Anthropomorphism

So, in yesterday's lesson, we read three short articles from a reader put out by the Great Ape Project. My favorite of the three was Douglas Adams' piece on encounter a mountain gorilla. Apart from being the science-fiction writer that he was, Adams was also a keen activist for conservation, and his legacy is continued by his friend, the ever-present polymath, Stephen Fry.

I thought we had a decent discussion on the value and problems with anthropomorphism and that worked nicely with the way anthropomorphism is essentially a rhetorical strategy, one that shapes the world in our image through language. My favorite bit comes at the end of Adams's piece, when he re-thinks the encounter with the gorilla:

I began to see how patronising it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure. I tried to imagine instead how he saw us but of course that's almost impossible to do, because the assumptions you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own,and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.... And then I pictured myself beside him festooned with the apparatus of my intelligence--my Gore-Tex caguole, my pen and paper, my autofocus matrix-metering Nikon F-4, and my inability to comprehend any of the life we had left behind us in the forest. But somewhere in the genetic history that we carry with us in every cell of our body was a deep connection with this creature, as inaccessible as last year's dreams, but like last year's dreams always invisibly and unfathomably present.