Rebecca Newberger Goldstein came up with a lovely concept in her early novel The Mind-Body Problem: the mattering map. The idea is essentially that everyone has their own framework of peaks and valleys, areas they visit regularly, those they cherish, those they believe important but don't really know too much about, those they're happy to disregard... as you go through life, as you consider, explore and navigate, the map becomes more detailed. It may change entirely in places. Where once it was 'there be dragons', you may find instead real gold.
I like this concept. It gives us a sense of preferences and priorities while reminding us that there will be new territories we haven't yet reached.
I can map this map (!) onto a rough sketch of Nietzsche's idea of personal development. He divides people into camels, lions and children (who aren't childish really). I got this not from the text itself but an episode of the Panpsycast podcast. OK, so the camels are those who just, unthinkingly, carry the burdens imposed by culture, society, religion and upbringing. They are conventionally moral as far as their situation demands. I guess he thought most of us are camels. For Goldstein, that's a map outlined by others which we haven't annotated.
Lions are rather like adolescents - which reminds me of Susan Nieman's idea of moral development, her second stage. They see the whole world as imposing these huge 'Thou shalt not!' edicts and rebel against them. It's like they want to tear up the whole map and draw an imaginary country. Or, they shout, 'Screw the map, I'm going wherever I want!'
The child, in Nietzsche's view, says 'Yes!' Possibilities are open. She is willing to explore and create, is delighted to discover and eager to learn. She may validate or ignore the traditional map - but she'll have considered it. Ultimately, it's her map, her own map. She creates it.
I was talking to my philosopher buddy in California, not about this, but about the Peter Singer book. And explaining the validity of sentience, of levels of consciousness - being self aware, a sense of the self as continuous and progressing through time. We were considering the validity of happiness and preferences as a foundation for an ethical framework. Of course, you have to ground things somewhere. If not in God, then where? The utilitarian's, it seems to me, is the most rational starting place.
And yet...
Maybe it's not all about quantities of consciousness, maybe it's about qualities of consciousness. Who knows if the zillion colour experience of a bee is not in a sense 'better'? Who are we to judge? How could we, from our inevitably subjective perspective? And happiness, maybe a dog experiences level of elation that no human, even pharmacologically assisted, can attain. Would the world be better if we were all born to pamper pooches? Maybe the suffering, subjectively, of a cow when her calf is taken away, is of some order of things, far worse than that of a human a in similar situation?
I know, I know, we can only base our decisions on the best science we have. And yet our science is dictated by our minds and looking for our stuff. We may never, because we might never know or care how to look, be able to answer these questions.
So, as a species, we're stuck in 'camel' - with a necessarily limited map.
Comments