Comprehending the Whale From Within Its Belly

Archimedes’ platform is a means for comprehending the society in which we reside. We are splashing about within the belly of our society and the only means for understanding this society is for us to find a platform outside of the monster.

I claim that we are all ideologues within our society and as such our view is seriously compromised. To understand our reality we must first discover how to stand outside of our personal ideologies. Ideology prejudices our view and blinds us to reality and only after recognizing this fact can we begin to analyze our situation.

If we continue to follow our bovine characteristics of either running with the herd or standing blankly staring into the distance we cannot “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative”.

How do we escape from the grasp of today’s ideologies, fads, rationalizations, and general enculturation? We must learn to read backwards to remove our self from today’s cultural container. As Archimedes observed we must find a platform outside of that reality which we wish to understand and to move.

Reading backwards is using our library card to borrow books that were written many years or many hundreds of years ago. Reading has another great advantage in that we can easily focus on books that have withstood the test of time. We can easily identify the ‘real thing’ insofar was worthy thinking is concerned.

We can read Churchill about the past one hundred years; we can read Marx, Darwin or Freud if we want to cover the 19th century, perhaps Paine, Jefferson and Hamilton on the 18th century, maybe Bacon, Chaucer, Aquinas and Plato going further back in history.

By reading backward we get a sense of the universal and the relative, the essential and the arbitrary. We can form the basis of reading critically with questions to act as our guide to understanding. We can learn to stop our general practice of sleep reading. We learned in our schooling to sleep read, sleep listen, and to become apathetic regarding all things intellectual. By reading backwards we can begin to comprehend the irrational impulses of our superficial consumer culture.

Our consumer culture through the schooling institutions has molded us into superficial creatures unable to withstand the inducements of our foolish value system.

So you think we can better understand the whale from the shark's belly than from the whale's belly?

I mean, I understand that it could help a little bit. I'm pointing out the flaw in the "inside"/"outside" dichotomy. There is no "outside" platform, just other "inside" bellies.

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Client: In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!
Tailor: But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world, and look at my trousers.
(Beckett)

It is the case that humans reason from within container like boundaries, and thus we are always within a container. However the trick is to enlarge our containers and thereby gain a more universal perspective. We must find a means to examine our assumptions. Each container is constructed with its own assumptions. That is why philosophy is so useful. It is a container with the largest container, or at least the Philosophy dept likes to think so.

By reading backward we get a sense of the universal and the relative, the essential and the arbitrary. We can form the basis of reading critically with questions to act as our guide to understanding. We can learn to stop our general practice of sleep reading. We learned in our schooling to sleep read, sleep listen, and to become apathetic regarding all things intellectual. By reading backwards we can begin to comprehend the irrational impulses of our superficial consumer culture.