Pl 370O Tideline

“Tideline” raises several issues that are pertinent to the role that philosophy plays in “telling stories about the stories we tell.”  The first is the question about the role that language plays in ascribing personhood to creatures.  Is Chalcedony, who is obviously a machine contrivance, capable of the kind of thinking that we want to say is a necessary condition for being “human”?  The story suggests that she is, inasmuch as she is capable of descriptive as well as evaluative discourse.  She is also capable of mourning her dead comrades and committed to remembering them in significant ways.

She also wants to socialize Belvedere into the myths and stories that she has in her files so that he might become the kind of person who will protect other children and animals.  This raises the question of the status of the stories that we tell.  Are they to be embraced for their veridical (truth) value or for their usefulness in forming a certain kind of person?  “Tideline” urges us to reflect on the kind of human being that we want to become: seekers after truth (correct correspondence with reality) or seekers after a certain kind of wisdom about how to live.

Pl 370O  The Mists of Time

In this short piece of science fiction, Purdom wants to argue that history is not the simple recording of facts, but that what counts as a “fact” is already an interpretation, a description which is guided by intentionality, interest, and purpose.  Thus the dispute between Emory and Giva centers on the kind of story which each wants to tell.  Emory wants to tell the story that glamorizes his ancestor and shows him to be the kind of character that British education and discipline required.  Giva wants to show the racism, sexism, and monetary reward that accompanies such an education.  In particular, she is interested in showing the full humanity of the human beings in the slaver’s hold and she is insistent on showing how the commitments of the British navy and its image of what it means to be a man have commodified and exploited the Africans.

Pl 370O  Before the Novum: Science Fiction Criticism

Edward James mentions three phases of science fiction criticism: 1) science fiction seen as amusement, 2) science fiction as prophecy and incitement to study science, and 3) science fiction as literature, social commentary, satire, and the literature of cognitive estrangement with an interest in newness or the novum.  This last understanding of science fiction puts sci fi in the same category  as many ancient and modern works of literature, such as Plato’s Symposium, Homer’s Odyssey, More’s Utopia,  Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, etc.

The instructor for the course outlined two ways of evaluating the stories that we tell—philosophy being understood as telling stories about the stories that we tell.  The first, classical conception, stretching from Plato 4^th C BCE to Kant, 1790, sees stories as media for truth, which is the correct correspondence of the mind with reality.  This version assumes that the truth is out there to be discovered, the mind has the capacity to get into correct correspondence with the facts of reality, and that the stories we tell should further this project.  Language is seen as a medium for expressing the truth which is already grasped by the mind.

The second version, which the instructor embraces, stretches from Nietzsche (1880’s) to Wittgenstein and the pragmatists (20^th C).  This version sees humans as incarnated vocabularies, linguistic beings who are centerless webs of belief.  In this version of language, humans cannot get outside the stories or social practices that they incarnate in such a way that they can compare them to reality (because “reality” is an expression that is part of one or another social practice).  Rather, they can compare one set of vocabularies or social practices with another to see which will be more successful in helping them cope with their environment.  In this version, what counts as a “fact” is not some non-linguistic given that we compare our language to but, rather, a tool for use in a language game or form of life.

Both Chalcedony and Giva can be understood according to this last interpretation of language, inasmuch as Chalcedony wants to socialize Belvedere into the stories that will “protect the other children and animals” rather than correctly correspond with reality, and Giva wants to edit her recordings so that they will capture the racism, sexism, and quest for monetary reward that the discipline of the British Empire inculcated into their young men rather than the conviction that African were genuine human beings with autonomous lives of their own.

Pl 370O Craters

“Craters” gives us a picture of a world in which our normal human connections and expectations are filled with “holes” as a result of our trading our solidarity with one another in for the isolation and solipsism that is attendant upon survival measures.  This necessary skepticism and mistrust about all human connections requires a suspension of all human feeling and a “living in the mind” according to one’s “calling.”  Human reality is inaccessible in this world of shifting appearances.  Duty to one’s calling replaces the notion of an “ethic.”  We are back to a Cartesian world view without the guarantee of a Perfect Being that our ordinary, familiar, substantial world is available for our habitation.  We are ultimately all alone.

