Similitude in Dissimilitude
William Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, writes
"a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder."
I hadn't really ever thought of this in such terms, but it caught my attention. The first thing that popped into my head was analogy. An analogy is a way of describing something by comparing it to something else. In essence, it is finding the similarities in comparing dissimilar things.
I've used lots of analogies in teaching because they are effective ways of getting a point across. One of the common ones I use regarding social programs is the comparison with humans interacting with wildlife populations. When we visit the woods, we are told not to leave food out for the wildlife. Doing so will cause the wildlife to interact more with humans, by conditioning the wildlife to get food in an easier manner than having to hunt or forage, and increases the chances of negative encounters between humans and wildlife. Welfare programs also increase dependency. This is not to say that welfare programs don't do any good, they do, as a matter of fact, directly provide needy people with resources. But a negative consequence of that provision by the government, is that the people being provided for stop trying to provide for themselves. This has frequently been turned on me as: So you're saying poor people are like wild animals???!!! My reply has always been- No.... this is an analogy- a comparison of different things- wild animals and people- to clarify the similarity- dependency fostered through the action of provision by an outside source. I'm relatively certain people ARE able to distinguish the difference, in which case it appears just a bad-faith attempt to derail the analogy by flipping the components.
But in looking into this idea of the perception of similitude in dissimilitude being a fount of intellectual activity, I found some other points of confirmation.
Aristotle thought the right way to construct a metaphor required an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. The similarity that a person with intuitive perception (genius) can pick out is not an obvious or traditionally appreciated kind of similarity. While analogy is the comparison of things, metaphor is saying one thing to illustrate another. It of course operates on understanding the similarities, and presumes the audience will too. Aristotle's genius could find those similarities in less obvious situations. I'm relatively certain Wordsworth would have been familiar with this and perhaps this is part of the reason he is referring to this being so well known.
One paper I looked at "considered the role of comparison in the development of knowledge, suggesting that comparison may play a special role in partitioning bits of experience into categories, sharpening categorical boundaries, and otherwise helping us create [a] conceptual structure above and beyond that offered by the world."
I don't know that I would have ever thought about this, but this paper did 4 compare-and-contrast experiments and concluded that the process contributed to knowledge development in important and foundational ways, again confirming Wordsworth.
This is part of why I love reading these works. I have to admit I would never have chosen these works out of a lineup on my own. I'm reading them because they are in the Harvard Classics series, and I, wanting to be the kind of well-rounded, educated person the series is aimed at, decided to read through them. But I am constantly encountering these ideas that catch my attention and make me think- yeah, I've never thought about that before, but it seems right and I want to know more.
