News from the Insane World of Terry Goodkind, Part 2

[Zahir al Daoud]

When it comes to how individuals find their own inner balances--yes, I am all for whatever works for an individual.

However, the whole point of the non-rational is that it not rational. It is not linear, not binary, not easily reducible to symbols if at all. By this I'm not speaking (er, writing) of the irrational, which is in contradiction to reason, but the nonrational, which is in a different sphere altogether.

I'll give a more concrete example. Years ago, I was assistant director for an Off Off Broadway play. I was very proud of not mentioning once during production my many disagreements with how the director was approaching the play. Yet I did discuss this with a neighbor, who was a bright man and an engineer by trade. He asked me once how I would have directed the play differently, and I began to tell him. He was baffled, and even told me what I was describing wouldn't work--even though this man had never even seen three seconds of a rehearsal in his life. What really got him was that I didn't care so much whether the actors understood intellectually what the test was about, but whether they could find an emotional "place" appropriate for the experience of the play.

The process of creating art is fundamentally an intuitive one. It is non-rational, non-linear and non-binary. That isn't to say reason doesn't play a part in the whole process, but as a writer and actor let me tell you a lot of excercises and effort goes into turning the rational parts of my brain off for a time. A teacher once put it very well. He said that, like many intellectually bright actors, I needed to find ways to "trick myself" into giving a good performance. He was right. The very best acting I've ever done, just like the very best writing I've ever done, always included hefty elements of complete surprise, where I did things I had no concious plan or expectation of that whatsoever.

Once I heard Edward Albee (the Putlitzer Prize-winning playwright) describe pretty much the same thing--about how a certain character in A Delicate Balance would walk on and he'd have no idea what she'd do next (once she walked on with an accordian, and he vividly described rolling his eyes when she did that).

Any attempt for us to dissect and understand this kind of process would kill it. I have literally spent years nurturing the knack of trying to dream while awake, then writing it down. It is not a rational thing. Nor is it irrational.

I can think of some other examples, but won't bore you with them. My point is that linear, binary rationality is not always appropriate and is often limiting. That doesn't mean it should be tossed away, any more than the fact you shouldn't use a screwdriver to hammer in nails means the screwdriver should go.

[Baeraad]

I don't dispute that sane, rational, well-informed people can disagree, and nor does Rand. In many cases, though, one of them is right and another is wrong.

Not that Zahir seems to need any help, but...

If one person says "the glass is on the table" and another one says "the glass is not on the table," then yes, one of them will be right and the other wrong. There isn't much uncertainty involved. You can argue about just what glass and what table you mean, I suppose, but ultimately, someone's world-view will turn out not to fit the real situation.

But if one person says (to take an example from earlier in the discussion) "terrorism is caused by religious notions" and another says "terrorism is caused by poverty"...

I strongly suspect that both play a part. And that they affect each other. And that they affect a thousand other things that also play a part. Simple answers just don't cut it. As such, both of my hypothetical debaters are right and wrong at the same time. To be specific, they are both partially right.

Here's a statement that I can't prove, but which my life experience seems to support: being partially right is the best you can hope for.

When two people are arguing, one of them can of course be more right, because he has a better grasp of the influences on the situation, and their effect. That's what you should be going for, and here premise-checking and logical deduction and so forth comes into play. As long as you admit to yourself that you're dealing with probabilities, not indisputable facts, you can go about it pretty much as usual.

See, there's nothing wrong with objectivism except the overwhelming simplicity of it. Goodkind (the only objectivist that I have very much experience with, since I gave up on Ayn Rand after the first hundred pages) tends to meet criticism of this kind with "well, if you don't accept that you're right and the other person's wrong, you end up having to accept everyone's viewpoint as equally valid, no matter how stupid or malevolent it is."

Uhm... no, I really don't. I fully accept that I can be more right than other people (in fact, I tend to assume that I am, but that's because I'm an arrogant bastard ). I just don't accept the comforting belief that there is an overarching Truth that is still simple enough for the human mind to grasp.

[EHK for Darwin]

Erikson attacks a straw-man.

No...I think at one point he stated that Goodkind's novels are nothing but strawmen. Personally I thought this part of his criticism was dead on.

Where it fails lies in its author's aversion to challenging his or her own assumptions (ironically) through the sweating-blood process of writing. As far as I'm concerned, if your theme survives the telling of the tale, then you effed up bad -- you weren't ruthless enough with yourself, with your most cherished beliefs. You didn't let your characters challenge them, tear them to pieces (as they are wont to do); you didn't let the story demand its own truth (which may be that there are many truths); in short, you took the coward's approach to writing fiction. But damn, it sells books, don't it?

