Comment by andrewflnr
4 hours ago
I don't think "judge writing by its quality instead of its source" is coherent. Certainly, the value of reading is in the thoughts it produces in the reader's mind. So if you want me to ignore the source, you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic. As a reader, it feels much like you telling me to eat something you made, which you enthusiastically assure me is high quality, but which you can't be bothered to eat yourself, and in fact you've never eaten anything like it before. Plus it smells like spray-cheese.
> you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic
The archaeological record is loaded with texts of dubious or unknown authorship. Many of our oldest classical texts fall into this category [1].
That doesn't make them "oxymoronic" to engage with. Just more difficult. From a time when few were writing and fewer of their works survived, this is worth the effort. When a nickel of electricity can produce text, it's not–we need the filter of authorship to decide how much effort we, as humans, should expend in engaging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer#Biography,_identity,_and...
Are you trying to argue that archeological texts weren't written by humans? Because otherwise I don't understand how your comment is related to the parent comment. It has nothing to do with not knowing the identity of the author. It's about the author being a human.
> trying to argue that archeological texts weren't written by humans?
I’m arguing they’re minds of unknowable foreignness to our own. We fill in the gaps because the text per se has meaning. If anything, we give those minds meaning through the text, not the other way around.
We impute “the thoughts that produced” those writings. One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers that produced a particular output in response to a prompt.
(I’ve absolutely read works without a care in the world for the author.)
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In Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" we learn that Menard, the fictional 20th century writer of the eponymous title, immerses himself in the language and culture of 16th century Spain (pre-1602, to be precise), to the point where he writes a chapters of a book which are word-for-word identical parts of Don Quixote.
Yet the literary criticism of Borges's short story points out how the two texts have different messages.
For Cervantes, this is a book for the people, written in the language of the people.
For Menard, this is a book for specialists, who would understand the old Spanish language.
In the 20th century of Bertrand Russell and William James, the philosophical concepts that an educated writer like Menard would know are far different than 16th century Spain, so an expression like "history, the mother of truth" has different meanings.
Since you mention Homer, if I were to write of the wine-dark sea you would know I am referring to Homer. It brings along cultural connections, including its own Wikipedia page.
While when Homer uses it, it doesn't have those connections.
The idea that a text stands alone is a formalist style known as New Criticism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism .
> New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. ...
> It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were "uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature."
Borges's story is a commentary about this debate.
While the linked-to essay in the Chronicle made no mention of the long discussion of the relevant literary theories, seemingly insisting that analytical writing somehow stands outside that debate, by simply ignoring the debate.
One of my favorite New Criticism corollaries is that an author, after a work has been published, is not in a privileged position from which to speak on its meaning. Tolkien qua author is omnipotent. Tolkien qua post-publication commenter is another speaker, albeit a highly knowledgeable one. (Purposely picking an example where the author re-wrote his works after publication, e.g. retconning the Ring into The Hobbit.)
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Such a rich response, much appreciated.
...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me? The identity of the author is not germane to my point, only whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind. You could argue those old texts are worth engaging with exactly because they're our only links to those minds.
> whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind
The mind is long dead. In true Cartesian form, we assume it existed. But it may not be, as with Homer, a single mind.
One can engage with text on its own. Even find meaning in it. Being unable and refusing to are separate categories.
Ok, but when you're reading Homer or Socrates or the Bible (we're relatively sure it has several different authors), you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers who, in large part, define what it actually means to understand the text. If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it.
> you're still engaging with a communal tradition of fellow readers
Inasmuch as you’re reading translations upon translations, sure. But none of that is necessary.
(One could credibly argue that engaging with an LLM is engaging with, in a sense, its training corpus.)
> If you read the Odyssey and decide it was actually about Pokemon, you're misreading it
If you can stand by your reading based on the text, I say go for it. It doesn’t work in your example. But there are plenty of cases where what was once an against-the-grain interpretation dived into and out of the mainstream.
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