A story about James Joyce

jackinyogrill

Joyce was staying with friends of his while working on a short story; one day, he stayed in his room from dawn until dusk, at which point he came down to the dinner table utterly exhausted.

"You must have done powerful work today, Jimmy," his friend says.
"Oh yes," Joyce answers. "I put in a full stop."
"But... You were up there for nearly fourteen hours! Is that all you did?"
"Not at all," says Joyce. "After hours of careful consideration, I took it out again!"

David Matthew

A nice little parable there. Does it vindicate or villify philosophical inquiry in your eyes, or am I missing the --- point?

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jackinyogrill

David Matthew wrote: »

A nice little parable there. Does it vindicate or villify philosophical inquiry in your eyes, or am I missing the --- point?

.

lol

Sorry, I didn't realise this thread existed at all. I posted it as a response to a thread in which the OP had simply typed a full stop "." Then the OP deleted the original post, and psni gave my response a thread of its own.

I suppose, if we look at my silly response charitably, it could lend itself to a couple of philosophical questions: how valid are the criteria by which we judge accomplishment and success? Is accomplishment/achievement an illusion necessary for the maintenance of our sense of self? How are our traditional concepts of 'work' (i.e. production of material goods or results) challenged by 'immaterial labour' (i.e. literature, art, comedy or anything else designed to produce an emotional or intellectual response)? Are those MY feet???

David Matthew

At first I took it as an allegory of philosophical 'progress' throughout the centuries... While everyone else is busy constructing sentences, paragraphs and entire pages, the poor philosopher worries over a full stop. And when he finally grasps the full and complete meaning, the 'being', of the full stop, only then will he dare commit it to paper.

And then his peers and sucessors come along and ridicule his boldness, his impunity, and go ahead and delete it.

But your way of looking at it is very interesting. And more contemporary. Many people have very set and rigid ideas as to what constitutes success and achievement. The philosopher (or at least the archetypal, 'lives in a wine barrel' philosopher) could very well be seen as the anti-success in this respect.

jackinyogrill

Well, ultimately the universe will eventually wind down into an undifferentiated blob of heat and magnetism, rendering all our actions ultimately pointless... or something. As well as that, a feature in New Scientist I came across recently asserted that there is no such thing as free will, because there are no 'gaps' in the structure of the human brain that correspond to the gaps in causality that we interpret as 'branching points.' AND in Scientific American, a group of researchers argue that time itself is an illusion. If all of that is to be taken at face value, everything we take for granted is an illusion that we cannot think ourselves out of.

If that's true, I reckon we should just be happy with what we have, whether it's just an illusion or not; living in a wine barrel seems perfectly sensible

David Matthew

jackinyogrill wrote: »

...everything we take for granted is an illusion that we cannot think ourselves out of...

If that's the case, that would also include the thinking you have done in reaction to those articles, and, eo ipso, the conclusions you have drawn, or taken, from them.

If you think yourself into something, you can think yourself out of it.

Scientific experiments are borne of thought, as is the concept of valid experimentation, and hence, verification of any kind. Anything that forgets that is neo-behaviourism, an often self-defeating branch of philosophy that tries to disprove the reality of mental life while tacitly relying on it.

MarchDub

jackinyogrill wrote: »

Joyce was staying with friends of his while working on a short story; one day, he stayed in his room from dawn until dusk, at which point he came down to the dinner table utterly exhausted.

"You must have done powerful work today, Jimmy," his friend says.
"Oh yes," Joyce answers. "I put in a full stop."
"But... You were up there for nearly fourteen hours! Is that all you did?"
"Not at all," says Joyce. "After hours of careful consideration, I took it out again!"

That quote is not originally from James Joyce it was said by Oscar Wilde concerning the proof of a poem he was "working on all morning" and the placement of a comma. It was in a conversation Wilde had with Robert Sherard and reported later by Sherard in a book he wrote on Wilde.

But this in itself makes it a more interesting - and serious - statement because it was a demonstration of the aesthetic view of art for art's sake and the supremacy of art over life - "life imitates art". "Aesthetics are higher than ethics," Wilde declared, "they belong to a more spiritual sphere".

Permabear

This post has been deleted.