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2012:blind-men-and-the-elephant

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Blind Men and the Elephant

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Authored by Frank Redmond, 2012

There is a very famous story about how blind men were trying to identify the true nature of the elephant from their perspective:

<blockquote> A Jain version of the story says that six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.

– via Wikipedia - “Blind men and an elephant” </blockquote>

The parallels between this passage and the scene in Hermotimus where Lycinus is telling the fable of the lion's claw are striking:

<blockquote> Her. There is a story that some sculptor, Phidias, I think, seeing a single claw, calculated from it the size of the lion, if it were modelled proportionally. So, if some one were to let you see a man's hand, keeping the rest of his body concealed, you would know at once that what was behind was a man, without seeing his whole body. Well, it is easy to find out in a few hours the essential points of the various doctrines, and, for selecting the best, these will suffice, without any of your scrupulous exacting investigation.

Ly . Upon my word, how confident you are in your faculty of divining the whole from the parts! and yet I remember being told just the opposite - that knowledge of the whole includes that of the parts, but not vice versa. Well, but tell me; when Phidias saw the claw, would he ever have known it for a lion's, if he had never seen a lion? Could you have said the hand was a man's, if you had never known or seen a man? Why are you dumb? Let me make the only possible answer for you - that you could not ; I am afraid Phidias has modelled his lion all for nothing; for it proves to be neither here nor there. What resemblance is there? What enabled you and Phidias to recognize the parts was just your knowledge of the wholes - the lion and the man. But in philosophy - the Stoic, for instance - how will the part reveal the other parts to you, or how can you conclude that they are beautiful? You do not know the whole to which the parts belong.

Then you say it is easy to hear in a few hours the essentials of all philosophy - meaning, I suppose, their principles and ends, their accounts of God and the soul, their views on the material and the immaterial, their respective identification of pleasure or goodness with the desirable and the Happy; well, it is easy - it is quite a trifle - to deliver an opinion after such a hearing; but really to know where the truth lies will be work, I suspect, not for a few hours, but for a good many days. If not, what can have induced them to enlarge on these rudiments to the tune of a hundred or a thousand volumes apiece? I imagine they only wanted to establish the truth of those few points which you thought so easy and intelligible. If you refuse to spend your time on a conscientious selection, after personal examination of each and all, in sum and in detail, it seems to me you will still want your soothsayer to choose the best for you. It would be a fine short cut, with no meanderings or wastings of time, if you sent for him, listened to the summaries, and killed a victim at the end of each; by indicating in its liver which is the philosophy for you, the God would save you a pack of troubles.

Or, if you like, I can suggest a still simpler way; you need not shed all this blood in sacrifice to any God, nor employ an expensive priest; put into an urn a set of tablets, each marked with a philosopher's name, and tell a boy (he must be quite young, and his parents both be living) to go to the urn and pick out whichever tablet his hand first touches; and live a philosopher ever after, of the school which then comes out triumphant. </blockquote>

Lucian is explaining to his reader the difficulty of 1) knowing anything in its entirety and 2) knowing anything based in partial evidence without having an idea of it in the first place. Hermotimus is like the blind men, thinking that he has found the true nature of philosophy, but really he knows nothing of the philosophy's entire, true nature.

Maybe the King in the fable has the right idea:

<blockquote> A king explains to them: “All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.” </blockquote>

Hermotimus is just like the blind men. That's why Lucian feels the need to lampoon him. He is a dogmatist; real, clear knowledge is very hard if not impossible to know.

2012/blind-men-and-the-elephant.txt · Last modified: 2015/12/16 11:03 by 127.0.0.1

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