Pl 370O Skepticism, Knowledge, and Ethics

Our ordinary language provides us with a way to meet the metaphysical problems posed by extraordinary uses of language such as the questions “Is it possible we are always wrong?”, “What is Knowledge?”, and “What is Ethics?”  Language makes discriminations for particular purposes in particular forms of life.  The claim that we are always wrong is misleading because the word “wrong” makes no intelligible discriminations.  In our ordinary discourse, “wrong” means a departure from “right,”  “false” a departure from “true,” and “opinion” a departure from “know.”  Language is a social product and the various language games that we play are socially learned and revised.  We cannot get outside our language games to determine whether they are in accord with some non-linguistic “reality” or not, because what is “real” is part of a language game.  Thus, intersubjective agreement about the standards and criteria governing our language games determines what we are going to count as right or wrong, true or false, knowledge or opinion.  Therefore, the skeptic is mistaken in claiming that all of our beliefs could be wrong.  If there is no such thing as a correct or right belief, the word “wrong” is meaningless, because wrong means a departure from what is right, which is a judgment in accord with the standards of one or another language game.  Our judgments about the appropriate use of “know,” “believe,” “hope,” or “wish” concern our confidence in the degree of evidence that we have for the claim we are making.

An ethic grounded in natural moral law is mistaken because nature does not have goals, only regularities.  Intentional beings (humans) have goals or purposes as well as regularities, but non-intentional beings in nature have only regularities (animals being limited exceptions to this analysis).  Thus it is a mistake to say that violating the “goals of nature” constitutes moral evil.  Nature cannot provide us with natural moral laws.  As intersubjective languages users, we must decide which criteria to appeal to in order for us to cope with our environment more successfully.  Turning babies into bombs, as was done in the “Craters” story destroys the intersubjective agreement necessary to make us rational moral agents and language users, because it erodes the trust enabling us to become competent tellers of our own stories.

Pl 370O Against the Current

‘Against the Current” raises questions about the nature of the self and the purposefulness of life.  With regard to the nature of the self, Aristotelian vs. Nietzschean pictures of the human person immediately come to mind.  Aristotle viewed the human person as having a function, to actualize the potential of his three faculties—reason, emotion, and  appetites in the appropriate and hierarchically ordered way, according to the experience of a person of practical wisdom, acting within a community of persons.  This view was taken over by Thomas Aquinas and used to legitimate the teaching of the Catholic Church that the Beatific Vision is the goal of human life.  Phil Rackman in the short story seems unaware of this view of human existence.

Nietzsche saw human life as natural and its purpose was self-creation.  He urged humans to be life affirmers rather than life deniers and therefore saw the postponement of life’s gratifications to an afterlife as a perversion of nature.  He suggested that to affirm life even in the face of the eternal recurrence of all thing would be the highest form of human striving.  Phil Rackman seems to have arrived at this insight in the course of his journey back in time.

The difference between the Aristotelian and Nietzschean view hinges on the Aristotelian conviction that the human person has a center, independent of beliefs, which is made for a teleological (goal directed) purpose.  The Nietzschean picture is of a centerless web of beliefs in which the web constitutes who the person is.

The question of whether life has a purpose or not is the question of whether to embrace Aristotle’s teleology or Nietezsche’s notion of life as art or self-creativity.  The isolated, cut off character of Phil Rackman seems to suggest a Nietzschean perspective.

