Quaestiones Domitianae

How did the topic of weather come to signal the most banal and everyday of interactions, while that of time continues to have some philosophical weight to it? The two are conceptually related after all (if we look back in history far enough; back before measurement), and in many languages remain lexically identical.

What if death involved a simple, sudden, traceless disappearance of the body, rather than a rotting, ghoulish corpse in need of disposal? What sort of things would we say about it? Would this affect our tendency to believe in an afterlife?

What if dying involved not pain and suffering, as it usually does, but rather a physical sensation of orgasm-like pleasure? What sort of things would we say about death then?

What if there were no animals, but only humans and plants? What would it be like to live without an extended community of beings that are like us but not us?

Here is a guest-quaestio, from Louis Agassiz: What if the lobster were the only articulate (i.e., exoskeletal) animal in existence? Could we then say that its species were the sole member of a genus, an order, a family, and other higher-order taxa that in this world are represented by several articulate species? How would we know? (see Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 1851).

And what is it that articulacy in Agassiz's sense, and articulacy in our sense, have in common, that they should be called by the same name?

We spend one third of our lives in thrall to florid hallucinations. We find this slightly embarrassing, and when we wake up we rush to assure ourselves and others that all that was just an aberration, and all this is what matters. Anyone who tries to take all that on, as intrinsically interesting, is destined to occupy a position at the fringe of acceptable discourse. (Freud is the most acceptable, and he's not all that acceptable.) What might we be missing in our sidelining of dreams?

What is really wrong, after all, with ad hominem arguments? How can these be sharply distinguished from arguments that are de hominibus, that is, arguments that legitimately implicate the character of the person we are arguing against?

What is it that our enjoyment of recorded music replaces? We know every micro-glitch and every barely perceptible throat-twitch of our favorite singers in the authoritative recordings of their songs. We have catalogues in our heads, and when we hear recordings from the canon we open that head catalogue and we find there a recording that is no less verisimilar, no less fidèle, than the grooves on any record. What is that catalogue of cultural experience that people used to build up over the course of their lives? Perhaps when they heard this little bump in a rhythmically related story they were about to hear that little conventional epithet? But each time, it had to have been slightly different; a story cannot be as faithful to earlier iterations as a recording. Where then does our ability to perfectly anticipate all the qualities of a perfect repetition come from? I would carry on in this vein, but this is already turning into more of an essay than a mere quaestio domitiana.

What is it that desire and charity have in common, that they should be called by the same name?

Comments

[Picador]

"Where then does our ability to perfectly anticipate all the qualities of a perfect repetition come from?"

I think you're underestimating the power of premodern storytellers to produce near-identical retellings, and also the value placed on this ability in preliterate societies. The value of faithful manual reproduction is greatly diminished once any art form becomes susceptible to industrial reproduction, while improvisation and originality become commensurately inflated in value. Our preference for vocal idiosyncracy in musical covers is a machine-age fetish; we would probably find the preliterate (or pre-recorded-music) ideal of slavish faithfulness to a traditional performance template to be off-putting.

For instance, I think it's notable that improvisational performances of jazz standards came into vogue along with the widespread availability of phonographs.