Which is incredibly true of Goodkind. His convictions are automatically portrayed as absolute fact, opposition ideals purposely portrayed as weak and stupid at best, or outright sinister and evil. (and apparently evil simply for evil's sake. Which is fine in your standard fantasy novel, but doesn't work so well when you claim your books are some deep philosophical examination of ideology and the human psyche). And they're of course always easily defeated by G-Kind's truth at the end. His first book had me busting a gut laughing at some of the ridiculous characters and laughable villains throughout. They were silly characitures that basically amounted to the most pathetic strawmen I've seen in print in a while. And I've read Tom Clancy damnit, I know what I'm talking about. The man has the subtlety of a sledgehammer and is just as preachy as any 700 Club host.

And Erikkson's criticism is dead on. Goodkind never challenges his assumptions anywhere throughout the book. Add in his generally being a pompous, self-righteous little prick (Goodkind, not Erikkson), and it becomes impossible to take his novels seriously as any sort of philosophical discourse...as he apparently claims them to be. They're poorly written, dime a dozen fantasy novels. Nothing more.

Some decent action here and there, an imaginative monster, and I like the S&M....thats about all the good I can say about the first, last, and only Goodkind novel I will ever read.

[Nous]

Zahir: Oh, that kind of stuff. Still, I can't say how would you expect any philosophy (abstract thinking) to deal with that kind of issue at all, since it's something that should be a matter for the relevant disciples. Rand had a few courses on writing, now made into books, and they,especially the one on fiction-writing, emphasized very much the importance of subconscious and not censoring yourself in advance by trying to write consciously. I can't tell whether you would agree with her,but at least as far as I can see, you're not at odds.

Baeraad: You are essentially arguing that reality is too complex for human minds to understand, except approximately. I'd argue that the complexity is precisely the reason why we need to essentialize, conceptualize, form theories and test them. There are such things as causes, and I believe they can be identified. As long as you remember the facts and the context the theory is formed in, you are pretty well protected against making overt generalizations.

The theory might not explain every single thing that happens in some field,but it will explain some aspect of the behavior. The alternative to forming a theory, testing it against data,and acting on it is treating every situation as completely new and simply doing what feels best on basis of vague resemblances to earlier situations.

Overwhelming simplicity of Objectivism? Try reading The Introduction of Objectivist Epistemology and understanding it after a single reading, then come back to me.

Here's a statement that I can't prove, but which my life experience seems to support: being partially right is the best you can hope for.

I'll take you at your word.

EHK: I was speaking of his section on Rand, not his criticism on Goodkind.

[Zahir al Daoud]

Baeraad did not say reality was too complex to be understood, but that reality was too complex to be understood completely. Such nuances are vital and frankly I've noticed a tendency to ignore them.

Nous, I'm going to assume you did not in fact mean to be dismissive with your remark ("Oh, that kind of stuff") . But frankly, it requires a little bit of willpower, as that is how I have seen the noble and difficult and important field of art routinely dismissed in very similar ways for years and years and years.

I will however note that if you think abstract thinking does not come into play with the creative process, you are very deeply mistaken.

I suggest we both back off because right now you're pressing some buttons in my head.

[Nous]

Well, my apologies if I seemed dismissive of your field. That was certainly not my intention. The only thing "that kind of stuff" meant was that I now understood approximately what you were speaking of. And the comment on philosophy was a bit misleading; the only thing I meant to say was that it's not the purpose of philosophy to teach one writing or acting. I didn't mean to equate philosophy with abstract thinking, or imply that philosophy is the only field where you think abstractly, or that abstract thinking and creative process are not mutually dependent. None of that is true.

The distinction between being understood completely and being understood escapes me in this case. If you say "I sort of understand what you are saying" you don't really understand it, but only have an inkling. Baeraad said stuff like "being partially right is the best you can hope for.", "I just don't accept the comforting belief that there is an overarching Truth that is still simple enough for the human mind to grasp." I made an inference from these statements. If you identify a causal relationship, you have identified it completely. In real world there may be several interrelated relationships in each particular case. Still, that doesn't remove the relationship you have identified. Just because there is no object that is not somehow affected by unbalanced force, doesn't make Newton's first law untrue, or only partially true.

I'm ready to back off if you are.

