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.
The side of the thing that is being used to compare and what it is being compared to. So what we're making a comparison to is the practice of philosophy. What then is the other side? What is the activity that I'm saying is like the activity of philosophy in certain ways?
I grew up in the countryside, and part of that was here in southeastern Wisconsin. Part of that was also in northwestern Indiana on my larger family's land, my mother's family, the Lemrises, who have had land in that area for quite some time. My grandfather's generation actually retired there and built houses, so I was there for much of each summer and for holidays.
Growing up in the countryside, you spend a lot of time traveling around on trails and going through the woods and meadows and other sorts of terrain. And you pay attention, if you're smart, to what's around you. And so there's myriad interesting bushes and trees and other features like that, stones, leaves, flowers. Then in the summer, you have berries.
And the berries that we liked the best were not wild strawberries or blueberries. They were black raspberries, which grew in significant profusion in many of the places that I have resided in. And so what is a black raspberry? If you're not familiar with it, you can easily look it up and you'll see that it's a kind of conical sort of thing with a bunch of little fruits all stuck together with seeds inside of them. It's not actually black. It's a dark purple when it's ripe, but dark enough that we could call it black.
There are also red raspberries, which tend to be bigger. They're often cultivated. In fact, we had a vast hedge of them so wide that I had to cut a path down the middle when I was a kid and they grew near our garden. We would get so many that we would eat them until we got sick. There are also golden raspberries, which my great-uncle Hubert had cultivated, and those were a bit rarer. Black raspberries are one of the preeminent wild berry out there.
They don't need cultivation. They will grow on their own in wasteland, under trees, all over the place. And when you find them, it's really quite a catch because if you get a cluster of them and they're fully ripe, they're sweet, they're tart. They have a complex flavor to them. They're better than the red ones. I would say even better than the softer golden ones, depending on your taste.
So as a kid, we would pick these anywhere we went. We were on some sort of camping trip. We'd find some black raspberries. We were out at a park, we would go in the woods and look for black raspberries. We'd go in the woods behind our house and find black raspberries.
And this continued on when I went in the army. We had them in Bavaria. I would pick them there with some of the other troops that were similarly from the Midwest. When I was in college, we had a vast woods behind the college in which there were plenty of these growing and I would go out there and harvest them.
They couldn't find them in southern Illinois because it's black berries, not black raspberries that grow down there and choke them out. But, you know, it's kind of a similar process to picking those. And then when I lived in northwestern Indiana, after I finished graduate school, I would actually go out and spend a lot of time picking these. And I showed my children how to do so as well.
So enough of my back history. How is picking black raspberries remotely like doing philosophy? Well, let's think about what kind of philosophy I typically engage in and maybe many of you do as well. It involves reading texts and thinking about what it is that the thinker has put in front of us. And when you read a philosophical text, the very first time that you do it, you're not going to get everything.
It's not as if everything is available to you right on the surface, neatly organized so that you can harvest it and put it into your bucket and take it home for you. It's going to require a good bit more work. So here is where the analogy comes in and might be helpful.
When you're picking black raspberries, or for that matter, plenty of other fruit, you will see some of them on the surface, so to speak. So they're in plain sight.You can easily walk over there and pick them and put them into whatever you're using to store them for the time being. And if that's all you want to do, that's fine.
You'll leave an awful lot of the berries behind because at any given time, you're probably, from the vantage point that you're in, not going to be able to see most of them. And this is something that you learn from experience. I suppose somebody could tell you this and that would give you a bit of a leg up, but most of us learn this in a more implicit and experiential way.
So if you are a picker who has done this a number of times, you know what to look for, which is that things are not going to be readily evident to you on the surface right off the bat.
Instead, you've got to get in there. And this probably involves a little bit of discomfort because blackberry bushes have thorns on them. If you're not adequately prepared by wearing long sleeves or having toughened yourself up you're going to have a lot of cuts on your hands and arms and that won't feel all that good that may actually dissuade you from the activity at certain points but it never dissuaded me.
And what you find, you go for those first few clusters of ripe berries that are ready for the picking. Now you're closer to the bramble, the tangle of raspberry canes, which are a profusion. And not all of the plants there are going to be blackberries. There'll be other things in there as well. And here's where it's now up to you and your eyes, your brain, and your initiative.
If you really want to harvest the blackberries, not all of them, because you're probably never actually going to find all of them. You have to do some work and you have to be attentive. One of the things that you'll need to do is lift up and turn over some of the canes and the leaves that are concealing things. So as you get closer you can see more of the berries, but you've got to push, you've got to pull, you've got to do a bit of work you have to try to see through the foliage so that you can find these things
And as you're doing this, here's where it gets very, very interesting. As you move from one to the next, your vantage point changes and you see not necessarily more as a totality, but you see things that you didn't see from where you were standing and looking before. You find other clusters that because of the way shadows were falling or where other leaves were, or even berries standing in front of other berries, you hadn't seen them before.
And so you proceed and you move through. And over time, you get really good and efficient at finding all or at least most of the berries that are available in a certain area. And what you find is not just a little bit more than the neophyte, the person who doesn't know what they're doing. You will pick four. You will pick ten times as many berries as they do. You will come away with gallon buckets full where they only found a pint.
So what does this then have to do with philosophy as an activity? Well, philosophy, reading texts, thinking about what thinkers have to put forward is exactly like this. Or if not exactly, at least quite similar. When you read a text the first time, you're not going to find most of the clusters of ideas, of arguments, of distinctions, of thoughts, of concepts available there.
And you may come away having said “well you know, I went through this person's text and I got everything I could out of it.” No you didn't! You only got a little bit, and if you knew where to look, if you had practice in getting your hands in there and moving things around and putting your eyes in the right place, you would have come away with much, much more.
Now, I'm not saying that to make you feel bad or knock you. As I said, this takes experience and it takes just as much experience reading through philosophical texts as it does learning how to be a good woods-person, or berry-picker, or anything along those lines.
One of the key things, one of the advantages that the experienced person has over the beginner is knowing that they have to keep doing work, that there is more to see, that they have to dig in, that they have to make connections, that they have to look at things from different angles. That they have to read the same part of the text multiple times before they're going to get everything that they can out of it. And sometimes you actually have to do the equivalent of pulling up the vine so you can see what else is underneath it.
Oftentimes, what I was doing as I was going out to the wind-rows and picking berries in the heat of the day was taking a break from my philosophical work as a professor. So while I went out there, as I was engaged in this activity for an hour or two of picking berries, these thoughts occurred to me.
I never wrote them down. I've only mentioned them to a few people. But I thought they would be interesting, useful, perhaps even entertaining to you, my listeners. And if they are indeed helpful, I would love to hear about this.
If this isn't a metaphor that you can relate to easily, you should feel free to come up with analogies or similitudes of your own that help you make progress in studying philosophy and getting out of it everything that you are capable of.
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