Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (125 page)

A
NNA
: I don’t agree with you, but I think you might have Plato on your side, because I believe he argued, in
Phædrus
, that every human being is given the opportunity to look at situations ranging from the most general to the most specific, and to carve
up the world in an objective fashion while making very fine distinctions. Am I not more or less correct in my memory of Plato?

K
ATY
: You’re absolutely right, and I can even cite the exact passage. It’s where Socrates tells Phædrus that humans have “the ability to separate things according to their natural divisions, without breaking any of the parts the way a clumsy butcher does.” This is how biologists proceed when they make taxonomies, for example, and it’s also how cultures and civilizations evolve, gradually moving towards the capability of sorting all the situations in the world into the categories to which they objectively belong.

A
NNA
: Well, I’m sorry, but I have to contradict you (and needle your friend Plato as well): categorization is not objective, as you would have it, but is profoundly subjective. For instance, if I assert “Donald Trump is a troublemaker”, is it not the case that in thus categorizing Donald Trump I am making a highly subjective judgment?

K
ATY
: I understand your example, but
troublemaker
is an extremely blurry category. You deliberately chose a category that is as blurry as possible! I even think you did it just to be a troublemaker!

A
NNA
: Me, a troublemaker? Never! And the truth is that my example is hardly unusual. Blurriness is par for the course with categories. With the greatest of ease we can find categorical blurriness all about us. Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” might be seen by one literary critic as a
masterpiece
and by another as
a piece of junk
; I might be judged
reliable
by one person and
flaky
by another; chicken liver might be considered
mouth-watering
by one person and
disgusting
by another. Doesn’t this show that categorization is enormously subjective? And there are so many other cases. Is our friend Virginia
good-looking
? Is she
cordial
? Is our friend Stanley an
artist
? Is he
fluent
in German? Was George’s retort to Virginia’s jab
appropriate
? Are Virginia’s clothes
matching
? Is George’s brother a
sleazeball
? Is it
sprinkling
outside, or is it
raining
? Is that a
hill
or a
mountain
over there? Was what Jane just said an
insult
or a
joke
? Is Jim
impulsive
? Is he
straightforward
? Is he a
patriot
or is he a
hypocrite
? Is he
ambitious, pushy
, or
driven
? And think about bright people vehemently arguing over the nature of
progress
or about whether something is a piece of
kitsch
or not. Don’t you see how deeply blurriness and subjectivity pervade categorization?

K
ATY
: Well, perhaps I misspoke myself, because you’ve pointed out very effectively that
some
categories are subjective. But that doesn’t affect the crux of my point, which is that
analogies
are
always
subjective. For example, wouldn’t you agree that when one event reminds you of another, it’s an analogy, and that such remindings are totally subjective because they depend completely on the idiosyncratic memories that you’ve built up over the course of your life?

A
NNA
: I’ll certainly grant you that
some
analogies are subjective.

K
ATY
: Excellent! I see that we’re on the same wavelength. So let me continue. We can come up with analogies between anything and anything else, depending on
what’s recently been passing through our minds. And if one is focused on one thing in particular, then analogies by the bucketful will come to mind. Back in Chapter 5, we saw how an obsession of any sort — golf, dogs, physics, a video game, or who knows what — can trigger a raft of analogies with just about anything that one encounters. One can unwittingly wind up in a kind of analogy-mania! And it doesn’t even take an obsession for this kind of thing to happen. Just yesterday, in fact, something of the sort took place. A friend told me about a science-fiction story he’d read and enjoyed. The gist of it was that some guy was listening to the news on the radio and he heard that a woman in a nearby town had been killed when she’d been hit by a car driven by a wild driver. For some reason he heard this piece of news at 7:30 PM but it said that the accident had taken place at 8 PM. So maybe you can anticipate what happened in the story?

A
NNA
: Mmm, not really…

K
ATY
: Well, the guy dashes to his garage, jumps in his car, and makes a beeline for the nearby town in order to warn the victim to get far from all roads. But as he’s approaching the main square, he loses control of his car and careens right into the woman, killing her at exactly 7:59 PM.

A
NNA
: That’s a striking and original story. But where is it leading us?

K
ATY
: Well, if you think about it, your first thought is probably going to be that it’s paradoxical, and if you think a little further about what lies at its essence, you will come to the conclusion that it’s the idea of
an unfortunate incident brought about by the very act of trying to avoid it.
Such a thing might seem to be totally unique — a clever fantasy dreamt up by an inventive author. And yet, if you start to look around you with this idea in mind, you’ll find a rich harvest of analogous events.

A
NNA
: Oh, so you came up with a bunch? That sounds interesting.

K
ATY
: Yes, and it wasn’t even very hard. They just spontaneously flooded my mind, and I couldn’t rightly say why. For example, the first memory that came to my mind was from way back when I was a little girl. One day I saw a tall vase sitting on a table that I knew was rickety, and so, trying to be helpful, I reached out to try to grab hold of the vase to make it stabler. What do you know, I accidentally banged the table with my hand, and immediately the vase toppled and shattered!

A
NNA
: That anecdote about little Katy clearly has something central in common with the science-fiction story — they share a conceptual skeleton.

