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trying to do this one step at a time
Sep. 2nd, 2013 06:13 amThis point has been met with incomprehension so many times on LiveJournal that I think I won't copy this one to Dreamwidth, where the groundwork of prior bewilderment hasn't been laid:
Maybe if I explain a bit more concisely what a non-reductionist remapping of the human condition would look like, using some of the metaphors that have puzzled my readers for the past seven or eight years:
A fast-food hamburger, canned beef stew and freshly made boeuf bourguignon are different ways of combining some of the same basic ingredients, with a few more items added or omitted. We do not ordinarily argue that a can of beef stew (I hated the stuff as a child) is either a degraded or a more fundamental version of boeuf bourguignon. It is perfectly possible to make a completely inedible boeuf bourguignon if you have no aptitude at all for cooking and you combine your ineptitude with a bad recipe and bad ingredients. I believe I recall that some European purveyors forty years ago actually managed to make an edible canned beef stew. But in either case, it is just plain bizarre to argue that a fast-food hamburger is just a differently cooked boeuf bourguignon, much less over which of the two is a more “authentic” reflection of the human capacity to cook the material that we describe as beef...you can argue over which one embodies greater complexity or even quality of flavor, if you wish, but then you are getting off into territory that is different from unambiguous analytical judgment.
And yet other aspects of human culture are constantly being broken down into constituent parts and judged according to the value assigned by the particular reductionist to those constituent parts. The reading of complex human behaviors as completely a reflection of cultural conditioning, economic motives, early-childhood traumas, or the firing of neurons combined with signals from the nervous system is equivalent to reducing the three dishes listed above to aspects of the main chief ingredient, a thing that a Hindu or a vegan would describe as a fragment of a murdered cow.
We need to analyze the components and combinations of human behaviors and beliefs and institutions with the same alternation of relatively dispassionate distance vs. committed but analytical passion that a food scientist and a recipe writer would bring to the three types of food categorized above. The fact also comes into play that we also have our own particular tastes in this comparison of flavors and textures, including the taste in which we don’t like, or we like but refuse to eat, any of ’em. But our ineradicable personal preferences shouldn’t be disguised as objectively analytical rules of procedure.
Maybe if I explain a bit more concisely what a non-reductionist remapping of the human condition would look like, using some of the metaphors that have puzzled my readers for the past seven or eight years:
A fast-food hamburger, canned beef stew and freshly made boeuf bourguignon are different ways of combining some of the same basic ingredients, with a few more items added or omitted. We do not ordinarily argue that a can of beef stew (I hated the stuff as a child) is either a degraded or a more fundamental version of boeuf bourguignon. It is perfectly possible to make a completely inedible boeuf bourguignon if you have no aptitude at all for cooking and you combine your ineptitude with a bad recipe and bad ingredients. I believe I recall that some European purveyors forty years ago actually managed to make an edible canned beef stew. But in either case, it is just plain bizarre to argue that a fast-food hamburger is just a differently cooked boeuf bourguignon, much less over which of the two is a more “authentic” reflection of the human capacity to cook the material that we describe as beef...you can argue over which one embodies greater complexity or even quality of flavor, if you wish, but then you are getting off into territory that is different from unambiguous analytical judgment.
And yet other aspects of human culture are constantly being broken down into constituent parts and judged according to the value assigned by the particular reductionist to those constituent parts. The reading of complex human behaviors as completely a reflection of cultural conditioning, economic motives, early-childhood traumas, or the firing of neurons combined with signals from the nervous system is equivalent to reducing the three dishes listed above to aspects of the main chief ingredient, a thing that a Hindu or a vegan would describe as a fragment of a murdered cow.
We need to analyze the components and combinations of human behaviors and beliefs and institutions with the same alternation of relatively dispassionate distance vs. committed but analytical passion that a food scientist and a recipe writer would bring to the three types of food categorized above. The fact also comes into play that we also have our own particular tastes in this comparison of flavors and textures, including the taste in which we don’t like, or we like but refuse to eat, any of ’em. But our ineradicable personal preferences shouldn’t be disguised as objectively analytical rules of procedure.
