The enforced narrowing of the scope of my daily activities,
about which I wrote yesterday, has gotten me thinking more generally about
perspective. The conversation I have started with Tom Hickey, Jerry Fresia, and
I hope others deals in very broad terms with national and international
economic and political considerations, a marked contrast to the circumscription
of my personal life. Given the rather peculiar turn of my mind, this led me
ineluctably to the Big Five and the Little Five, which those of you who have
not had the great good fortune to go on safari may be unfamiliar with. The Big
Five are the lion, the rhinoceros, the elephant, the African buffalo, and the
leopard. Originally, in the old days when colonial types went on hunting
safaris, these were the five trophies most prized, apparently because they were
thought to be the most difficult animals to kill. After trophy hunting was for the
most part banned in East Africa, the Big Five became the animals that guides
felt obligated to show to those of us who went on game viewing safaris. In my
experience, guides would regularly pass up quite interesting lesser animals in order
to ensure that their clients ticked off on their lists the lion, the
rhinoceros, the elephant, the African buffalo, and the leopard.
At some point, I do not know when, a safari guide with a
sense of humor came up with a list of the Little Five, small bugs and animals
whose names happen to echo those of the Big Five: the antlion, the rhino
beetle, the buffalo weaver, the elephant shrew, and the leopard turtle. Now
these are very small game, needless to say, and hardly worth a guide’s attention
unless the clients are curious to see them, as Susie and I were. The elephant shrew
may look very small to me, but not to another elephant shrew, of course. And
the rhino beetle looks quite as menacing to another small bug as a rhinoceros
does to a large grazing animal. It is all a matter of perspective.
This is brought home to me daily in the apartment which is
now my world, as Susie and I watch the birds that come to our three
birdfeeders. Hummingbirds are tiny and look as though a slight breeze could
blow them away but, judging from their behavior at the feeder, they are
ferociously territorial and rather pushy. Goldfinches too, I am sorry to
report, do not share easily or play well with others, as they say in upscale
preschools.
One of the nicest literary expressions of this theme of
perspective can be found in T. H. White’s classic work The Once and Future
King, his three volume work about Merlin and King Arthur. You will recall that
when Merlin begins the education that will prepare little Wart for eventual
elevation to the throne, he turns the boy into a number of different creatures
so that he may see the world as they do and understand it from many
perspectives. As I recall, Merlin even turns Wart into a mountain so that Wart
may understand how things look from the point of view of something that changes
only over millions of years.
Lacking a magician, I do the next best thing and go to
YouTube where I find interesting videos on paleontology and the evolution of
life. It is humbling to reflect that from that point of view, my long life
counts for no more than that of a mayfly. The evidence of the bones suggests
that genetically modern humans have existed for perhaps 200,000 years. Assuming
that for most of that time twenty was a relatively late age for a woman to bear
a child, that means that there have been 10,000 generations of humans, only a
bit more than the last four of which span my long life. All of recorded human
history amounts to barely 5% of that period of time, and Plato, the first great
philosopher in the tradition to which I have given my entire career, takes me
back only 1% of the totality of the human story.
It requires a genuine feat of tunnel vision to care about
capitalist exploitation, or systemic racism, or even global warming.
Fortunately, evolution has seen fit to place my eyes close together above my
nose so that I can only see what is right in front of me.
Your reference to the placement of our eyes reminds me of the remark by then Federal Judge Abner Mikva (who was the representative of Hyde Park in the Illinois legislature when I was at the University of Chicago in the early ‘60s). Lawyers love footnotes, but Mikva didn’t. “If God had wanted us to read footnotes,” Mikva said, “he would have put our eyes in our heads vertically rather than horizontally.”
ReplyDeleteAnother quote of his is semi-famous. As a young student at Chicago, he went to the Democratic machine’s local ward heeler and said he wanted to volunteer to work on the campaigns of Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas. The ward heeler asked, “Who sent you?” When Mikva replied “nobody sent me,” the ward heeler told him: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”
David, I taught at Chicago from 61 to 63 and I wrote some position papers for Mikva. When were you there?
ReplyDeleteHello. I’m an enormous fan of your work. I know you’re a busy man and you may never have time to respond. But if there is ever a chance that you could spare a minute to respond, I’d like to make it easy for you by repeatedly posting this question unless you ask me to stop of course.
ReplyDeleteAllow me to sum up some of your brilliant arguments on your Kant lectures.
