What Joni Said

            On the Friday morning of November 11th, during yoga I remembered that Leonard Cohen had died and I wept a little bit a couple of times. In my view he was the greatest songwriter of this century and the last. I remember hearing an interview with Joni Mitchell about sixteen years ago in which she declared that the three greatest songwriters of the 20^th Century were Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. I have a similar, though different list. I would say that the top three are Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg and Christian Christian.

            When I got to the hallway outside of the lecture theatre one of my fellow students in Aesthetics class said hi to me and got to the door of the room first. He opened it slightly, then closed it and walked back out to the center of the hall. I asked if there was a class inside, even as I went to check for myself, then I also closed the door. He said it looked like they were taking a test. We started chatting. He’s a tall, slim guy of East Asian descent, who told me that he’s a math major and that this year is his first year of taking Philosophy classes. He’s also taking Knowledge and Reality, though not with Imogene Dickie, the cold and barely human instructor that I’d had. He told me he’s enjoying Aesthetics, and I agreed that the subject matter is interesting but complained that a lot of the theories tend to dry the interest down. He was in accord with that and offered that maybe there’s no need for any theories of art. I told him that philosophy is like that and told him George Gurdjieff’s story that philosophy was invented by Greek fishermen who, when they were forced onto islands during storms would pass the time by playing a game called “filling up he void with nothing”. In the game, someone would make up a question and then someone else would make up an answer, and thus philosophy was born.

            He told me about a site where I could download the third edition of the Routledge Companion. I expressed worry about it being a Russian site but he said it was safe. It’s called Library Genesis and he said he’s been able to get most textbooks that way as long as they are available as ebooks at all.

            The room cleared out and we went inside, but I first introduced myself and he told me his name was Matt. We shook hands and he went to his seat at the back. We continued to chat a bit though as I took off my leather jacket and carefully positioned it on the back of my seat so it wouldn’t be lumpy. I recommended to Matt The Philosophy of Sex course.

            Our lecture was on the topic of literature.

            Professor Russell began by renaming Poetic Truth, for our purposes, as Literary Truth.

            The subject of movies came up and I said that because movies are initially written they should be considered literature. I made the same claim about comic books even when there is no text. Devlin didn’t agree.

            He said that the question, “What is literature?” is not a very interesting one. Truth is getting something right and literary truth is a distinctive way of getting something right. If what you believe is true, you are right. Empirical truth is observable. In math, numbers are truth. The relevant questions for literary truth, as Aristotle said, are character traits such as courage or madness. The truth of what is courage is conveyed in literature.

            According to Shelley, literary truths are not distinctive in content but in kind. In literature we come to the truth through imagination. But literary truth is not truth at all, just expanding imagination, so is Shelley missing it?

            David Novitz tries to get at it better. Trying to preserve the distinctive in kind idea, he says that literary truth is knowing what it is like. Stepping into someone else’s shoes and being transported to another’s consciousness: this is distinctive. How do we understand this getting it right? What is the substance of the distinction? For Novitz it is less important what the subjects of the questions are except as a way of getting truth. Not belief but make belief and what truth would be for that. Truth can’t be a literal correspondence between belief and the world. If you make believe it’s raining, you’re not wrong if it isn’t. Make beliefs are true when your answer matches their answer. Our make beliefs are true when we get it right. There is a correspondence between your perspective and that of another.

            I was confused about the idea of getting into a character’s or an author’s head and how that relates to actual truth. He said that one is not occupying the perspective of a character but rather the narrator. It’s a type of truth that goes along with literature. You can enter into another’s perspective.

                        There was a lot of discussion at the end of our lecture.

            After class, I went up to OISE to check in my French exercise books and then to take them out again. When I opened my backpack to get the books though, a wasp came flying out and up to the high ceiling of the library to explore it’s new home and I’m sure, final resting place.

            The librarian told me that I would have the books till the 25^th and said, “So merry Christmas!” Since I always get the books for two-week stretches, I questioned whether it was instead, November 25^th that the computer was showing. He double-checked and confirmed that the renew date was indeed in November.