[Baeraad]

I'd argue that the complexity is precisely the reason why we need to essentialize, conceptualize, form theories and test them.

I'm all for that. I'm just pointing out that you're less likely to run into unpleasant surprises if you're aware that your theories are, yes, approximations.

And there's nothing very unscientific about that, I assure you. It's called positivism. Every theory is a working model which behaves (in its context) in the same way as the universe seems to behave, and which can therefore be used to predict future events.

What a theory is not is a description of the laws of the universe. We are completely unable to study the laws of the universe, since we can just study what happens, not why it happens. But it's possible to notice tendencies and make use of them.

So how is this different from what you're arguing for, you might very well ask. The practical implications does seem to be the same - if you're trying to build a car, it doesn't much matter if you see combustion as a universial law or a working model.

However, when you're aware that your theory is by necessity a partial and incomplete model, then you're capable of accepting that other models might have their individual merits. That doesn't matter if you're building a car, because everyone pretty much agrees on how that's supposed to be done, but it's a big help when the topic gets stickier. Electrons aren't sometimes waves and sometimes particles, or indeed both at once - it's just that sometimes it's beneficial to think of them as waves, and sometimes it's beneficial to think of them as particles.

And when you start dealing with people, who tend to be rather more complex than electrons, then it's really a big help for you to know that the nature of things are contradictive - or rather, that our own limitations force us to see them as contradictive, since we're not equipped to understand the whole thing at once.

... mind you, I suppose this all boils down to me saying "it's all very complicated and if you don't see that it's because you're making things too simple for yourself" and you saying "it's all very simple and if you can't see that it's because you won't go through the trouble of sorting the important influences from the unimportant ones," and that particular discussion has been going on since ancient Greece, hasn't it?

The alternative to forming a theory, testing it against data,and acting on it is treating every situation as completely new and simply doing what feels best on basis of vague resemblances to earlier situations.

Yes, but now you're doing exactly what I disapprove of objectivists doing - you're making it sound as if the only alternative to your way of doing things is to do the exact opposite. As I hope to have made clear now, I am all for using the procedure you describe - I just believe you should use it while being aware of its limitations. That slight modification can't hurt (that I can see), and the additional flexibility it grants might conceivably help.

(edited to make it more diplomatic)

[VerySmallMonster]

You shouldn't be so hard on him, 3 of the 9 books he published so far in the proper series are very good novels. -> Wizard's First Rule, Stone of Tears and Faith of the Fallen.

IMO, Wizard's first rule was alright except for the S&M, and Stone of Tears was alright except for being way too close to Robert Jordan, but Faith of the Fallen? That book actually made me physically ill. It was the one that made me finally give up on Goodkind, and believe that is very difficult (for example, I am actually planning to read Knife of Dreams in the near future). Something about it, the whole philosophy and world view just made me sick.

On TG's character? Well, of late he seems to have become a little full of himself.

A little?

[Werthead]

In the same way that Hitler was a little bit sociopathic?

[Nous]

I believe we can learn why things happen, based on our studies of what happens. When you go deep down, there may well be a level where we can only discover what happens, without being able to discover why, but that is hardly a concern for most of us.

Yes, electrons are not waves or particles in the sense of macro-scale, they are something else, though they sometimes behave in ways that are similar to waves or particles. I have no problem with that.

I see no reason to see people as contradictive. It is enough to understand that they often behave inconsistently. When I try to understand people from one perspective, I also try to keep the whole thing in context, and remember that the perspectives complement, don't contradict, each other.

Well, in a sense there are infinite number of possible ways of acting, not just either integrating everything and acting based on that, or treating everything you deal with as an isolated concrete. All of those are compromises between the basic principles, though. There are two principles one might employ, but there is nothing that forces anybody to employ either consistently, or properly.

What you call keeping in mind the limitations of the procedure, I call keeping in mind the context in which the principle was formed, and where it may be applied. I wonder if we have the same thing in mind...

I think this has gone on long enough, and maybe it's time to let TG-bashers back to their thread. However, if you really want to continue, I'm ready.

EDIT:fixed a grammatical mistake.

[Baeraad]

I think this has gone on long enough, and maybe it's time to let TG-bashers back to their thread.

You're probably right. I've stated my position as clearly as I am able, and I can't exactly think of a way to prove that some things are unknowable. Isn't that logically impossible to prove, anyway? So yeah, I'm done.

Thanks for the sparring.

