Perspective matters.

One creature’s hiking trail is another creature’s lunch buffet

Words of Wisdom has ventured into delightfully alien lands of conceptual earnesty these past several weeks, and I’m pleased that my broadcasting of observation made real through intent, of the format needing to become, for lack of more technically effective terminology, more “loosey-goosey“, was both well suited and followed through upon, in the ventures of breaching new cognitive lands thereafter. In a stroke of fascinating paradox, I have some of the final premises already in mind for the final weeks of 2025, involving the subject matter of what the last Words of Wisdom will entail, but I do not at current moment, have a definitive conceit for today’s article, and since we are a scant few hours away from the midnight deadline to get this posted, it is about time we just sit down and “wing it”, in order to put some philosophical bread on the empty table of the thought, so to speak.

To that end, my continued dabbling into the realm of psychoanalysis has me pondering the sphere of the human condition, so there is a compelling reason to attempt to expound upon the wild beasts of the working class standard; those sad lot that roam the white collar jungles of man’s vanilla domain, and the plain Jane’s that they fall prey to on a libidinal whim. I also happen to be incidentally running into reoccurring themes involving Nietzsche as of late, so I thought maybe I should just take hold of the animal stating me in the face, and confront the mad jackal head on, in breaking down an aphorism of note I have a personal interest in.

This particular aphorism comes to us from “The Gay Science“, and acts as Nietzsche’s own acknowledgement of the limitations of the human condition:

“How far the perspective character of existence extends, or whether it have any other character at all, whether an existence without explanation, without “sense” does not just become “nonsense,” whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an explaining existence – these questions, as is right and proper, cannot be determined even by the most diligent and severely conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect, because in this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its perspective forms, and only in them. We cannot see round our corner: it is hopeless curiosity to want to know what other modes of intellect and perspective there might be…”

A surprisingly concise point from Nietzsche, who can be notoriously cryptic with his point of view amidst his critiques. This feeds into a desire of mine, in wanting to rumble with some kind of reality related to the potentiality of humanity itself, one that would kind of meander between the delusional poison of hope, and the stark raving mad contrast reality provides in juxtaposition. Now, as already posited, Nietzsches assertion is fairly succinct, and I feel doesn’t really demand further redress, but for the sake of posterity, I reiterate that what he is putting forth, is that one is limited by their own perspectives, and therefore, inherent bias will rule how they end up understanding the world around them. He does go on not long after that, in a suggestion of combating this truism, in one needing to draw from another perspective, like the complete polar opposite of one’s own, as a sake of comparative enlightenment, so the solution that he immediately proposes is plain as day in coming to terms with a fulcrum of change. These are all well and good strategies, for anyone willing to put in the extra work in exercising their own rationality, and by showcasing the functional virtues of Aristotelian man. However, I think it’s worth diving into the deconstructionism of what entails these inherent biases, and what the bias of one’s own perspective can do, in coloring the world with a specific color pallete of perception, and the effective fight to change it in conclusion.

An easy way of decoding this, point in fact, is by borrowing from another philosopher named Heidegger, who deals in the realm of phenomenology, and that is essentially the school of thought dealing with the perception of reality itself, the subjective way of interpreting the objective world, our judgement vs the reality etc. In an extraordinarily, almost inappropriately criminal tl;dr version of Heidegger’s insights, a paraphrasing of his findings on the matter are distilled into the simple notion of: “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, which is actually a quote borrowed form a psychologist Abraham Maslow, but is an accurate parallel of Heidegger’s own viewpoints on how he sees the modality of existence vicariously through “the lived experience of a tool”. Once again, a fairly obvious takeaway here, but an insight that helps to further frame the idea of how one’s own “value propositions” translates to your interpretation of reality, in this case, viewed through the productive machinations of how hammers function.

I think one of the first important take away’s, in distilling “the logic of a hammer”, is that most people do not realize they are hammers, disregarding the notion that their everyday has an inordinate amount of nails to deal with. This is in part, a difficult truth to grasp onto, when confronting the notion of how someone could overlook such an obvious bias in their own day to day, or at least, a reality that seems obvious to you, the non-hammer, in your non-nail contingent world. I think, in kind of a fascinatingly literal-metaphorical paradox of acknowledgement, it bears repeating that hammers don’t think, and that statement becomes infinitely less laughable in notionality, when one considers people as hammers. While I won’t detour into this point anymore than the flippant aside of my mention of its existence, this line of thinking brings to mind my own recent preponderance in relation to this topic, with my theory on the “Turn Signal Paradox”, but I digress back to the hammer filled world we find ourselves in.

In an absurdist moment of defamation, I put forth an obvious conclusion, that in an existence that is representative of a wasteland of humans as tools dichotomy, the simple take away would be simply, to not waste your time dealing with tools, unless you’re playing the part of mercenary, and a job needs to get done. We can use this frame of reference, however, in helping ourselves avoiding the bleak, one dimensional realities that come with the modality of life-as-hammer would entail, by making a metaphysical leap of radical faith, through the notion of empathetic objectification. In order to understand your own position relative to the hammer, and in very much the same way, how you relate to the problem-as-nails dichotomy that come with the viewpoint, one may then use the power of metaphysical interpolation, in understanding the simple reality of yourself relative to the world: “How are you not like a hammer?” While this may sound absurdist and baffling to the non-philosophers amongst us, it is a completely valid thought experiment, in deconstructing oneself, through the perspective of another, and the nail-in-relation scenario, of what you may be, in relation to these elements. In putting forth the effort of empathetic objectification, not only must you empathize with another, but interpret their own interpretation of hammer-as-autonomous-agent, in how they are unable to ,”look around their own corner”, as it were, to perhaps give you the now new found perspective of how to “see around your own corner” in the process. Being able to use what they can’t see with their hammer related proclivities, will help you redefine your own objectified existence relative to the enlightenment, and will empower you in a new way of navigatory standard, in the corner that no longer creates the impossible standard of your own perceptual limitation.

As always, take care of yourself, and others.

-Pashford