{"id":14744,"date":"2015-01-13T08:29:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T13:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14744"},"modified":"2015-01-13T09:51:12","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T14:51:12","slug":"everyone-unique-connected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14744","title":{"rendered":"everyone unique, all connected"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading my sister Caroline Levine’s extraordinary new book\u00a0Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network<\/a>, I’ve been reflecting on similar ideas that I have\u00a0come to quite independently.<\/p>\n

In college, I was deeply struck by the argument that human beings (whatever we all share as members of the same evolved species) are also divided into large clusters whose members think\u00a0alike in important respects but\u00a0differ with outsiders. Those clusters can be called cultures, worldviews, Weltanschauungen<\/em>, etc.\u00a0That these groupings\u00a0are internally consistent but different from one another is an essential premise of philosophers like Hegel and Herder, of founding anthropologists like Boas and Malinowski, of New Historicist critics like Catharine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, and even of\u00a0deconstructionists who seek\u00a0to rupture such “bounded wholes”\u00a0(see Caroline Levine, pp. 26, 115-16). I’ve found the same assumptions elsewhere, too. The influential psychologist Jonathan Haidt assumes that\u00a0each person subscribes to a \u201cmoral matrix\u201d that \u201cprovides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders.\u201d And (although different from Haidt in most other respects) John\u00a0Rawls called\u00a0a \u201cplurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines\u201d a \u201cfact” about the world.<\/p>\n

At one moment during\u00a0the summer of 1989 (crossing the street in Rosslyn, VA), I thought: But each of us belongs to many of these clusters at once. The clusters overlap; their borders cross. In fact, even twin siblings would have somewhat different\u00a0influences and assumptions. I drew this pair of diagrams, which appear in my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities<\/em> (1995, p. 188-9).<\/p>\n

\"Nietzsche\"<\/p>\n

I favored what I pretentiously called the “postmodern paradigm” of fig. 2 and claimed that it dispelled some of the dilemmas of value-relativism and skepticism that bedeviled modernity. This was before the large literature on “intersectionality” really got going. I agree with the argument\u00a0that (for example) race, gender, and class can “intersect,” but\u00a0I would push that\u00a0to its limit. Our backgrounds intersect in so many ways<\/em> that everyone stands at a unique intersection.<\/p>\n

Now I am more likely to draw a different kind of map, one that treats each person’s mentality as a network of ideas, such that the nodes are typically shared by\u00a0people who interact, but each person’s overall network is unique. (This is the map of the ideas identified\u00a0by my students in a recent class. Each student is displayed in a different color, and their networks touch where\u00a0they disclosed the same idea.)<\/p>\n

\"class<\/p>\n

Caroline would describe figs. 1-2\u00a0as sets of bounded\u00a0wholes<\/em>, and\u00a0the third diagram as a network<\/em> map. Wholes and networks are two fundamental forms in her account–she also investigates rhythms<\/em> and hierarchies<\/em>. Indeed, the two forms I\u00a0display above are limited in two respects. They are time-slices that fail to capture change. (Rhythm is missing.) And they are all about ideas and values, not about institutionalized forms, such as hierarchies. I think she is correct that\u00a0all four types of form–and no doubt more as well–overlap and contend, creating the structures in which we live but also offering opportunities for emancipation if we figure out how to put them together in new ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading my sister Caroline Levine’s extraordinary new book\u00a0Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, I’ve been reflecting on similar ideas that I have\u00a0come to quite independently. In college, I was deeply struck by the argument that human beings (whatever we all share as members of the same evolved species) are also divided into large clusters whose members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14744"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14754,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14744\/revisions\/14754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}