K
ATY
: To be sure. That’s exactly why it came to mind. But that wasn’t the only memory that came to me. I next remembered another time when I offered a friend a gift to make up for an argument we’d had, but for some reason she found my gift offensive, and this eventually led to a total break between us. And then I suddenly remembered that time a while back that you, Anna, baked a delicious cake for a party you were throwing, and how at the last minute you decided to brown it to make it even tastier, but you got distracted by a few guests arriving early and you overcooked it, thus ruining your cake. You’ll never forget that incident, will you?

A
NNA
: How could I? It was such a disappointment to me! And I agree with you that it is analogous to the other events that you were reminded of. I think anyone would. So doesn’t that show the objectivity of this analogy?

K
ATY
: No, no! All these analogies are totally
subjective.
They came to my mind only because I was thinking about the story of the woman killed by the driver who was doing his utmost to prevent her death, and if no one had told me that story, none of these memories would have been triggered in my mind. None of them would have bubbled up, although any of them could have bubbled up in some completely different context. So you see how subjective analogy-making is!

A
NNA
: Well, not so fast. I greatly appreciate the variety of the episodes in your life that this story reminded you of, but as we both just agreed, they all share a conceptual skeleton, which you formulated as
an unfortunate incident brought about by the very act of trying to avoid it.
These episodes are all seen by everyone as analogous because it’s clear that they all share this central essence. This is why I insist that analogy is not always subjective — no more than categorization is.

K
ATY
: All right, all right… I see that the common core is clear here, but maybe this analogy, or this family of analogies, is a special case. Maybe this wasn’t the best possible example.

A
NNA
: No, that’s not the problem. The same would hold for analogies all across the board. For instance, think of the analogy in Chapter 6 between a thin wooden stick offered for stirring coffee and some javelins offered to row a boat in a lake. Who could ever claim that these situations have nothing in common? No one, since their shared essence is clear as a bell! Or take the analogy between sound waves in air and ripples in water — where’s the subjectivity in that? Or the analogy between a point (
x, y
) in a plane and a complex number
x
+
yi
, or the analogy between lungs and gills, or that between a bullet and an arrow, or between a table in your house and a table in my house. What could be more objective than these analogies?

K
ATY
: But I still insist that there is something highly subjective about analogy-making, because the memories that flashed to my mind when I heard that science-fiction story were completely idiosyncratic, and depended entirely on the chance events of my life and on how they happened to be stored in my memory. Yes, they all share the same conceptual skeleton with the science-fiction story, but they wouldn’t have occurred to anyone but me! They are products of my brain, and my brain alone! And so this definitively proves the subjectivity of analogy-making!

A
NNA
: No one could deny, Katy, that what the science-fiction story brought to your mind — that specific set of curious and paradoxical episodes — is completely unique to you. As you say, this is a set of memories that is yours and yours alone, and it’s a result of the random vicissitudes of your life, the events that chanced to happen to you or to your friends, or perhaps events that you had read about or seen in films. And whenever you hear any story, analogous situations will come floating up to your consciousness, and they will certainly be a function of your
personal experiences. Your unique experiences and how you encode them will determine when they will come to mind on later occasions. What this clearly shows is that categorization (or analogy-making, whatever you want to call it) comes from the perspective one adopts on a situation. And for this reason, categorization is profoundly subjective.

K
ATY
: Your words are confusing me, Anna. I carefully chose an example to show you that
analogy
is subjective, and yet you’re turning my own example against me, to argue that
categorization
is subjective! What kind of sleight of hand is this, anyway?

A
NNA
: There’s nothing underhanded or tricky going on here, Katy. It’s just an inevitable outcome of clear thinking. Your example was all about a set of stories that we agreed are all
analogous
, stories that all share a conceptual skeleton — and it was also all about a set of stories that all belong to a single
category
, a category whose core and whose fringes were very nicely fleshed out by your highly diverse set of examples. The verbal label “unfortunate incidents brought about by the very act of trying to avoid them” attempts to pinpoint the subtle shared essence that makes them all analogous.

K
ATY
: I can easily envision a little category centered on the story of the woman whose death was caused by the man whose goal was to save her.

A
NNA
: Why call it “little”? It wouldn’t be hard to add members galore to this category. For instance, one might think of a person strangled by their seatbelt, or an attempt to stave off a war between two hostile countries that goes wrong and winds up triggering the feared war. One could also think of a face deformed by plastic surgery that came out unexpectedly, of a singer who loses her voice on the very morning of her recital as a result of too much practicing, of the big stain in a tablecloth left by a stain remover, of a résumé that is so jam-packed with lists of achievements and honors that all potential employers are immediately put on their guard, and who knows what else. This shows how diverse are the potential members of such a category, and all the situations that you and I described could be looked at in plenty of other ways and thus could be seen as members of plenty of other categories. For instance, the singer whose voice went hoarse as a result of too much practicing could be assigned to the category
too much of a good thing
, and the grotesque face caused by plastic surgery could be seen as a member of the category
should have left well enough alone.
This kind of shift in point of view gives rise to a shift in categorization. In short, I believe that I’ve just demonstrated the profoundly subjective nature of categorization.

K
ATY
: So you think that my example demonstrates the subjectivity of categorization just as much as the subjectivity of analogy-making?

A
NNA
: Absolutely! And it’s precisely its subjective nature that lends categorization so much interest. Our categorizations are influenced by many factors: the place we happen to be in; our current goals; our knowledge; our culture; our emotional state; our obsessions; and who knows what else!