Thursday, August 5, 2021

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 2

"Primary familiarity," as I've defined it in Part 1, is essentially the same as Aesopian contempt, the passive tendency to take aspects of experience for granted, whether or not one is justified in so doing. This species of familiarity is expressed largely by a sense of being comfortable with accepted realities-- though the downside of this comfort is that in some ways it can become boring. The person who experiences this boredom may seek some way to escape his dull round-- going on vacation, having an affair-- but in so doing the individual is not really assessing the things in his regular life that might suggest unfamiliarity.

"Secondary familiarity" is active in the sense that it seeks to reduce perceived unfamiliarity through one of two major methods, both of which involve the amassing of abstract conceptions about the world. This impulse relates to the famous statement by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." There's a sense that the person seeking to familiarize the unfamiliar relates to the unknown thing as a challenge to his intellect and/or imagination.

Take as example the aspect of human experience most associated with life's "dull rounds:" the generally steady rising and setting of the sun. Now, in pre-industrial societies, humans lacked any instruments capable of assessing the physical nature of the sun. Proto-scientists of the period, particularly those in hierarchical cultures like those of Egypt and Sumer, certainly amassed a certain amount of data about the movement of the planets they could perceive, and some may have even realized that Earth and the other planets moved around the sun. This close study of the patterns of particular aspects of experience is one of the two major methods, and can be lined up with Ernst Cassirer's idea of theoretical science. In our own time, of course, science has progressed to the point that the sun's nature is not especially unfamiliar to our culture. As a part of rote learning, schoolchildren assimilate such facts as the composition of the solar orb and how far it is from Planet Earth. Ironically, all of the findings of this type of "secondary familiarity" may devolve back into a form of primary familiarity for non-scientists: people know these facts and they may appreciate having a greater sense of the coherence of the physical world. Yet, for non-specialists, the data doesn't possess any special resonance. Presumably there are still scientists who regularly examine Old Sol looking for more mysteries to solve. But I would think that their quest to familiarize the unfamiliar would be rather limited these days.

The other major method of seeking secondary familiarity is, as any regular readers of this blog ought to expect, that of mythology and its expression through art-works. A primitive poet may have neither scientific knowledge nor perhaps any inclination to follow that discipline. So he formulates a story that familiarizes the unfamiliar nature of the glowing fireball that circles Planet Earth by saying that it's the flaming chariot of the sun-god Helios, who flies across the sky daily to bring warmth to living things. This assertion does not attempt to reduce unfamiliarity by accreting data about what causes underlie what effects. The storyteller presents what Cassirer calls a "free selection of causes," meaning in this context that the author selects the cause most appropriate to the artistic effect he wants to have on his listeners, rather than seeking the physical nature of the phenomenon in itself. The storyteller does not seek to explain-- few if any people believe the old "myth-was-primitive-science" canard-- but rather, he seeks to imbue an unfamiliar phenomenon with familiar associations, by surrounding the phenomenon with human-like trappings of chariots and horses.

Now, as scientific knowledge advances, the Helios assertion loses some though not all of its cultural force. By the time a Greek thinker like Aristarchus advanced the idea of heliocentrism, most intellectuals probably did not accept the mythic rationale for the sun's existence and purpose. By modern times, the story of Helios can be derided by scientific proselytizers as evidence of the gullibility of non-scientific primitives, and many persons with no interest in the subject will accept that verdict. Nevertheless, once the Helios story is a known facet within the vast history of both myth and literature, it never totally loses the charm of its aspirations to familiarize the unfamiliar. And thus a modern author like Madeline Miller may choose to place new wine in the old bottle labeled "the Helios myth," even if her story is more about the sun-god's famous daughter Circe. In contrast to the findings of theoretical science, the stories told by myth and art, in order to bestow familiarity upon the chaos of experience, can be take almost infinite permutations depending on what cause an author selects to achieve his desired effect.

More in Part 3, where I'll get back to the topic of the NUM formula.


 







No comments:

Post a Comment