciding "who stole the tarts" take copious notes before anything is said. Carroll winks at the reader to remind him or her that we should also be taking notes. What seems like madness and silliness may be philosophically important. The ancestor of "Monty Python and His Flying Circus" is Carroll's "Wonderland":
"The jury all wrote down, on their slates, 'She doesn't believe there's an atom of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to explain the paper."
Rules of evidence determine what is "worth writing down" or requires explanation, lawyers' "relevance" and "prejudicial effect" turn out to be the same concept:
"If there is no meaning in it,' said the King, 'that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye: 'I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. ' -- said I could not swim --' you can't swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, p. 100. (Hermeneutics?)
What seems baffling and crazy in the "Alice" stories is a set of concealed philosophical conundrums. Carroll is asking the adult reader of this work to pay philosophical attention to what is being said. Paradoxically, this "adult" attention is only possible for readers who can "play."
The stories are also politically subversive, since Queen Victoria ("off with his head!"), together with the important people who presume to define normality and virtue in her court, must be depicted as both sincere and foolish.
Best of all the law -- as Mr. Dickens suggests -- "is an ass!"
" ... 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.' ..."
" ... 'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!' ... " (This sounds good to the OAE in NJ.)
Ibid., at pp. 102-103.
Is Dick Cheney the White Queen, as it were? ("American Doctors and Torture" and "Torture and the Law" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
The "preemptive" or "preventive sentencing" debate in American law as well as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo where the "worst of the worst" are held and tortured before being charged (or without being charged at all!) would exceed even Lewis Carroll's expectations.
Mr. Cheney, as the White Queen, is "red in tooth and claw" -- like Charles Darwin's image of a nature that is oblivious to human moral expectations.
How can we reconcile the cruelty of nature with a benevolent God?
We must interpret.
The purpose of evidence is to point our way to truth, not to rationalize and justify what we have decided to believe for ideological reasons. This will come as news to New Jersey's Supreme Court and corrupt legal ethics establishment.
This jurisprudential discussion provides a way to use the "Alice" stories in a television series concerned with the transition from Modernity to Postmodernity: How can we make use of our televisual and entertainment culture to examine serious political and philosophical issues in a way that makes discussions accessible to a wide audience without succumbing to "Weapons of Mass Deception"? We must charm them. ("'Drawing Room Comedy': A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
The White Knight in the television series is unable to use his "antique weapons" very effectively against the "dominations and powers" of the Evil Queen. Religion is unarmed against science. Yet our sympathies are with the White Knight who scores a victory, morally and aesthetically, despite this numerical disadvantage. Michael Frayn wonders:
"Some beliefs -- in universal love or the perfectibility of man -- are further specimens of that fabulous creature in the logical zoo, the uboama; they are breaches of the fundamental logic of language and thought. The worlds they project are not so much like the one imagined by Pushkin as the one created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass, [exactly!] where the White Queen boasts of sometimes believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The challenge, not just of implausibility but of impossibility, might be an added encouragement to the faithful. 'Certum est quia impossible est,' as Tertullian, one of the early Fathers of the Church, famously declared -- 'it is certain because it is impossible.' ..."
The Human Touch, at p. 262. (The "logical zoo?")
The point, Michael, is that to relinquish one set of beliefs (religion) is not to inhabit a bottom-line reality without illusions or beliefs, but only to adopt a different set of illusions and beliefs, a view of the world that must be equally metaphorical (science): Do laws "behave"? Have you seen "Superstrings" creating reality? Anybody find the "God-particle" today? The metaphorical capacity of language -- all languages, including scientific languages -- follows us wherever we go. This does not deprive us of truth because, unlike Humpty Dumpty, we do not presume to determine, individually, apart from the logic of discourse and structures of language, tradition, history, what words or concepts or symbols must mean. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
Is the "God particle" like a "spinning top"? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.") Is Jacques Derrida our Humpty Dumpty? No. Baudrillard? Maybe.
Derrida's point is that we are all in "Wonderland" for we can never step outside of our "texts." We live and must live within the linguistic realities that we both create and that create us without foregoing concepts of truth and meaning, goodness and love. Scientists are saying much the same, i.e., Brian Greene and David Deutsch. (Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, pp. 380-381.)
Transcendental forms of argumentation -- like mathematics and physics, Critical theory or hermeneutics, perhaps -- will always come to the rescue of our imperiled "princess" of truth by slaying the dragons of nihilism and political correctness. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
Michael Frayn is dangerously fond of these dragons, of course, but Michael attended Cambridge University -- with Draco Malfoy! -- where this sort of perversity must be expected. ("Steven Hawking is Right on Time" and "Steven Hawking's Free Will is Determined.")
Postmodernist thinkers, like Professor Derrida, are often assumed to exclude themselves from their criticisms of the Western metaphysical tradition. This is not accurate -- certainly not as regards Derrida -- who is well aware of the self-referential paradoxes at the heart of the "Alice" stories. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Derrida suggests that we now must LIVE in metaphor in a way that was only imagined in the past given our communicative and linguistic environment. Furthermore, this "residence in metaphor" is a process that includes and is enhanced by contemporary science and scientists as much as artists or philosophers. Among these metaphors is our sense of time "passing." ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
"The Knight looked surprised at the question. 'What does it matter where my body happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the time. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, at p. 204 (emphasis added).