Pl 370O Hiroshima

The atomic obliteration of Japan in 1945 reminds us of how precarious life is when decisions are made in private, without the consultation and deliberation of those who are affected by these decisions. We are all social beings, having become human by the acquisition of human linguistic social practices.  Thus we have an obligation to be part of the decision making process that will eventuate in policies that have a bearing on our interests.  The leaders of the Axis and Allied powers in WWII made their decisions in private and then conscripted millions of young people to carry out their policies without these young people having a voice in these policies.  The outcome was the proliferation of nuclear weapons with no public discourse about their use.  Thus the nuclear clock is still five minutes to midnight.

Chalcedony in “Tidelines” is the end of that nuclear madness and she dies trying to teach Belvedere to tell a different story with his life.  Giva in “The Mists of Time” tries to show what exclusion of African voices from policies that affect them results in.  Martha Trumanente in “Craters” is cut off from public discussion of issues of governance, as is everyone else in the story, with terrifying consequences.  And Phil Rackman faces the return to the past affirmatively, if alone.  The science fiction stories warn us of the ultimate isolation of the self that we all face when we are deprived of intersubjective deliberation about the stories that will affect us.

So far in this course we have considered three themes, each of which has two opposing views.  The first is 1) the relation of words to world.  The classical view (Plato to Kant and beyond) stresses a word-world correspondence, insisting that our words adequately represent the given structure of reality.  The neo-linguistic pragmatist view (Nietzsche, existentialism, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism) emphasizes that language is a tool meant to help us cope with our environment more successfully.  Intersubjective agreement as to standards and their application in various language games gives us the tools, always contingent and revisable, to help us cope better. 

The second theme is 2) skepticism and knowledge.  The classical view of philosophy leads to skepticism because one is always unsure whether or not one has correctly grasped the essential natures of things.  Necessary knowledge is always uncertain and, therefore, dubious.  The pragmatist tradition looks to the ordinary distinctions that our language makes and sees doubt as a departure from conviction.  Thus all of our beliefs cannot be wrong, only those that we have a reasonable, checkable doubt about.  Knowledge in this tradition is intersubjective agreement, not necessity. 

The third theme is 3) Aristotle vs. Nietzsche.  Associated with the classical tradition, Aristotle and his followers thought that human beings had a built in purpose and that fulfilling that purpose was the goal of human existence.  Thomas Aquinas translated this goal into union with God.  The Nietaschean pragmatist tradition sees human beings as self-creators, centerless webs of belief who are always in the process of defining themselves by the vocabularies they incarnate.  The goal of this tradition is enhanced self (and Self) creation.

Pl 370O Roxie

Roxie tells the story of a Nietzschean celebration of life as the narrator’s dog ages, one of his walking companions, Tony, is suffering through chemotherapy and declares that he is “still vertical,” a very elderly couple remark on what a beautiful dog the narrator has, and an asteroid is almost certain of colliding with the planet earth, threatening the end of civilization.  The author/narrator states that “even when that nothingness reclaims us, there remains that unvanquished honor of having once, in some great way or another, having been alive.”  This story seems to challenge the eschatological, teleological theme, inherited from Aristotle, Augustine and their followers of an intrinsic purposefulness to life.

A companion theme to the story is the question of Roxie’s ability to think.  This raises the Cartesian question, “How does one know whether anyone else but oneself is thinking?”  The Wittgensteinian answer is that “thinking” is not a private, mental event but a public, social application of the linguistic expression “he/she is thinking,” for which there are public behavioral criteria, the most prominent of which is the uttering of sentences, e.g. “What were you thinking?”  “I was figuring out how to complete my task with the obstacles I anticipate.”

In this vein, the question of a non-language user’s ability to think comes into consideration.  Is Roxie’s ability to fool her owner with a limp, to urinate on his carpet in retaliation for a denied walk, to notice details that the owner is unaware of evidence of an ability to think?  This needs further discussion.

Pl 370O Science Fiction and Philosophy

Continuing the discussion of whether non-humans (computers and animals) can think, the instructor concluded that “thinking” is ascribed to beings who use language as a tool rather than a medium of expression.  In this respect, the ability to make inferences in logic, to know what it would be like to make a wrong move in a language game, to be self-critical, to be hypocritical, to lie, to hold oneself to standards and to be able to change standards, to create poetry and music are all characteristics of human thinking which computers and animals lack. Animals are capable of responding and learning but not “thinking.”

