Crooked Timber

Okay, Whit, I give. You want to talk philosophy, then let's talk.

Christianity (in)famously describes us all as the crooked timber of humanity.

There is a wealth of philosophy in that phrase. But the aspect I want to highlight is the anthropic angle. This crooked timber idea is not a singular concept because it presumes in the saying something else: what a straight timber would look like. There is no getting away from this, a very common, ordinary observation is built or rests on … something else.

This is a duplexity in human agency that is not a byproduct of something else, an unintended consequence or epiphenomenon, but something absolutely fundamental: the bifurcation within the psyche of how we view the world from our singular peculiar viewpoint. Such a standpoint is utterly unique in the life of Planet Earth - an organism that fashions (in Richard Rorty's paradigm) conceptual mirrors of a world, but mirrors that always reflect two things - that which is and that which has been or will be or ought to be - and somehow make them seamlessly into a single conception about what is going on.

I am reminded for some reason of the mystery of music. We hear notes on a scale, but we don't really hear just the individual notes as they are played because that would be a schizophrenic cacophony. We hear a musical composition, a musical event, because each note has a context within the ones that went before and the anticipation of the ones that will come after. In other words, each note is a duplexity (or multiplexity), both itself in tonal purity and all its brothers and sisters that preceded and will proceed from it.

And we do this naturally; historical anthropology tells us that music is a primeval impulse that has always been a part of us  - almost as if it preexisted  the first homo sapiens.  And if received wisdom can possibly be true, music may even have been that which created us unto what we are and might become.

What we are and might become - there is the duplexity again. We are both, crooked and straight, and which e'er path we tread depends not on me but Thee.