A, B, C

11

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer first made a large portion of the reading public for philosophy aware of the mediated (that is, indirect) structure of sensory perception for humans. But the fact is, this is true for all creatures who have senses as well as for plants that seemed to be slowly developing something akin to them. Remember that the next time you take a walk in the woods. Yes, 95 percent of our genes are identical with chimpanzees. But 50 percent of them are identical with oak trees. We share genes with lizards, chickens, pond scum, mushrooms, and spiders, not to mention gnats, lichens, elephants, viruses, bacteria, nematodes, and the rest of life’s teeming species. That’s why we eat each other in so many directions; and it’s why a number of species, such as poisonous snakes and poisonous plants, have developed defenses to keep from being eaten. The fact that we share as many genes with everything that lives is one, but by no means the only, bit of evidence for our direct connections. And that creatures with ears and eyes and tactile feelings look, sound, and move as if they are alive in the world and care about being so — that is, they exist as subjects — is another; but, again, by no means the only or determining one. We live in a world constructed of a vast number of suggestions — and a relatively few explanations (relatively few because we only have the ones, however, we’ve been able so far to figure out, in which there are bound to be inaccuracies and incompletenesses). Many of the explanations contravene the suggestions. The French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan called these two very human orders the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Different cultures have different Imaginaries and different Symbolics. What science says as a larger philosophy, at least to me, is that this multiplicity is a negotiable condition of the world, accessible to language and its potential behaviors, not an ontological bedrock of the universe: an effect, an illusion if you like that can be explained. I would only add: however you want to talk about it, it damned well better be. If not, we’ve had it.