In his essay on the relation between science fiction and philosophy, Peccorino determines that science fiction has the capacity to open human beings up to new possibilities (which he calls the speculative function), whereas philosophy exercises a critical and logical role (which he calls the analytic function).  Though Peccorino quotes John Dewey, a pragmatist, in his favor, throughout the article he seems to view philosophy as exercising a logical function as part of its disciplinary commitment.  The instructor for the course pointed out that logic itself has a history and is always part of some narrative or other rather than being a gift that is part of the structure of the human mind.  Thus he sees the relation between philosophy and science fiction as that of one tradition of stories with a loose family resemblance (philosophy) commenting on another genre of stories (science fiction) with a view to seeing how the possibilities and warnings coming from science fiction can enable us humans to cope more successfully with our environment.

Pl 370O The sky is large

The astronomer Cui taught Ling that the Middle Kingdom was not the center of the universe but one of many worlds that circled around the sun, thus demythologizing the Middle Kingdom’s conception that that the Dragon Throne was the center of the universe with other stars and satellites losing significance as they found themselves farther and farther away from the throne.  So human beings were thought to gain significance by their approximation to the throne.  The Bright Kingdom also looked to the heavens for a favorable time to attack the Mexicas, a civilization whose astronomical beliefs reflected their faith.  They believed that their world was only a few centuries old and that contrary evidence was put there to test their faith.  They also had multiple calendars and in times between wars played at games that prepared them for war.

Cui and Ling, once prominent in the emperor’s court but now consigned to penal solitude, are pictured as a brave attempt to replace the method of fixing beliefs by reliance on authority and tradition with the more daring pragmatic method of testing hypotheses by observation and practical consequences.  The story challenges the attempt to read supernature’s intentions and designs from the descriptions of the natural world.  Thus the notion of a chain or hierarchically arranged ladder of being, the justification of the suppression of women or people of color as a design of nature, the attempt to see history as evolving from a distant tyrannical and polytheistic past to a democratic monotheistic present as part of nature’s design, and the appeal to a natural moral law are all part of the framework that this story calls into question.

Pl 370O Stephen Jay Gould

Gould wants to argue that nature can give us no clue as to the intentions, if any, of a supernatural, all perfect being, inasmuch as nature displays no overall benevolent purposefulness, which one would expect from the hands of a benevolent intelligent designer.  Natural phenomena such as drought, earthquakes, hurricanes, and the existence of ruinous diseases seem to belie the notion of purposefulness in nature.  In addition, the unfeeling cruelty of certain species of insects, in particular parasitical bands of wasps, toward their hosts seems to make a mockery of the claim that nature is guided by moral intentions.  In addition the notion of a great Ladder of Being in which beings are arranged in a hierarchical order descending from God, who has being in an unlimited fashion, down through the grades of successively more limited species of being—angels, humans, animals, plants, non-organic beings—is predicated on the linguistic fallacy of making “being” a predicate like other properties of an object, such as red, hard, coarse, long, etc.  when “being” merely designates that some object is real and not fictional.  Thus we are not permitted to make an inference from so called limited beings to an unlimited being, since limitations in “beingness” is a category mistake.

Pl 370O The Ocean is a Snowflake

In a world where there are no print media, no books, there is competition for how to depict reality.  The animators are interested only in simulations as a replacement for reality.  They seem to be winning the day.  The people of far off civilizations like to experience as many vicarious events as possible and the animators fulfill their dreams.  Thorby, the main protagonist in the story, states, “Everything to do and nothing matters.  Story of everyone’s life.”

