Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of… – The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt English essayist (1778 – 1830)
It’s always disconcerting to find that something I’ve been saying for years has been said a long time ago. At least, I can be consoled by the fact that I can make sense of it with a whole lot of new language and conceptual aparati.
Here’s the radically antimodularist bottom line: the same principles that make it possible for us to recognize that a given instance of a chair is a chair and we can therefore exercise all of the properties associated with chairs (e.g. sit on it), viz principles of categorization and framing, that are responsible for issues like racial or gender prejudice. However, and that’s something Hazlit’s aphorism doesn’t recognize is the opposite process, one particularly dear to this blog, viz negotiation.
So here we have two acts of reductionism going against each other. On the one hand, we can reduce everything to the same process of categorization (incl. framing, metaphors, etc.), and on the other hand, any cognitive process can be subject to negotiation.
Without these two seemingly incompatible processes, life would be impossible. We can reject the inferior status of other races in the process of negotiation but at the same time we probably need to use a lot of distinguishing characteristics to classify people as belonging to a certain social group, for instance to avoid insult. Likewise, not all chairs will always readily accept our buttocks in the same predictable manner and still remain chairs. ‘Watch out! That chair was designed by XY.’ somebody will cry out to remind you that not all of the ‘chair frame’ readily applies.
Thus our life is a constant battle between freedom of spirit and the determinism of prejudice. And without this dualism, we would die!
