The Phoenix and the Carpet #7


 My reading of the seventh chapter of Edith Nesbitt's (1904) children's book "The Phoenix and the Carpet". Here the children discover the limits of animism - carpets simply do not think like humans and interpret instructions their own way. Hence the tidal wave of moggies.

As an aside, having an animist view of the universe does highlight the issue of language. We do not have to go as far as to embrace the Sapir-Wharf Hypothesis to see that different human languages produce very different understandings of the world... and that if we extend the capacity for language to a vast number of other beings (both organic life forms and creatures which current scientific thinking would not consider to be alive in the first place) then the problems of communicating between different forms of consciousness increase exponentially. I might write a book about this issue one day.



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