Greek manners and Gothic morals

What do we see when we see things we didn't see before?

Only in love does one take the time to puncture one's neighbor's masks, to consider them in the kaleidoscopic fullness of their psychology, to refrain from dismissing them when they say or do something embarrassing or something that—worse—falls into a category. Categories are the end of thought and, in many ways, the end of sight. With most people we have firm habits of categorization ....

That's quite a claim for love.

A friend of mine used to say that a lot of modern liberal thought is perfectly fine if you read it very quickly but deeply troublesome if you read it more deeply. I'd put the above quote from Nehring into that, ah, category.

If you read it quickly you get the surface thought that we diminish others by categorizing them and, therefore, one of the magnificent things about love is that our deep sense of wonder at this person we are in love with enables us to see ....

Well, enables us to see what exactly? That's where it all breaks down. If categorization is bad then what is the opposite of categorization? The closest we get here is that word "kaleidoscopic". I can't read that sort of thing without getting a picture of a heavily stoned guy back in high school days listening to the Beatles through headphones and saying "wow man, the music goes right through your head" over and over again. Later he tried to tell me that the experience had changed his whole way of seeing the world but could not, of course, explain what was so different.

Let's consider an example. Aidan is an urban guy who went to a first class university. He hates people from the south and is firmly convinced that they are all racist haters and stupid. He meets a Nanci-Jane woman from the south. At first nothing about her challenges his existing categories. He sets out to have sex with her for no reason other than he wants the power thrill he thinks will come from nailing this dumb southern woman. Only something changes as he sets out to do this. She keeps defying his categories. He realizes he never understood the kind of culture she grew up with and that everything he thought he knew about the south was nothing more than a series of stereotypes that crumble like so man sandcastles in the face of this richly cultured and deeply intelligent woman.

Okay, what happened here? Did he reject categories or did she show him new categories?

That isn't a rhetorical question. It could be either. The rhetorical question is this one: which one should it be?

This series begins here.


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