MemeTome

While browsing, I came upon an interesting online newspaper journal, The High Horse, which publishes sociological, literary, and philosophically themed works. This particular piece is by Isabel Waidner.

The following relates to the peripheral and slightly curious paragraph ‘The reversal of the metaphysical hierarchy: the value of the surface’ in Hannah Arendt’s first volume of ‘The Life of the Mind’.In this paragraph, Arendt points out, that modern science perpetuates philosophy’s sempiternal hierarchy of ‘true inner Being over mere surface’. Therefore – adventurously, yet plausibly – Arendt grounds her reversal of aforesaid hierarchy in the findings of a Swiss zoologist, named Adolf Portmann, who – from a zoological (hence, scientific) point of view – has no reason to think of “the surface, or outward appearance, of animals as the subordinate consequence of the much more essential inner process.” (He figures, the opposite is true: inner organs exist solely to bring forth and maintain appearance.) Arendt transports Portmann’s zoology into metaphysics. The following returns Arendt’s metaphysics to the animals…

http://www.thehighhorse.net/chiroptera-vampyros-taphozus/122/ Read the story of two bats respectively submerged in tanks of water. The verbal gymnastics and interplay is quite entertaining.

The aforementioned Hannah Arendt was a German political theorist. “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting’”

The zoologist also mentioned, Adolf Portmann, turns out to be fairly elusive to search engines in terms of finding translations of any of his works online. If anyone can track something down for me, I will be pleased.