Re: Porous Selves, Buffered Selves
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 14 August, 2023 03:10PM
Sawfish wrote, "based on what I've observed, it looks more likely than not that man is an animal in the same sense that a giraffe is. One is much better at treetop browsing than the other, while the situation is reversed in say, tool-making."
Not to continue the debate about animal selves, etc. -- but I'd say, Remember that the traditional hierarchy of being allows for human beings to be classified, in some sense, as animals. The higher levels include the lower. We have (or are) something that animals don't have or are not, plus that which animals have, and what plants have, and what minerals have. So I like to write tongue-in-cheek "Scholastic" definitions of Man such as "Man is the animal that makes promises," or "Man is the animal that digresses." We are animals in that we do what animals do (we exist, we have life, we eat, we reproduce, we alter our environment for our benefit), + more.
The traditional ontology allows also for a level above us that would, as a rule, be invisible to our senses. Like ourselves, these beings (call them angels) would exist, be alive (in some sense), be selves, and also possess, presumably, some faculty or faculties that human beings do not possess. These, it has been supposed, could include an immediate perception of truth rather than our acquisition of much, at least, of what we know, laboriously through the senses and by inference; and immortality; if the number of angels was created in a primordial time, there presumably have been no deaths of angels and no matings of angels to replenish the population. This of course is not a proof of the existence of angels. However, the traditional porous self will be able to allow for their existence on the basis of revelation and/or experience, where the buffered self will reject the whole idea.
That, by the way, leads me to something I wanted to throw out to the list. The buffered self culture in which we live has no place for angels, although the genuinely religious minority porous counterculture may do so. A great many people really would not like the idea of angels, good or bad, impinging on human existence. So angels are out of the picture and we breathe a sigh of relief.
But then we propose that there ought to be creatures on other planets. I think this is an important part of the imaginative life of many people. Among the "uneducated," this may take the form of enthusiastic collecting of alien plush toys and what not, enjoyment of conspiracy theories, and so on. Among the "educated," it takes the form of a scientistic assumption that "the conditions for life" in an inconceivably vast universe of uncountable galaxies of uncountable suns must exist, even if we have no evidence for such life; it is just not probable that in all that big universe we are "alone." We at least find the idea very appealing.
(And so Lovecraft populated the universe with a lovingly developed scheme of aliens on Yuggoth and so on. But discussion of Lovecraft and aliens might be better kept on the thread of differences between Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard.)