Mind & Desire Episode 5 - A Similitude Between Picking Black Raspberries and Studying Philosophy

One common tool that many of us in the field of philosophy make a lot of use out of, sometimes not acknowledging that we're doing so, is what you could call analogy or metaphor, or to use a term that I particularly like for it, similitude, which comes from the Latin simulitudo, meaning something like “likeness” or “likening,” showing how things are connected with each other, how they resemble each other. And in just a bit, I'm going to share with you one that I derived about 20 or so years ago.

It occurred to me a number of times while I was engaging not in philosophy, but taking a break in the day from doing philosophy and engaging in a different kind of activity, something that I had been doing since I was a little kid.

Now, I do have to make a bit of a proviso before we jump in and start looking at this analogy or similitude. You can only push a metaphor so far before it begins to break down. None of them are perfectly adequate. The map is not the territory or even indeed the other map necessarily if we want to mix metaphors a bit here.

I also should say that I'm not trying to make a connection between this activity and anyone whosoever at any given time in any given way engaging in something called philosophy. The field, the discipline, the literature of philosophy is very vast and quite tough to adequately, universally generalize about.

So take this for what it is, one way of representing what philosophical activity could be like and providing a few features that might get you thinking about how to do it well.

Any analogy, metaphor, or similitude is going to have two main sides. The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to.