These came to me (as I was trying to get back to sleep) at 2:30 this morning...


JUDGEMENT PARABLES

1.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I renounced strong drink in order to pursue the active life in my community. I imposed strict ordinances outlawing alcohol, with severe penalties for the smallest infraction." The Judge said to him : "I perceive you are a man of strong will and self-denial. After a thousand years in the Hell of Tyrants and Oppressors, I will transfer you to the Hell of Drunkards, where you may remain sober for eternity."

2.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I learned, through careful perusal of the fine print of your Holy Book, that you abhor homosexuality. Thereafter I spent my life preserving your people from the slightest taint of such practices." The Judge said to him : "I see that you are an observant, conscientious and meticulous man." He handed him a copy of the Holy Book, in the form of a large roll of toilet paper, and ordered him to clean, forever, the anal cavities of his brethren in Hell.

3.

A man died and came before the Judge. "Judge," he said, "I know that the word of your Holy Book is the literal truth. I have devoted my whole life to the recreation of an exact replica of the original Holy Nation, as described there in detail." The Judge said to him : "I see that you greatly revere the literal truth of the Sacred Writings." Then he seated him, naked, upon a large anthill, in the Hell of the Literalists, and commanded him to read the Holy Book aloud, unceasingly, to a large colony of fire ants.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

There seem to be some echoes of Kant in my remarks yesterday about the "strict measures" of beauty. Those places in the Critique of Judgement about "genius". Poetic genius - being the effect of Nature working through the poet - is what applies the "rule of nature" to the products of art. (I'm getting this from the McKeon essay.)

Today Jonathan clarifies some of the distinctions between taste (an aesthetic response to an aesthetic object) and judgement (appreciation, &/or critique, which combines both taste & a set of standards). Judgements will differ because standards differ. Taste informs judgement - judgement refines taste.

Am reading an interesting book right now, Prisoners of hate : the cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence. By Aaron Beck, who I guess is considered the founder of cognitive psychology. I come upon things in the process of buying books for the library, lucky me.

Surprised to find it shedding light from a certain angle on the pathology of (sub)literary polemics, my own in particular within the larger scene of same.

Also struck by similarity between Beck's architecture of cognition/emotion, and the way that Elder Olson, in one of his Chicago-critic essays, analyzed the dynamics and effects of poetry, especially dramatic poetry. He describes there how a drama, by depicting or shaping a certain limited set of images or representations (logos), first affects the opinion or judgement of the audience about what they are witnessing : and then that opinion, that cognitive assessment of the image or scene (ethos), triggers the audience's emotional response (pathos).

I'm just getting into Beck's book, but the introduction describes his research into the elusive, peripheral thoughts of his patients - the thoughts they don't even recognize enough to share in psychoanalysis : thoughts which, paradoxically, frame & direct more overt behavior (often defense mechanisms or delusions). These are sort of protective thoughts, guarding the perimeter of the egocentric self - which if damaged or vulnerable, result in fantastic forms of intellectual & behavioral over-reactions. As in the audience's "judgement" of a drama's events, these very primitive ego-protective cognitions - survival mechanisms - trigger (or at least contribute to) feelings, emotions.

The book is sort of a summary of Beck's decades of research. He tries to show how the personal pathologies are seamlessly linked with mass social & political disturbances & afflictions. But I'm only on the first pages.