(I’m not a philosophy major so I might not sound a bit green here). You described Kant’s synthesis of the manifold through space and time. Kant says we become aware of space through exterior intuitions and then time through interior perceptions of some “thinking quasi self” that has been conscious of these phenomena. We can’t be aware of our thinking until after we’ve thought it so we are temporally separated from the self. We then apply this time to other things. Ok. So when we say time, we don’t mean time as the dividend of distance that equals speed. We can still observe that kind of time without being aware of ourselves right? We see objects moving through space and can construct horological time. Are we talking about the groundwork of time itself (a chronotope perhaps) where time operates according to a specific orientation (ourselves). Perhaps this is not scientific time but ideological or moral or social time (thinking of Mannheim’s ideological critique and his four different types of time consciousness). If that’s the case, we become solipsistic by constructing everything. According to our self-centered Time orientation. We create a chronotope that everything else reacts to. We act and others re-act (exactly like a Republican/Democrat/vegetarian would act we tell ourselves) and their actions are always geared towards our manifold for further analysis. Whatever observable personality that they have is viewed as just another of their phenomena (more complex but comparable to their blue eyes, brown hair etc). They are just complex automatons of our manifold, lacking the infinite freedom and mental creativity of our universe building consciousness. This of course leads to your deconstruction of Kant’s ethical theory. Question: But most of us (except trump of course) learn to believe that other beings operate in their own synthesis of time and space. They have their own consciousness that we cannot fully comprehend, rationalize, or predict. They are, as Levinas put it, infinite visages. They are infinite because they possess the one thing that no other finite thing in our constructed universe has; the ability to judge us and perhaps understand something about us better than ourselves. Why else are we so concerned about the tension between how we see ourselves and how others see us. We seem to simultaneously see ourselves as our noumena and as reductive phenomena in their own conscious manifolds. B133 tells us we can’t conceive of a consciousness beyond the manifold of space and time, but if Mannheim is correct, their time and (as you showed) even their space is incommensurable to ours. We seem to know that any summary we give of their consciousness will be reductive because our consciousness cannot comprehend a consciousness equal to or greater than its own capacity. Thus they are infinite only because they are impossible for us to restrict in our consciousness. They are always more than what we conceive. If that is the case are they not, even in our own mind beyond phenomena. How would your theory of Kant’s ethics respond? Thank you for all the content
I had a professor in some philosophy course I can barely remember illustrate some philosophical point (which I definitely cannot remember) by quoting "at random" from Human, All-Too-Human:
ReplyDelete628. 'Seriousness in play.' At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells: it kept on and on, and over the noise of the backstreets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out into the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy. Then I thought of Plato's words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless...
I think the professor wished for it to appear as an arbitrarily selected quote (the point, whatever it was, had nothing to do with the substance of Nietzsche's aphorism), but it was too beautiful not to suspect that the quote was in fact a personal favorite of his.
I was at the law school from Fall 1960 to Spring 1963. We were across the Midway from the main campus.
ReplyDelete"I think the professor wished for it to appear as an arbitrarily selected quote (the point, whatever it was, had nothing to do with the substance of Nietzsche's aphorism), but it was too beautiful not to suspect that the quote was in fact a personal favorite of his."
ReplyDeleteThen it is not surprising he was a fan of Nietzsche.
That's a nice selection from Human all too human
What the hell is a ward heeler?
ReplyDeletejeffry g. kessen
ReplyDeleteSeems like you're too young to remember the glorious days of smoke-filled room, machine politics. According to Webster, per Google, a ward heeler is "a minor politician who canvasses voters and does other chores for a political machine or party boss."
Look at a batch of wildflowers. Its all the philosophy one needs.
ReplyDeletePalmeter. Got it. So a ward heeler is kind of like Lindsey Graham. As for wildflowers, Anonymous, fragrant aromas seldom tell all the tale.
ReplyDeleteDavid Palmeter and jeffery g kessen,
ReplyDeleteWard heelers were low on the party totem pole, and definitely not elected officials. Wards were the smallest political unit. The person on the party payroll had the job of making sure people were registered and voted. Often, in the days before the New Deal, if someone needed some social welfare assistance, the ward heeler would facilitate some help.
My mother told the story of how in Jersey City, NJ, which was run by Mayor (Boss) Hague, a car would arrive to drive her father to the polls. Frank Hague was mayor for thirty years (1917-47), and was seriously corrupt. He was a multi-millionaire when he retired. On the other hand, he served the needs of his constituents very effectively. On the plus side, he had a maternity hospital built and on a few occasions he had the police stop the importation of scab labor when workers were striking at factories in town.
Surprisingly, I have always found one of the more fascinating subjects in nature documentaries to be plants. These involve massively sped-up videos so that we see up see what happens in a second what usually takes an hour (say). Their movements are not only complex and goal-directed but look positively intentional. I sometimes wonder whether we would view them as we do animals if they were only faster.
ReplyDelete