Can six blind men figure out what an elephant is like?
Thursday Theses: Multiple discovery, John Godfrey Saxe, and poetic analogies
I hope the title was sufficiently clickbaity.
Anyway.
You may find me quoting Brahmanic religious texts more often than you would your average Midwestern Lutheran.
There’s a story believed to have begun in India which spread outwards from there.
It has always resonated with me.
As you may have gathered from that title, it’s a parable of a few non-sighted men who come across a pachyderm.
There is a retelling from John Godfrey Saxe in quaint terminology:
I.
IT was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.II.
The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me!—but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"III.
The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried: "Ho!—what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 't is mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"IV.
The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"V.
The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"VI.
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"VII.
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"
I’ll delay to give the resolution of the poem yet because I disagree with the moral Saxe gives.
The great difficulty we understand though is that we, epistemically, are all just blind men groping an elephant.
There are so many ways to misread the world around us.
And it’s so often the best option to employ our “epoche,” or “non-judgment.”
It’s kind of like trying to interpret signals from the opposite sex — you take all the information you have and try and draw conclusions and you still are dead wrong.
There is a theory within the philosophy of science about “multiple discovery.”
In short, the theory is that we all inevitably converge on truths that are out there to be discovered.
If the blind men are approaching the elephant in the same way, using the same techniques, they will begin to agree more about its characteristics.
Similarly, you may think of Plato discerning the forms.
He believed that these abstract principles that emanate the world as we know it could be critically apprehended through conscious effort.
The multiple discovery theory runs against a “heroic theory” that it takes a particular or chosen mind to make a great discovery.
With the theory of multiple discovery, as it were, the many monkeys left in a room, typing infinitely long enough, produce the works of Shakespeare.
Just as Shakespeare apprehended the pieces of his play from the real world so that he could fashion together his great pieces of drama and comedy, so too could an immortal assembly of monkeys with an endless dedication to piddling around on typewriters.
If Leonardo’s flying machine works in one universe, it could, theoretically, work anywhere in the multiverse.
If we let the blind men have at it long enough, they will get a full picture of what this elephant thing is.
But let us continue.
Here’s the next verse of Saxe’s version:
VIII.
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Are these men wrong? Are there analogies wrong?
Analogies, by nature, capture part of the truth but can’t do it all.
Even this parable can’t communicate the whole truth — parables don’t lead us to 1:1 ratios.
When Jesus gives His Parable of the Sower, needless to say, Jesus does not have a one-to-one set of characteristics with the the sower.
Nor do His disciples have one-to-one characteristics matching the seeds.
These blind men “knew in part.”
As St. Paul would say, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Each poet, with their diverse analogies captures something of the truth.
Let’s take William Blake’s poem, “Auguries of Innocence” as the lesson:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Now whether or not there is a “world” in a grain of sand or the poet just reads that into the grain, well… that may be a conversation for another time.
But, boy, when epistemology meets poetry, you know things are gettin’ intense.
Heaven may well be in a wildflower.
We should let it be.
Because the poet grasps, by abstraction, a very real thing.
Most of Blake’s items here aren’t analogies of an exact sort, given that “world,” “heaven", “infinity,” and “eternity” are all abstract ideas — “infinity” as a concept only exists by negating the idea of the “finish” — but ultimately, you can see the correspondence that Blake is going for.
After all, an hour at the DMV can feel like an eternity, while a day off can rush by quickly.
A trip to Disney World when you’ve never been can be a whirlwind of experience that slows time.
A 45-minute car ride to work can feel like a brief jaunt when you make it every day.
For more, let’s turn to John Denver and Placido Domingo (as is only right):
Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm
It exists to give you comfort
It is there to keep you warm
And in those times of trouble
When you are most alone
The memory of love will bring you homePerhaps love is like a window
Perhaps an open door
It invites you to come closer
It wants to show you more
And even if you lose yourself
And don't know what to do
The memory of love will see you through
The lyrics defer judgment about what love is like.
“Perhaps” is a powerfully noncommittal word.
In it, we speculate and attempt to grasp at a more transcendent truth.
And here we again find a correspondence of abstract things to concrete images.
That’s the power of poetry.
To continue on regarding this being a story that Saxe only “knows in part,” he drives at a very specific sort of quarreling: religious disputes.
MORAL.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
Saxe orients the parable towards religious controversy.
Obviously this is broader than theology.
Though there is an interesting thread here in the West perhaps that we can relate to this overall discussion, without following the rabbit too far down the hole.
Within the Christian tradition, Justin Martyr wrote about the “logos spermatikos,” stating that the inspiration of God can be found, at least in some part however small, in other religious thought.
St. Paul quoted pagan poets in reference to God during his sermon at the Areopagus, talking about how “in Him we live and move and have our being.”
A beautiful thought to include.
But the point I’m moving towards — in a bit of retort towards Saxe’s fair but overly specialized employment of this parable — is that we see endless debate in so many in many, many domains.
For instance, here’s a fun article: Why doesn't philosophy progress from debate to consensus?
Dare we to say that one of these blind men is a Continental philosopher and the other is an Analytic philosopher?
Should one be called a pessimist and the other an optimist?
Is one a Democrat and the other a Republican?
Is one seeing the world on LSD and the other seeing the world on cocaine?
The history of ideas shows in full color just how many ways we could think about the world:
We’re encouraged towards epistemic humility.
We’re all just after the right analogy to describe the world as it really is.
We’re all just trying to find out “what sort of thing is an elephant?”
It encourages curiosity and sparks an appetite to dive deeper and know more thoroughly.
Now we know in part, but then we shall know fully.
Even as I am fully known.