The realist purists in the story are represented by Thorby, who proposes a Heraclitean notion of constant change, flux, explosions and new beginnings, and Leoa, who wants to record reality as it always was and give her viewers an image of being as permanent, timeless, and changeless in the tradition of Parmenides.  The people themselves seem to favor the view of Leoa, inasmuch as they want to keep themselves young, sexually attractive, and ageless.  The end of the story seems to favor the view of Thorby who finds himself alone and separated from people, but knowing that “his normally expressionless face was cracking wide open with pure joy, and Leoa and her cameras were in some city or on some ship somewhere farther from him than anyone had ever been.”  This is pure Nietzschean life affirmation.

Two things are noticeably absent from the story, however: dialogue and writing.  Thorby and Leoa never really engage in dialogue for fear that they might be caught unprepared by the others’ camera.  Thus Leoa accuses Thorby of “intoning” and Thorby accuses Leoa of wanting the perfect spontaneous looking shot, for which she is willing to employ endless camera takes.  This lack of dialogue makes it impossible for them to think the thoughts of the other and have their own normative vocabularies challenged by the other.  The lack of writing reinforces this notion that humans cannot share the thoughts of the other and become self-critical and transform his/her own self.  They are condemned to be passive subjects of more and more unreflective experiences.

Pl 370O  Nature and Science Fiction

The instructor tried to make the case, against the flow of the argument in “The ocean is a Snowflake,” that the self is social, constituted as George Herbert Mead maintains by the self’s internalizing conversations s/he has with others in such a way that the self can have conversations with him/herself and thus become self-critical, i.e. able to evaluate the vocabularies and norms by which s/he currently defines herself in favor of vocabularies that make for more successful coping.  Thus, humans are incarnated vocabularies whose current final vocabulary is achieved through dialogue and reading and writing texts, the only way that one can get to know the thoughts of an other and talk back to those thoughts as well as talk back to one’s own thoughts.

The dialogical, social nature of the self is in play in responding to the question of the supposed dualism between nature and culture.  If culture, the current sets of descriptions that we humans use, is a Kantian conceptual scheme that tries to interpret the givenness of nature, then there is no way that we could ever be assured that we have grasped nature as it is in itself and therefore no way of knowing what nature really is.  However, if we ditch the nature/culture dichotomy and see “nature” as playing a role in our current linguistic descriptions, then alternative descriptions of “nature” that emerge in science fiction can be  compared to our current descriptions to see which are more useful for helping us cope more successfully with our environment.  This decision will be part of our final vocabulary and thus a crucial part of our self-definition.  Our ways of talking about nature are therefore central to our ways of talking about self.

Pl 370O Stray

Ivan, an immortal, weary of his centuries of playing puppet master to human mortals that desperately needed his being and love for their own personal fulfillment, finds himself soul-dry, an empty carapace at the side of the road in the 1930’s-40’s in segregated America.  He is taken in by a young black woman to whom he tells his story; she believes him and they are married.  The science fiction story is about the tension the two experience between Ivan’s need to return to his former life posture of controlling, making things better for people, and, in the process, making them tools, puppets, and slaves, and Muriel’s insistence that he let them be and just watch what they choose.  Ivan begins to see that his former stance was that of a roach crawling over the bodies of those he controlled.  Yet, the tension crystallizes around the figure of Sarah, a young white girl whom Ivan finds praying by a cemetery and whom he comforts and brings home to Muriel.  Muriel convinces him that Sarah is a violation of his promise to take responsibility for her and to leave her alone.  Ivan ultimately agrees to send the young girl back, no worse for her experience with Ivan and Muriel but no better either.  The story is favoring a commitment to the human condition and all of its caprices over an ultimate state of perfection that this embodied life is only a dim preparation for.  Mortality with its uncertainties and contingencies and mistakes is preferable to the anti-human state of immortality.