[Zahir al Daoud]

Actually, it has been proven mathematically that some things are unknowable. I don't know how but that is what matheticians say, and they ought to know.

But if you think about it, one thing that is absolutely unknowable is simply The Present. Since any form of perception takes some (usually infinitesimal) amount of time, all we can ever perceive is the very recent past. You don't see these words they way they are NOW but how they were a tiny fraction of a millisecond ago--the amount of time it takes for light to travel to your eye and then for your brain to process it.

As far as Terry Goodkind goes, his interview turn me off in a big way. But then, even more importantly, I read a few paragraphs of his first book. What utter garbage! I'm not even talking about the content. The WRITING! The man is terrible at it!

[Baeraad]

Actually, it has been proven mathematically that some things are unknowable. I don't know how but that is what matheticians say, and they ought to know.

Well, what do you know. Math is on my side. After having spent innumerable hours locked in life and death struggles with my math homework, that's a novel experience indeed.

The WRITING! The man is terrible at it!

While I can see what people mean when they say Goodkind's prose is atrocious, it was never that much of a problem for me. To be honest, I'm much more bothered by what is considered really good prose - which is to say, prose that is really intricate and goes off into strange metaphores and suchlike. You can trust Goodkind for that much - he says what he has to say without getting tangled up. And then he says it two or three more times, just to make sure the message has gotten through.

Okay, so that is kind of annoying, I admit...

But what turned me off was the excessive family values. I swear that the man uses the word "children" like a religious man might use the word "grace" - like it's the very core of all that is right and good and wonderful. Bleh.

And I don't really see how it fits with the selfishness-as-a-virtue thing, either. Uhm... it's wrong to help your fellow human beings out, but you should create a couple of duplicates of yourself and spend the next twenty years of your life catering to their every need? How does that work? You're not supposed to be selfish on your own behalf, but on behalf of your DNA? All that vaunted human capacity for reason is just a way to ensure that your genes get passed along? Aren't we pretty far from "the inherant nobility of Man" now?

Meh, I'm probably overthinking it. It's probably just a case of Goodkind going "I like children. Since I'm the perfect human being, everyone else are supposed to like children, also."

[Crazydog7]

I was sitting in my favorite spot last night trying to read Wizard's first rule agian and I finally figured out what was creeping me out. The part where the evil villian dude feeds the kid and then breaks his skull to divine the future. I literally had to go into the bathroom and puke.

It is indeed a rare author that manages to invoke a page or two for the S&M crowd and another fringe sexual group at the same time.

[Sad King Billy]

Just wanted to let you guys know that there is a wikipedia page devoted to Terry Goodkind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Goodkind.

[Slick Mongoose]

Just wanted to let you guys know that there is a wikipedia page devoted to Terry Goodkind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Goodkind.

They accuse Terry of writing fantasy. Shocking.

[Brys]

Someone should put the fake fansite in the links on Wikipedia. Not that the real fansite is any less entertaining.

But this is shocking:

Awards

1995 - British Fantasy Award, Icarus (Newcomer) (Nomination)

1995 - Wizard's First Rule Locus Poll Award, Best First Novel (Place: 7)

1996 - Stone of Tears Locus Poll Award, Best Fantasy Novel (Place: 15)

1996 - Stone of Tears SFBC Award, The Science Fiction Book Club's Book of the Year Award (Nomination)

1997 - Blood of the Fold Locus Poll Award, Best Fantasy Novel (Place: 18)

1999 - Locus Poll Award, Best SF/Fantasy Author of the 90's (Place: 49)

2004 - Prometheus Award - Naked Empire (Place: 4)

Goodkind won awards! And ones that even count! Are these real - or is someone trying to destroy my faith in the Locus awards?

[A wilding]

Yes, it is shocking - the Lotus people could only think of 48 SF/Fantasy authors other than Goodkind. :sick: Perhaps thoughts of him drove all other names from their heads ...

[williamjm]

But this is shocking:

Goodkind won awards! And ones that even count! Are these real - or is someone trying to destroy my faith in the Locus awards?

From that list, he doesn't actually appear to have ever won anything. Compared to GRRM's multiple Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker awards, getting fourth place in the Prometheus awards (for Libertarian fiction, IIRC) isn't too impressive.

[Brys]

Still, Goodkind being nominated for awards is a shocking situation. It must have been a bad year for Wizard's First Rule to come 7th in Best First Novel for Locus. While Goodkind may not have actually won any of these awards, remember that Martin's ASOIAF hasn't either.