Before I resume my reading with Chapter 2, "Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy," I'd like to make a few side remarks.
Though Smith's language is very simple, so that there really is no need to express (re-cite) anything in my own language, I cannot help but feel the urge to give in to my involuntary recollections of similar thoughts from elsewhere in my adult life. Related thoughts, flashes of insights, movements in my thinking that I didn't know were dormant until awakened by a sentence or two that I read in this study, are all there. But all these I am resisting. I do not want any of these to intrude: because if I allow all these to seep in and shape my reading, then what I am doing here will no longer be a reading for the first time, but will turn itself into a review, a commentary of sorts. Having said that, I don't believe it is entirely possible to be so "memory-less" a channel. Nevertheless it is easier to be such when one is reading a philosophy text, such as this.
When we began this text, how did we start? We didn't start off with a human being as a single entity in order to analyze this being in various sorts of ways. Nor did we take a sample case of a multitude of people in order to figure out how they behave as a group. None of that. Instead we began, with no prelude whatsoever, with human relatedness. Right off the bat, we were interested in the question: "How people relate to one another?"
Without asking this question in such explicit manner, we began to wonder about how we were interested in the fortune of the others. That lead to a distinction between two aspects that we articulated roughly like this: though we know a lot about our fellow human being by the aid of our senses - we see them, hear them, feel them and so forth - what really is driving this ability of ours to be able to relate to the other person is not our senses, but our imagination. The faculty of imagination helps us experience the fellow-feeling in some yet-to-be-explored-thoroughly manner.
Having thus put our finger on this basic way of our being, we began to plow on, to see in what various manners this imagination come into play. Nothing in what we spoke so far is prescriptive. Smith is not saying that we ought to behave this way. We are talking here in a descriptive manner, describing what is already in play. The way we already are. It is important to keep that in mind.
Why are we talking about how we already are? What new stuff are we to gain from all this? Well, we are talking about how we already are because we forgot. We forgot because we, perhaps without really intending to, sort of covered this layer of what we already are, with another layer on top. This other layer on top spoke a different language; it fooled us into thinking that we are really this other, this top layer, and not the one beneath it. Somehow, over all these past tens and tens of years, we managed to spread more and more layers, one layer on top of the other, so that we sort of kept on going farther and farther away from the way we already are. Each additional top layer fooled us into relating to one another only in the way that layer wanted us to, and then another layer came along and wanted us related to one another in the way that layer wanted. Before we know, we are here and now, in the world of internet, in the world of blogosphere, and if we look around we will notice that all this world of internet, these groups, these blogs, all this stuff that surrounds us, is really another layer on top, which really wants us to relate to one another in its own way! What the heck? What just happened? How did we get so far from the real, from the bottom-most layer of how we already are? I am reading this text as one of my ways to get back, or to see if I can remember. I am not running away from the world as it is now. I simply don't want to be fooled.
OK, that's the end of my aside.
What the heck? What just happened? How did we get so far from the real, from the bottom-most layer of how we already are?
As one progresses in age, and with a few added ( layers of ? ) experiences, one finds that it is not entirely easy to escape the possibility that it all these layers ( or masks, in another not too unrelated context ) are(!) what you are - as a whole, or in part(s). And there is nothing more to it. Nothing hidden / subterranean.
As someone that I read long ago concluded, after an exhaustive dissertation into the relations between Form and Content - the Form IS the Content.
And that is the Truth ( if there be such a thing ). I find it difficult these days, to disagree.
:)
Posted by: KK | March 05, 2007 at 06:35 AM