Gotham Diary:
Thinking, Meaning, and Spirituality
5 September 2014
A very good friend of mine is in India at the moment, pursuing Oneness. That’s my way of putting it. We have surprisingly fertile conversations about living and being. They’re surprising to me — but not, it seems, to her — because I am and always have been unmoved by Asian ideas about humanity and the world, especially the ideas that have been tweaked for export to the West. I should have thought that that would make for rough seas, and the relegation of my friend’s pilgrimage — my word again — to a no-go zone, in which case our friendship would subside for the time being. I find, however, that not only am I able to set aside my judgment of abstract ideas generally, in order to hear what my friend has to say specifically, but, beyond that, I am no longer braced by the core idea of Western thought, a faith in reason.
What “reason” boils down to is the rule against contradictions, which holds that a thing either is or it isn’t; it can’t be both. This kind of reason is essential to the prosecution of scientific research. In the laboratory, the rule against contradictions has found its home. It need no longer burden human beings elsewhere. The modern humanist understands that, while we are indeed capable of reason, we are hardly the “rational animals” of Aristotelian formulation.
For nearly 2500 years (not a very long time, when you consider the recently excavated skeleton of the dreadnoughtus, but long enough), “reason” has served as a kind of intellectual skin color, undergirding a shifty racism. Men have been regarded as rational animals — women not. In the Age of Empire, Europeans were the reasonable people, while everyone else was “primitive.”
Boys attained the “age of reason” at about seven or eight years of age. I found myself thinking a lot about this while I was playing with Will last month. What would it mean for Will to attain the age of reason? He’s already pretty clever, and he is only four and a half. Kathleen and I don’t talk about it, because we don’t want to upset his parents, but we think that Will would make a pretty good lawyer, and not just because he’s resourceful and persistent. I don’t think that there is much in the way of reason that he has yet to learn. What I think will happen to him in first or second grade, if not sooner, is that he will accept that it is easier to cooperate with the way of the world than to challenge it. This is reason in the sense of the phrase, “I knew you’d see reason.” Our way or the highway.
This lesson has to be learned and unlearned throughout life. Adolescence is the dreadful passage that it is because teenagers have to do both: they must unlearn habits of conformity in order to discover themselves while at the same time learning that this new selfness equips them to hurt others as they would hate to be hurt themselves. Ten years later, most educated people undergo a third awakening, as they find themselves judging their friendships and associations in largely adult terms, and abandoning (or shelving) attachments that remain juvenile. No sooner is this process complete than intimations of mortality begin to sound, growing louder every year: We are all going to die, but we are each going to die alone. The world comes to an end for every one of us, but goes on undisturbed for everyone else.
These existential lessons have nothing to do with reason. Reason, in fact, is a handy tool that allows the user to concentrate on whichever side of the paradox is more appealing, and to forget about the other. I can agree and disagree with my friend, and, motivated by a reasonable concern for friendship, ignore the disagreement.
Anyway, reason is for scientists and circuitboards. It is not for human beings.
***
My friend recommended a book, and the book, promptly purchased, arrived yesterday. I will say more about it anon; for the moment, the only thing to say is that the bit of the book that I sampled raised, front and center, the concept of spirituality. My friend and I have already exchanged letters on this topic, and I’m sure that there will be more.
What is spirituality? I have no idea. For me, it has never been anything but a word that other people use. I exaggerate. I have a sense of spirituality akin to the sense of horror that can be kindled by a “haunted house.” You can imagine ghosts, but that doesn’t make them real. Spirituality, like horror, can be experienced as a transient emotional state. But for many people it is clearly a lot more than that. Just not for me.
Spirituality is often associated with the search for meaning. Once again, I’m stupid. I don’t understand the “search” part. Meaning, for me, is like a waterfall at whose foot I’m standing. Meaning is the ordering of the world, the incessant fitting together and coming apart of everything that is. To wax poetic, the sound of its thundering is the music of the spheres, and I can’t imagine not hearing it. But then, I’m an old man. I didn’t hear it when I was young. And I thought that meaning was something that people made up. Even then, I didn’t see the point of searching for it. To put it absolutely simply: “meaning” was something that I was not in any pressing need of.
What I say about meaning is an extension of what I’ve learned about thinking. The world means; I think. Thinking is simply the arrangement of the contents of my mind. Fitting together and coming apart, on a very small scale. It has little to do with syllogisms or puzzles. I don’t try to answer questions; I try to understand them.
The world is complete, comprising everything that was, is, or will be. By comparison — well, there is no comparison: my mind is simply empty. But not utterly empty.
Writing about this to my friend yesterday, I remembered a curious problem from childhood.
To decorate the den in our first house, my mother bought — at Gimbel’s, I think — three ornamental maps. Much later — I still have them; they’re on the wall in the foyer — I realized that they must have come from a deluxe publication of the Second Empire or the early Third Republic. Each map portrays a département of France, its margins filled with what used to be called illustrative material. La Fontaine appears in one of them, while two peasants roll a cask of wine in another.
Because one of the departments was Finistère, whose peninsulas are a salient feature of the outline of France, I tried to arrange the maps of the other two — Aisne and Côte d’or — alongside it in a way that would complete the famous Hexagon. This couldn’t be done, of course. There must be other pieces to the puzzle. Slowly, I realized that I wasn’t missing a few pieces; I was missing almost all of them. (There are nearly a hundred.)
That is how the mind is. We are missing almost all the pieces. But there are corners that we can try to fill in. It would be possible (in theory) to collect all the other maps from that old folio, but hardly necessary, as maps of the departments of France are easily found. The trick is to know that you haven’t got them, and then to look for them. This is what thinking is.
The other difference between meaning and thinking is that we think, when we think properly, in a shared language. Romantically-inclined people like to overlook the role of articulation in thought — an essential one. If you can’t say it, you haven’t thought it. Meaning, in contrast, we each perceive from a unique viewpoint, which we can share with no one. Meaning can, therefore, never be expressed in words. Only what we think about it. And thinking about meaning is not recommended. We can only think about the bits of meaning that we have assembled in our own minds. Our almost empty minds.
***
Two notes, both bearing on the law.
First, every judgment is a decision between two or more choices. In order to choose well, we rely partly on the principles of reason, but there is much more to it than that; judgment itself is rarely purely rational. Having made a judgment, however, we apply the rule against contradiction for practical purposes. In a court of law, you cannot be found guilty and not guilty. In Anglophone law, it’s worth noting, the ruling concept of reasonableness is almost openly at odds with that of rationality.
Second, Kathleen and I are not hoping that Will will grow up to be a lawyer. Kathleen is especially emphatic about this. For my part, speaking as someone who hasn’t practiced law in nearly thirty years, law school can serve as the crown of a humanist education. I’m inclined to think that everyone ought to go.
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Daily Blague news update: Joys of Jihad.