What is Your Porpoise? (After Lewis Carroll)

By Westen Soule

The Parallels of Risk-Taking in Business and Philosophy

The bounty one gains from interpreting Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland is hotly debated. There are influential theological perspectives: in this vein, some people connect the ‘rabbit hole’ to Alice almost in the way the apple of scripture has been linked to the biblical Eve. Alternatively, some have interpreted the book’s additional characters to be an extrapolated swarm of mental illnesses by which Alice was plagued in falling down the rabbit hole; in this schema, the white rabbit speaks for anxiety...and the list goes on.

In a somewhat different interpretative framework—but not an uncommon one—the true philosopher's quest for knowledge is at times depicted to be the rabbit hole in which Alice finds herself to be seemingly forever falling. What epitomizes this phenomenon best to me is, fittingly enough, a scene in Chapter 10: “The Lobster Quadrille.” Here Alice remarks that the porpoise does not fit into the group—strictly out of her fear of its predatory nature.

However, the Mock Turtle who led Alice to the dance insists, “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going on a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”—and after a bit of a decoding on Alice’s part, she realizes that the Mock Turtle certainly meant what the Mock Turtle had said: the porpoise was necessary in the Lobster Quadrille. Lewis Carroll’s use of diction in this case may allude to the archetypal, universal link between risk and reward in our seemingly endless path of choices. Faced constantly with distance and alienation from others in every passing moment, we nonetheless have to move forward and—again and yet again—make a choice.

What sums up and depicts such existential distancing or alienation between human beings more fully than the social milieu of secondary school? Or the ensuing stories—in our college years and beyond—of those who successfully made it out of the weeds and proved themselves?

Capturing the values that we all share, in a slightly different context, is evident in the true mark of any good commercial product. The computer technologies that process our vastly different lives have been the platforms through which we have exalted collective conveniences. To explore such shared perspectives and yet also, as it were, log in to the opportunities of much more individual growth that come with it, we might meet to ponder what alternative philosophy—the love of wisdom—truly offers to Eve’s apple.

This prospect of seeking alternatives to the stereotype of “temptation” may mean relentlessly asking how we can find meaning within a world in which each one of us feels profound alienation—in which many have even sworn allegiance to a business-branded-apple via an ever-present wristwatch. How can we carve out a unique, but also uniquely meaningful, path?

PART TWO WILL CONTINUE OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS.