Theoretical Aspects of Essay Engineering

the “Aesthetic Experience” of the Literary Work.

Theoretical Aspects of Essay Engineering

 As noted previously – the essence of analysis and the purpose of essay composition is the creation of conceptual frameworks for understanding empirical reality. Essay Engineering is the application of this theory to the pragmatic fundamentals of textual analysis and basic research; Essay Engineering teaches these skills in a literary studies curriculum and is foundational for the humanities in general (referred to hereafter as the human sciences).

The fundamental nature of analysis (of historical events & geopolitics, literary works, economics, etc) is consistent with the general form of thought as it functions in the medium of language, and therefore in the human sciences at large: i) the sorting and organizing of non-quantitative empirical evidence into qualitative data sets; ii) the use of inductive reasoning to create conceptual frameworks that are “fitted” to the qualitative data set. (The term human sciences is interchangeable with the term humanities; its function here is two fold: i) to distinguish the field of study from prevailing norms of humanities research and instruction in the US, which are largely inimical to rigorous, evidence-based thought; ii) to set the human sciences on equal footing with the natural sciences; the humanities in the U.S. being significantly corrupted by entirely dubious pseudo-methodologies and fanciful delusions; they have, as a result, fallen entirely into disrepute.)

The Essay Engineering curriculum consists in methodologies that constitute a “qualitative algorithm for thinking”; this algorithm generates conceptual frameworks from qualitative data sets – for, as noted above, “the essence of analysis and the purpose of essay composition is the creation of conceptual frameworks for understanding empirical reality”. These methodologies include: single data point (qualitative) reconstruction with criteria of accuracy and completeness in propositional content; multiple data point (qualitative) synthesis; the evidence-driven extrapolation of the “signifying plane” and its conceptual framework (the “Constellation” or “Formal Pattern”), including the linkage of multiple single-concept points (“Formal Qualities”); the signal/noise phenomenon, that clarity of language is inseparable from quality and rigor of thought.

This reconceptualizing of humanities study was developed in the course of both academic and real-world experience, including: undergraduate studies at Harvard College and PhD research at Stanford University; investment banking, geopolitics consulting, and private tutoring in New York. The research findings that constitute the “qualitative algorithm for thinking” advance the fields of literary studies and history by working within the liberal-arts tradition and consistent with its essential tenets and the non-politicized, impartial pursuit of knowledge – but these new research findings push far beyond the limitations of existing methods and conceptions.

All thought necessarily pertains to one of two spheres: the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) or the human sciences (intellectual history, diplomatic history, economic history; the study of Greek classics of epic, tragedy, philosophy; etc.). In the natural sciences, quantitative methods are generally dominant, though qualitative thinking figures significantly, too. In the human sciences, qualitative thinking is dominant, though quantitative measures can be relevant contributions, too.

A research element that is central to Essay Engineering is the divergent functions of the concept in the two sciences, in the natural sciences and human sciences. In the natural sciences, a concept contains complete knowledge of the phenomenon and supersedes any instantiations in physical-material reality; e.g. the chemical formula for water, the nature of its phase changes from gas to liquid to solid, the phenomena of boiling-point elevation and heating-point depression – these constitute complete knowledge of the matter, and there is no requirement to investigate specific instances of gas, liquid, or solid, whether steam from a Yosemite hot springs, the salt content of the Mediterranean, or ice in the Antarctic. While in the human sciences, a concept is derivative of a particular circumstance of human reality such as historical event (or the fictional representation of reality in a literary work); e.g. the nature of the concept political revolution cannot be understood except in its specificity of American Independence (1776), French Revolution (1789) or Russian Revolution (1917). Or, to be more accurate, knowledge of a concept in human sciences is inductively extrapolated from a specific, delimited empirical reality. One can, of course, engage in the comparative study of multiple revolutions and identify certain common elements; but these common elements are always inductively extrapolated from the specific, single event; moreover, the most common elements (e.g. the overthrow of the status quo government) are seldom the essential element into and distinctive insight into a particular event, which tends to confound generalization.

