metonymy4u

Much of Foucault’s cultural critique centers on an archeology of form vs. function; as models for understanding human experience. These existential (explanatory) models changed significantly in post-Enlightenment Europe. The industrial revolution, Darwinian biology, the ascendancy of liberal republicanism—-all of these reshuffled the deck on human understanding. Whereas Adam Smith replaced formal economies of need and simple exchanges with a functional analysis of labor and capital, Darwinians replaced aesthetic appreciation of form with a functional genealogy of competition and reductive selection. I think Foucault’s point is simply that this had an effect on our view of ourselves. Perhaps salutary, perhaps not. But the dethroning of human aesthetic exceptionalism had far reaching implications that we have thus far failed to thoroughly interrogate. And perhaps—who knows?—to overcome?

One of the oldest human problems has been the question of how to explain our penchant for suffering. Humans seem to suffer emotionally in ways that other animals do not. Although we do not think this is a true as we once did (we are now more aware of social cognition in dogs, grief in elephants, self-harming behaviors in apes and even a possible case of a dolphin suicide as described in the movie “The Cove”), still it seems that no other species can manage to be so unhappy in the midst of so much economic largess. Why is this? One cause, I believe, is the size of our brains. Our large brains which have more intense, long lasting and overwhelming emotions than other animals, and which also have the cognitive ability to derive hypothetical relationships between simple events. So we can learn not just to be afraid of things that terrify us, but we can also learn to be afraid of terror itself, and learn to wage war on it, even though it is wholly a pigment of our imagination. The ability to derive relationships that are never directly experienced was Kant’s revolutionary insight into human cognitive ability. It was the answer to the problem of the poverty of the stimulus (e.g. how do we get from counting apples in an orchard to the concept of numbers ad infinitum) that had stumped philosophers from Plato to Hume. And although I believe other animals exhibit this ability as well, no other animal has based their entire being upon it the way humans have. The problem is that the same ability which gives us the geometry to build a house or plan an orchard also enables fear of the inevitable “other,” and builds the bombs to kill it.

i’ve never seen a people so surrounded by wealth, yet so poor.