I am sure that, subconsciously, Lewis Carroll sensed this transition to a new age in our reasoning and symbolizing, capturing the phenomenon in these delightful stories, cleverly updated, in a television series that is about our "dreaming" and continuing inability to escape "childhood" in the twentieth century, and beyond. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
Sources:
Primary Sources:
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Wadsworth, 1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Bantam, 1981), With Introduction by Morton N. Cohen.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Modern Library, 2002), With Introduction by A.S. Byatt.
Secondary Sources:
Edward Albee, Tiny Alice (New York: Pocket Cardinal, 1966).
Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977).
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1994).
Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature (London: Methuen, 1974).
David Bohm & B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).
F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: H.S. King, 1876). (Republished by Oxford's Clarendon Press, available at Strand Books in New York for a measly $18.00, I believe.)
F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968). (Lionel Rubinoff, editor and introduction.)
F.H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). (James W. Allard and Guy Stock, eds.)
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: McMillan, 1897).
Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1861-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985). (Alternate realities, multiverse theories by analogy to the "Alice" stories.)
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (New York: Vintage, 1970).
Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: McMillan, 1917). (Philosophical masterpiece that is out of print anticipating developments in late twentieth century physics and literary theory.)
Justin Cartright, Oxford Revisited (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2008). (Gorgeously written account of Oxford and lived or durational time.)
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1946).
S.T. Coleridge, The Portable Coleridge (London: Penguin, 1978). (I.A. Richards, editor.)
Arthur C. Danto, "Deep Interpretation," in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 47-69.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1978), the references are usually to a famous translation by Gayatari Spivak. This is a work I have absorbed at second hand.
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Allan Lane, 1997).
Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Poststructuralism (London & New York: Verso, 1984). (See the discussion of Derrida and deconstruction.)
Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Philip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
Michael Frayn, The Human Touch (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). ("We are -- in a way -- a tiny part of the ball that comes rolling across the floor. So we can't know where it came from." Discussing Kant at page 254.)
Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). (Lacan and numerous other thinkers have used the "mirror device" in the German idealist tradition to discuss both id/ego/superego and noumenal/phenomenal/hermeneutic issues. The "mirror image" is one of the master motifs in the works of Derrida and Ricoeur.)
T. H. Green, Hume and Locke (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968). (Green was the dominant philosopher at Oxford from 1865-1880, whose critique of empiricism dates from 1874 and earlier. The introduction by Ramon Lamos of the University of Miami in this edition is excellent.)
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2004).
Marjorie Grene, "Intellectual Autobiography," in Randall E. Auxier & Lewis Edwin Han, eds., The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene (Illinois: Open Court, 2002), pp. 14-15, pp. 24-25. (Notice the undetected association between Professor Grene's discussion of "tacit knowing" and "environmental affordances" in connection with ideational spaces and affective moods -- Lewis Carroll's Oxford as "Wonderland.")
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Errol E. Harris, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988).
Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London & New York: Methuen, 1972).
Dieter Heinrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Meaning of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). (Foremost expert in German idealism and, especially, Kant and the German Romantics in developing the "moral image of the world." Everything old is new again.)
T. Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), (R.F.C. Hull, translation). ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone) (New York & London: Penguin, 2005). (Highly recommended.)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (London & Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981).
Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (London & Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1988). (Arthur C. Danto, editor and introduction.)
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York: New American Library, 1942).
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches: A Study of the Human Mind in Relation to Feeling, Explored Through Art, Language, and Symbol (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962).
E.J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Alison Lurie, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980).
Magnus Magnusson, ed., Chambers Biographical Dictionary (London: Chambers Harrap, 1990).
Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
D.M. McKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957).
John McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). (1st. Ed., 1894.)
John McTaggart, The Nature of Existence 2 Volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921, then 1927), begun before World War, I. (Einstein's papers on relativity date from 1915, then 1918. Mary Whiton Calkins also anticipates Einstein and the quantum revolution.)
John Stuart Mill, "Autobiography," in Max Lerner, ed., The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (Harriet Taylor as anima, or "Alice," liberating feminine archetype associated with poetry.)
Ian I. Mitroff & Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What it is Doing to Our Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism & Romantic Thought (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972).
Beverly Nichols, The Fool Hath Said (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Walter Pater, Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1974). (Harold Bloom selection and editing.)
Adam Phillips, Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002). ("The child ... erupts as a biological being within the system of the symbolic order ..." quoting Althusser. Dr. Phillips would make much of Gaarder's analogy between Western philosophy and Wonderland, or philosophy as a kind of "child's playground.")
Philip Pullman, Clockwork (New York & London: Scholastic, 1996).
Colin Radford, Driving to California: An Unconventional Introduction to Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edingburgh University Press, 1996).
Kathleen Raines, ed., S.T. Coleridge: Poems and Prose (New York & London: Penguin, 1957).
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Jonathan Ree, Philosophical Tales (New York & London: Methuen, 1987).
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (London: SCM, 1980). (The power of religious metaphors.)
Stuart Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon Books, 2002), esp. pp. 151-184. (This is the third time that I have restored this title to its proper place in the list.)
F.E. Sparschott, "S.T. Coleridge, Credo ut Intelligam," in Looking for Philosophy (Montreal & London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972).
Gore Vidal, Two Sisters (New York: Ballantine, 1970) ("We are ... what we remember. But what is that? And who are we if memory fails? or even, for that matter, as they say, serves." p. 148.)
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Notebooks (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).
Scholarly Articles:
P.L. Heath, "Lewis Carroll," in Paul Edwards, Ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 1, (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 36-37.
J.B. Schneewind, "John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 5, pp. 229-231. (The glossary of logical terms in this volume may come in handy.)
Introductory Works:
Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Graham Priest, Logic: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jan Westerhof, Reality: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