The Essay Engineering curriculum continues in the tradition of intellectual history (or history of ideas), which is a sub-discipline of the academic field of history; it engages in the study of human thought in the broadest possible field; this includes foremost literary works and philosophy – but intellectual history has little to nothing in common with English literature departments and literary studies departments at universities and secondary schools. The curricula and methodologies are entirely distinct, even antithetical.

the “Aesthetic Experience” of the Literary Work.

Cultural norms and shibboleths are most remarkable for being entirely unrecognized. Consider the hypothetical objection on the home page: “But how can you study literature like it’s a lifeless, technical matter? What about the “aesthetic experience”? How can there be any experience of beauty with all this rigor and systematicity?” Many educated persons will agree immediately and insist that this critique contains a natural, self-evident notion of the literary work as opposite to science and engineering, as opposite the technical and rigorous – because (as such persons believe to be equally self-evident), the literary work consists in unmediated emotional richness, because its essence is a transcendent experience that defies categorization, that cannot be reduced to something technical and determinate like sentence-level meaning or propositional content.

This set of beliefs is, generally speaking, uncontested and is even considered incontrovertible – but these beliefs are entirely culturally constructed; while not entirely arbitrary, they are not undeniable, absolute truths. Though not widely understood, it is an uncontroversial assertion that present-day Western beliefs are greatly influenced by the historical epoch of Romanticism – even, that the present day is simply a further stage of Romanticism, that the Romantic epoch never ended but has continued uninterrupted since ca. 1800. (The difficulty of recognizing the nature of present-day cultural reality is the compounded by the general non-historical world-view of even the well-educated Westerner.)

Namely, the hypothetical objection (“But how can you study literature like it’s a lifeless, technical matter?…”) can be traced to various exemplary works of Romanticism. Among them, and concise and trenchant in its stating this position, is John Keats’ poem “Lamia”, where Keats attacks science as a pernicious force – a “cold” and soulless practice that deprives life of its unknowable truths (its “mysteries”), the entirety of its magic (“all charms”), and all spectral presences (“haunted air, and gnomed mine”), that destroys both life and beauty, that grounds heavenly, angelic flight:

***

While there are several major elements of 19th century Romanticism, those most relevant to the study of literature are the function of subjective states and the notion of the aesthetic (i.e. the beautiful). These notions, in turn, constitute a radical break with norms of the precedent Enlightenment era of the 18th century. M.H. Abrams’s noted scholarly work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition sets forth a duality distinguishing the respective world-views of the two centuries. The Enlightenment tradition posits the literary work as a largely objective description of reality. This tradition of mimesis can be traced back to the Ancient Greek tradition, especially Aristotle’s Poetics. (See Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems.) Contrariwise – the Romantic world-view posits the literary work as an expression of distinctive, even uniquely individual subjectivity, a subjectivity that exists to “illuminate” the world, in the heightened sense that there is no world without the individual’s interior sensibility. The individual subjectivity’s illuminating force creates an entire world that never before existed – and the experience of an aesthetic artifact (i.e. the literary work) in its beauty simultaneously creates a transcendent experience, which has risen above the mundane world and is entirely detached from practical and everyday life.

It is from this romantic sensibility that there arise objections to the application to literature of anything remotely related to engineering. Any effort to render the world intelligible, any external norms that dictate and constrain individual prerogatives – to the Romantic mind, these are undesirable and unacceptable, and so these approaches to literature must be rejected by the Romantic mind. (cf. Isaiah Berlin’s Roots of Romanticism.) But does the Romantic mind know how best to comprehend the literary work? Might there be elements of traditions predating Romanticism which should be considered?

References:

M.H. Abrams. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Link to publisher’s synopsis.

Isaiah Berlin. The Roots of Romanticism. Link to publisher’s synopsis.

Stephen Halliwell. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Link to publisher’s synopsis.