It seems so simple to say that when you have a hammer, everything looks like it needs to be nailed in. But I have found that this simple sentence professes a far deeper message than just a warning that “thinking outside the box is necessary”. Our tools, our hammers, our screwdrivers go far deeper than just that. Our lives and our studies provide a context that can very subtly change the nature of the thing that we observe.
It is my opinion that we walk around with what I call “tools of interpretation” that influence our understanding and interpretation of events. At the core of it, it seems simple that our experiences and our understanding is what allows us to understand the world around us. That when i see water boiling because of knowledge of science i interpret it as deeper; as the process of H20 over coming it’s bonds and becoming a vaper rather than remaining in a lquid form.
But what happens when we insert being and human nature instead as the object of focus. The danger of the hammer, is that everything looks like it is something to be nailed. The studies of human life in their definitions create problems that limit them in the same way that a hammer limits the application of force to specific ventures.
Foucoult, analyzed human nature through the spectrum of history. His tool if intrepreation of human nature was that of history itself. But the understanding of history is separate and different than the understanding of human nature or being as I might call it. History as I understand the study analyzes future actions through past actions. Thus all past actions lead to yet a greater and greater point that has either been already realized or will at some point be realized.
Both Foucoult and ,aesthetic philosopher, Arthur Danto both applied this sort of notion to their independent perspectives. But the study of history in and of itself is not the study of being independent of human nature. It is just a perspective. I believe that when we study with a certain perspective we are putting on “rose-colored’ lenses. They help us understanding the world, but because they are just perspectives they do not in themselves have a complete perspective. If a single human had such a perspective then we would call that human being god.
In other words the perspective of our nature through the perspective of history provides a different analysis then the same view through the perspective of say nuerological psychology/psychiatry. Both of these perspectives have their values and both of these perspectives (though some proponents would argue otherwise) have aspects that they “miss out on” so to speak.
The more depth we add to a single perspective, we increase it’s capacity to analyze however our focus becomes super-limited as well. A microscope is wonderful at seeing a specific sample, but terrible at seeing the whole picture. In this I offer a danger, when your entire world becomes wrapped around the cause and effect of one specific lens, you know longer have the capacity to see the importance of other perspectives and your own lens contains all the necessary components to your own personal view of being. But because your own perspective is not the complete perspective then at some point your actions and your methods will not be line with how the world actually is.
In Danto proclaiming a historical end to art; to the extent that anything could be art we place the importance of art in a historical context we removed the immediacy of art.
In the discussion of male privilege we forget that privilege is a function of a society. The fact that I am a cis-gendered male means that there are some things that I cannot understand or even discuss is in itself a function of privlidge.
In the discussion of magic forgetting that other belief systems and notions of divine are viable is one difference between religion and spirit.
In the discussion of psychology, forgetting the being that we speak of is a means to it’s own ends.
I could go on....but I have many tinted lenses that I enjoy peering through reality with.
The Tools of Interpretation are necessary and useful, but they are tools. They are NOT our being.
~Food For Thought