Pl 370O Metaphor as a way of saying the self

The difficulty in appealing to metaphor as a way of saying the self is that this move presupposes a false dichotomy between the literal and metaphorical and the self and what we say about it.  It is a repeat of the old scheme/content dichotomy that Immanuel Kant is responsible for which maintains that our conceptual schemes variously organize the content of experience that is a raw given.  Thus the literal/metaphorical dichotomy privileges the literal use of language as getting us closer to reality as it really is and consigns the metaphorical use of language to the ornamental, the poetic, to rhetorical flourishing.  But language is not the representation of reality and its goal is not to get us closer and closer to the way “things really are.”  Language is a tool for coping.  If we scrap the literal/metaphorical dichotomy in favor of familiar and unfamiliar descriptions, then we can privilege one description over another only for local, particular purposes and not for the assumption that one is more essentially correct than another.

The same analysis can be given for the self/what one says about the self dichotomy.  It also assumes that there is a privileged grasp of the self which is afforded the possessor of private mental events.  Others can only guess or make inferences as to what goes on inside the private mental theater of the one experiencing.  However, if one sees talk about the self, whether by the self or others, as being public and social and that which is constitutive of a self, then a conversation about which description sets one should incarnate is possible, with the result that one can become self-critical and accept or reject the recommendations and corrections of others in the process of defining oneself.  But, in principle, there is no dichotomy between a “self” and “what one says about oneself,” even though one can choose not to vocalize his/her own self-descriptions.

Pl 370O The Alchemist’s Gate

The “Alchemist’s Gate” may be taken on two levels of meaning.  The first is a metaphorical (or unfamiliar) way of calling attention to that which is constitutive of human personhood: the fact that we humans become genuine selves by settling on self-descriptions as a result of imaginary conversations that we have with our past and future self-descriptions in the interest of helping us cope more satisfactorily with our environment.  By assessing these alternative self-descriptions more critically, we may achieve some understanding of what these descriptions entail and be enabled to take a stand on the implications of these descriptions and so improve and enrich our current final vocabulary.

A second level of meaning is the theological proposition that we are characters in a life script that is already written for us by Nature or some Transcendent Being and that we are merely acting out the story told by this Force.  In this scenario the alchemist’s gate provides us the opportunity to appreciate what story we inevitably are acting out.  This story involves such concepts as “free will” and “determinism.”  It asks us to accept as mysterious the compatibility of two seemingly incompatible propositions: 1) that human beings are free to choose their projects and 2) that all human actions have necessary antecedent causes.

Pl 370O Sartre

Sartre distinguishes non-human beings, which he refers to as “in-itself,” and human beings, which he calls “for itself.”  Non-human beings have their essential natures already fixed.  They can be manipulated by human beings for human use and therefore have the function of serving whatever interests human beings have.  Human being, however, has no essence.  It is freedom-to-define-itself by its actions and choices, and therefore its being is always in suspense.  Sartre says that the past is irremediable but that its meaning is determined by the project for the future that human beings commit themselves to.  Thus the past gets its meaning from the commitments and decisions that human beings make.

Sartre seems to be engaging in the same philosophical fallacy as is made by those invoking the classical literal/metaphorical dichotomy.  Just as those who want to distinguish the literal from the metaphorical on the grounds that literal language gets us closer to reality as it really is and metaphorical language is rhetorical ornamentation, so Sartre wants to make a distinction between the past as an objective, given event and the meaning that humans give that past.  The remedy is to see everything, non-human beings as well as humans, the past as well as the future, as being under a certain set of descriptions.  These descriptions are tools for successful coping with the world.  The greater the fund of descriptions and self-descriptions one has to draw upon, the greater is the possibility of more successful flourishing.  Thus, instead of referring to an object and the meaning we give it, it would be better to assess the various ways we have of talking about something against alternative descriptions to see which descriptions better serve the particular interests or forms of life we are engaged in.  This releases us from the obligation to try to represent or make contact with an object as it really is independent of the meaning we give it.  Everything is under one description or another.

