[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by GdB

Thanks for the warning. But this privilege of yours has a consequence. ('Noblesse oblige') Please compare Lessans' views on free will between Peacegirl's test, and the Authentic Text.

PS
Ben je echt een Nederlander? Of doe je maar alsof?

With pleasure! peacegirl's nonsense babble (which she dishonestly presents as her father's nonsense babble) on the subject of free will is simply incoherent nattering. Like the rest of her rather bland Corrupted Text, I do not find it interesting or engaging on any level.

The Authentic Text, you see, is a literary work. It is not the clunky, pedestrian heap of twaddle that peacegirl hawks at $41.00 a copy. It is a Zeitroman of the America of the 1960s and 1970s, clothed in a charming picaresque. peacegirl has mistaken the protagonist's ceaseless chatter for philosophical revelation, about the nature of eyesight, free will, and juicy cunts and glandular homo-sexuals. What she doesn't simply delete, she attempts to uncritically translate this into some commercial gain in her Corrupted Text.

In reality, however, the Authentic Text contains much, much more. It is a moral recoil against the horrors of World War II, and a search for a national soul in the grip of Vietnam. It is a comment on the machine state, and the wedding of our individual fates with impersonal technologies. The sexual revolution is cast, in amusing and ribald terms, as a general eruption of sexual frustration rather than sexual liberation. It is, at its core, a stinging rebuke of the national preoccupiation with and apparent need for a guru, and an effete and navel-gazing academia.

What peacegirl takes to be a literal, actual "observation" regarding free will is, in fact, part of a rather devastating comment on the embrace of hedonism for which the era is well known. That its vessel assumes the persona of a self-appointed, pool-shark "Messiah" is, of course, potent comment in itself. What peacegirl reads as the rather comical conjecture that light is a property of the eye, and the famous proof by dog eyes, strikes at an academic establishment that has divorced itself from the society that it inhabits, and become unmoored from the principles it should embody. Recall, for example, a horrifying thought experiment involving the the mutilation and confinement of a solitary infant, existing for years in an isolation chamber and surviving on intravenous glucose, or an absurd experiment involving a vicious dog an fifty immobile individuals. The results of these "experiments" tend to be absurd non-sequiturs, but their inventor seeks and receives equally absurd admiration! This commentary recalls the Milgram experiment, Timothy Leary and the "turn on, tune in, drop out" counterculture of the era, and later even the Stanford prison experiments, as well as the other horrors undertaken in the name of science in the recent past. This "discovery" in fact damns the emergence of an morally unaccountable class of technologists at the top of society.

The Authentic Text expresses views on free will only on the most superficial and obviously facile level; it is so facile that it invites - even demands - the reader to explore more deeply the subtext that informs it. I have elsewhere noted its resonance with Philip Roth and John Barth. The more I consider the Authentic Text, the more I find to tie it to its place and time. Consider, for example, the metafictional dimension of the Authentic Text: the Authentic Text itself involves the Author’s efforts to have the Authentic Text published - c.f. The Sotweed Factor or even Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is there, as late modernism/postmodernism unfolds, not in vacuum.

I hope that this is responsive to your inquiry. This is why, in my view, it is so important to distinguish the Authentic Text from the Corrupted Text.

And to answer your question, I’m not Dutch! Just an honorary Dutchman. Because I don’t want to be a Belgian and there’s no room in Luxembourg until at least one boar leaves.