(as a response to comments in part 2.)
on Genie: what if, instead of experiencing other people as a criterion for personhood, we posit that in order to exist as a person, a human must possess language? or, if it makes you feel better in the case of the very young, the potential to learn language?
[interesting: this debate keeps making me think back to morality & medicine class, where a substantial portion of the semester was spent talking about what makes someone a person (specifically with regard to arguments on abortion, euthanasia, and life support). none of the solutions we came up with seemed quite right.]
the depth of connection that can be achieved when reading something written across a potentially vast span of time or distance is, yes, profoundly spiritual.
How do i want my story to be told?
for years, i've had an agreement with a friend that whichever of us dies second will edit the journals of the first for publication. the problem with this is that both of us have been keeping journals for so long (and have plans to continue doing so for many more years before that time), so really what it will amount to is one person finally reading the other's journals, becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them, and remembering that no one would be interested in publishing them anyway.
i feel like there's a simple, sound-bite answer to this question, and i think it is, "in bits and pieces."
How do i want my story to relate to all of the others?
to the universal story that we each tell a part of?
tenuously. i want to make sure that when a fly hits my part of the web, the spider, waiting elsewhere, will know.
as for the influence i wish to have on one other person's story, i'll take that question as rhetorical, at least for now. but, in order to decide whether it will remain so, i will ask for clarification: am i choosing the person as well as the way in which i influence their story, or is it any given person?
and to Alex: me too. let's go.
1 comment:
I think it would be pretty hard to learn language without a human/pseudohuman presence. You need to have the interaction to facilitate the learning of the language. Since language is a means of communication between and among people, one would argue that language would be completely unnecessary if we could survive as isolated beings. I mean, language was invented so that people could communicate. At some point, people had to create this language. At some point, people became people in the way that we define them today, if we define them by language, so what does that mean for the people at that transitional point? Are they human or not? Questions only beget more questions, it seems. But I like this sort of thing.
On the point of influencing stories, let's say you have to answer it both ways. If you were given the opportunity to influence someone's life and could pick the person as well, in what way would that be? Also answer as if the question were referring to any given individual.
...I took 613 as well. I hated that class because of my TA and because I always fell asleep when he read directly from his slides that were directly scanned from our textbook. I found the readings to be quite interesting, though. I do agree that most of the definitions for personhood weren't quite right. It's funny how we can be completely confounded by what surrounds our existence--what is our existence. You think we'd know by know who we are.
That leads me to another point. If you can't figure out what a person is in general--if it takes all these damned years to come up with ill-fitting definitions over which philosophers will quibble until the end of time--how is it possible for us to define any INDIVIDUAL person? Our labels are just as ill-fitting. Our definitions are just as useless when they must be put into practice. We must solve these issues in the same way that the medical profession has chosen to handle issues involving the boundaries of life and human existence: case-based reasoning. We use the cases--the stories--of others to make our judgments about all the new cases and stories we encounter. And we face the same problems that are faced in the medical profession. Sometimes we can rely solely on what we have seen before. Sometimes the cases are that clear cut. But more often than not, the case has its own little twist that sets it apart from the rest, and we must use the training and experience we have internalized--the things that make us human--in order to determine humanity, both on the grander scale and on the personal.
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