Pl 370O  Saving Tiamaat and The Second Sex

Both writings are concerned with the issue of confronting the alien in others as well as ourselves (the crocodile in Debra’s encounter with herself in the mirror).  The desire to essentialize one’s own ethnic origins, sex, gender, nationality, etc. and to make the identity of others derivative from one’s own or hostile to one’s own is at the basis of the Self/other dichotomy that has been behind the oppression and exploitation of groups of individuals throughout human history.  The Other has no identity of his/her own except as a reflection of what s/he is not: not male, not white, not Protestant, not Western, not civilized.  Thus the other has no individuality but is an instance of a type: the eternal feminine, the noble savage, the barbarian, the oriental.  At the end of Saving Tiamaat, Debra decides to “launder her soul.”  Both Gwyneth Jones and Simone de Beauvoid suggest that the beginning of a solution is to see others as other “selves,” selves who comprise the conversational partners that constitute us as genuine selves, fellow incarnated vocabularies.

Pl 370O  Dark Heaven

Dark Heaven seems to be a reflection of a Dark Earth as seen through the eyes of detective McKenna who has risen from an officer of vice to the homicide squad and is now pursuing the suspected murder of two humans.  His pursuit takes him on a journey through the dredges of humanity, which he seems to acknowledge in an uninvolved way, following lead after lead until he traces the deaths to Centauri tourists who have been protected by the federal government in exchange for their technology.  The Centaury explain that they were only feeding their young and that this present life is a stage in a transition to a dark heaven where minds become wave packets joined with hosts of other minds forever.   McKenna wonders what significance this has for our present embodied existence and the reader is left questioning whether this dark earth is simply a temporary resting spot before the final union of minds in dark heaven or whether this present world must ultimately matter a great deal to us, since dark heaven seems to be the product of an alien theology.  The ultimate significance of our embodied existence is at stake here.  McKenna concludes that at least he will not view the strangeness of the universe the same way again.

Pl 370O Feminist theology and science fiction

Both contemporary feminist theology and science fiction attack the dualist patriarchal tradition in theology that draws a radical distinction between spirit and matter in reality and assigns masculine characteristics to spirit and feminine characteristics to matter.  In this view, spirit and the masculine is privileged over matter and the feminine, which is expected to be subordinate to the upper realm.  Both recent feminist theology and science fiction attack this dualism in favor of a pantheism or panentheism in which the world is seen as part of or embedded in God.  Thus, symbols of mystical oneness with the whole of things pervade feminist theology and science fiction in an attempt to make contact with a “depth dimension” of human life.  A pragmatist like William James could appreciate this appeal to a depth dimension as providing hope and comfort to humans, whereas a pragmatist like John Dewey thinks that dimension talk distracts us from our obligation to try to achieve solidarity with our fellow human beings.  The instructor shares the Deweyan view.

Pl 370O Sea Change

Miranda—Em—undergoes a sea change when, instead of being a lapdog to Callie, she discloses Callie’s smoking to Anila, confronts Mrs. Banville with the fact that Callie overdosed on toxins that Mrs. Banville was taking for her antiaging treatment, forced Mrs. Banville to pay off Anila’s debt, turned sixteen and became a citizen of the world in deliberate separation from her mothers.  She now has to make her way in this brave new world where she can either acquire knowledge or have her eyes tinted.  Anila herself provides a model for her by following in the wake of disasters and helping people put their lives back together.  The story confronts the reader with the terrible problem of what it means to be human, to make choices, when great wealth and position have decided one’s fate up till then.

Pl 370 Science Fiction and Emerging values

The essay attempted to contrast the Enlightenment world view of scientific objectivity and a rational utilitarian stance toward a material universe detached from human self-understanding and self-definition with a humanistic, neo-romantic, holistic understanding of human life as part of an organic relationship with the universe.  Aldridge claims that this holistic view that emerges from contemporary science fiction is both a piece of social criticism and a prophetic voice in helping us to think about alternative ways of conceiving of our relationship with our fellow human beings and the rest of the universe.