Its poignant and heart-wrenching to watch, of course, but it also made me think of how we use language. It should come as no shock that language is an extension and representation of both our rational (reasoning) and irrational (emotional) selves.
I separate these artificially and simply for heuristic reasons--I am not being reductionist; and, although I am dualistic, I am doing so consciously for the sake of illustrating a point.
From one perspective, I think this video illustrates how we err when we take figures of speech like metaphors, personification, and anthropormorphizations too literally. What I mean by this is simply, if we refer back to the video, most viewers would describe her responses using terms like 'grief', ' a sense of loss', 'pain, and so on; however, if we attribute the actions of the chimpanzee mother as such some would say that we're anthropomorphizing.
Which, since primate research done by the likes of Dianne Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Biruté Galdikas, is not necessarily inaccurate. As Dutch Primatologist Frans de Waal noted: "To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."
This being said, we certainly can--and often do--take such figurative devices too far, and, in doing so, do commit an error. This can be seen, for example, when we give animals names and expect them to respond to them (although they may respond to the sound).
Anthropomorphizing also serves distinct literary purposes as seen in Mark Twain's, "A Dog's Tale" (no doubt also a conscious homonymic pun knowing Twain); or, Geroge Orwell's Animal Farm. Where very often anthropmorphzing is relegated to children's (didactic) tales and so-called serious literature that utilizes the same approach is given the more serious title of 'allegory'; yet, both of these examples anthropomorphise none-the-less.
In art, we can see such aspects of visual anthropmorphizing in the satirical representation (above) of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (below).
We may also go too far the other way when we deny the benefits of anthropomorphizing as a heroic extension of empathy. Again, if we return to the video of the mourning chimpanzee mother, we would, I believe, do ourselves a disservice if we imagine that emotion is reserved only for our species.
Equally so, personification. In today's society material things are often imbued with such importance so as to be placed above others within our species; when we judge the 'worth' of an individual in economic terms; or, justify denying tools to alleviate suffering based on an abstract (thereby artificial) financial matrix in the form of socio-economic indicators.
Furthermore, we can develop an unhealthy nostalgia for objects, especially when these objects are in the form of symbols. We can see this in even the seemingly most benign patriotism where we hold nations as being analogous to families or individual's, sometimes in need of self-defence in the form of war; or, when we describe foreign relations in the terms of relationships, especially if we wish to 'divorce'.
However, if we swing too far to the other side; if we deny meaning and emotion can imbued upon things we are in danger of cutting ourselves off from memories via things owned or cherished by those whom we've loved, yet lost.
This reminds me of a passage from Jo Walton's novel, Among Others. In one scene the protagonist, Morwenna (Mori) is contemplating the nature of things--those things not ours, and the effect of not having 'our' things may have upon us:
"...we don't have our own plates, or own knives or forks or cups. Like most of what we use, they're communal. they're handed out at random. There's no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness. Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup. Nobody can get fond of anything.
At Home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar's chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma's shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother's shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn't use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she'd cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.
None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn't stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn't have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was most cherished. (We always felt they might at any moment.) I suppose what they really did was psychological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in the tapestry. Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately" (p. 56).
Which brings me to the crux of my point: that to live full and meaningful lives we must be prepared to balance between the reasoning and rational world without losing sight of the emotional and irrational world; for one without the other is impossible.
This is, I believe, the subtle and deeper lesson in Carl Sagan's advice that we "be aware of wonder." The world around us is physical and follows the rules (guidelines if you like) of the physical; whereas we, who inhabit the world, who exist within the physical, are not prisoners to it because we are meta-physical creatures--the Yin, to the physical's Yang, if you will. In fact, we are both at once.
Therefore, it would seem that we are necessarily incomplete when we swing too far literal or too far figurative; when what we need is a balance between to the two.
So, we do ourselves a benefit--we exercise our meta-physical capacity--when we see the chimpanzee mother suffering, grieving. Just as we do ourselves a benefit by, as Mori indicated, we personify things because "[t]hey confirm the past, they connected everything, they [are the] threads in the tapestry," and if we fail to do so, if we are too literal, we leave ourselves a little more barren.
In other words, we must strive to be Menschliches, Allzumenschliches ("human, all too human").
I think we need to add to our lexicon of fallacies several new ones: the metaphorical fallacy: believing 'A' actually is 'B'; the personification fallacy: on the one hand, believing the object--a 'thing'--is a subject and, on the other, failing to see the importance of these 'things' within our "tapestry"; and, the anthropomorphization fallacy: the error in believing that our species alone can suffer, feel pain at loss, and grieve.
I think the danger in failing to see the imbued--the magical--diminishes us; and, in so doing, allows us to diminish each other.
I also believe that to do so is to accept plurality: the holding of two--potentially contradictory--thoughts in our minds at once. This is our strength, not our weakness. To give prominence to the literal over the figurative (or vice versa) is too unnaturally sever the whole at the expense of that whole. That is: to see wonder in the literal as well as in the figurative; to believe in the importance of stories--the meta-physical--as equally important to science--the physical, so we may see the world for the beautiful--often paradoxical--mystery that it holds.
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