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6 We Are Rational Beings
We humans are born radically incomplete; we are unfinished nature, which means that we are not enslaved to anatomy like animals are. The natural tools, weapons, and armor of animals serve only one specific task and cannot be put aside or changed for others, severely restricting the life of an animal to limited activities. A mole’s short, chunky paw is an outstanding digging tool but cannot hold anything. An eagle’s talons are perfect for clutching small animals but are useless for digging. The human hand can perform all the tasks achieved by the restricted tools of animals: it can dig with a hand shovel, stab with a sword, cut down a tree with a saw, and perform thousands of other activities without being restricted to any single one of them.
Unlike the instincts and organs of other animals suitable only for specific tasks that lock them into one way of life, the human mind and hands are general tools. The human hand is tailored to the human mind. Planting a garden, making a canoe, and painting a picture are rational activities; in each case, the hands move under the direction of the mind to achieve the desired end. Thus, human activity is rational.
We Desire to Know by Nature
Every human being desires to know by nature. As soon as a child learns to speak, an unending barrage of questions begins, as every parent knows. Children are experts at wondering, for they see the world with new eyes. Some of us preserve the spontaneous wonder we had as children. The actual life we live first as children and then as young adults — if we did not have our questioning turned off by parents and teachers and if we do not become corrupted by the desire for power, wealth, and material comfort — shows that one end of human existence is to reveal, or to uncover, or to come into contact with more and more truth. Just as the sunflower cannot help but turn from the dark toward the light, the human being cannot help but shun falsehood and seek the truth.
The Senses Need Training
Knowing begins with the senses; unlike animal perception, human senses require training. The untutored tongue cannot distinguish a St. Emillion from a St. Julien, though a wine enthusiast not only can recognize the region the wine came from but the chateau and the vintage year.
Hence, the education of the whole person must include training in the use of the senses. Chief Standing Bear says that Lakota children “were taught to use their organs of smell, to look when apparently there was nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. A child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child.”[1]
Observation lessons were often given in the one-room schools of America’s past. John T. Prince, in his Courses and Methods: A Handbook for Teachers, written in 1892, explains that the “aim of these lessons is not so much to teach facts as it is to cultivate the pupils’ powers of observation, and to awaken an interest in, and a love for, the things of nature that lie directly about them.” Prince suggests that teachers tell nothing to their students that they can discover for themselves by their own powers of observation. He maintains that for students, “Learning one fact by their own unaided powers is better than memorizing a hundred facts which have been given to them.”[2]
Age is no barrier to training the senses. An adult can see the parts of a flower — the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils — or observe that the head of the common ant is triangular or learn how to use the pointer stars of the Big Dipper to locate the North Star.
While reflecting upon Lakota life, Standing Bear discovered the universal truth that “half-dormant senses mean half living.”[3] When a person’s senses are alive and alert to the world around him or her, life is full and interesting. Of all the natural creatures, only human beings can perceive the fullness of nature. Who does not wonder how birds fly, why the trees turn color in the fall, how ants find their way back home, or why heavy objects fall? If a person is alive, then everything in nature evokes wonder.
The Joy of Knowing
Every naturalist enjoys the pleasure of exercising his or her powers of observation. Listen to Charles Darwin’s journal entry describing his first day in a tropical jungle: “The day has passed delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again.”[4]
The beauty of nature connects a Lakota Indian Chief, a great English naturalist, and a pupil in a one-room schoolhouse on the American prairie. Fully developed senses allow us to receive the gifts of nature: beauty, wonder, mystery, and places to meditate — the means to discover that we belong in this world as much as the wild sunflowers and the soaring hawks.
7 Habits of Thinking
The Curse of Social Living
Sophocles enunciated 2,500 years ago that “nothing that is vast enters the life of mortals without a curse,”[5] wisdom that implicitly recognizes that no perfect social order can be created; said in colloquial English, Nothing great without a curse, and this applies to the social nature of Homo sapiens, too, not just to the human condition of nature not giving us a specific way of life.
The curse of social living is that every society implants ideas and instills habits of thinking and feeling that limit its members to a particular perspective, one that, as a general rule, is contrary to human nature and destructive to neighboring societies. The paradox is that social living greatly extends our capabilities and yet limits us. Capitalism tells us that we are economic beings, consumer-workers; nationalism tells us that our ultimate destiny is the fate of our Nation-State; democracy tells us we are autonomous, isolated individuals.
Ancient Habits of Thinking
A person in a premodern culture acquires at an early age the habit of understanding himself as part of a larger whole. Alexis de Tocqueville emphasizes that an “aristocracy links everybody, from the peasant to the king, in one long chain.” [6] If I am a link in such a chain, I understand myself by looking outward to see who is above and below me in the social hierarchy. In this way, I form the habit of understanding myself as part of a whole. Later, I transfer this habit to thinking about other things. Thus, in a group-centered culture, the first habit of thinking is: To understand something, see how it is related to the whole. With such a habit, a person approaches every problem as an organic whole, not a composite whole made up of a sum of parts, and understands each of its many interrelated parts in terms of that whole, whatever it may be — humanity, the family, the person, or even an animal or plant. Before a Hopi potter begins to shape the clay, she has the entire design of the pot formed in her mind. No single element of the design has a symbolic significance in and of itself, but only in relation to the whole. The design intricacies of Hopi pottery are shown in Figure 7.1.
In the ancient world, the constant reference point is the group. To be separated from the group is to lose one’s identity or even one’s existence. Prince Modupe says that at the turn of the century in Africa, “Any destiny apart from the tribe was, of course, beyond the limits of either imagination or intuition. It was as unthinkable as that one of the bright orange legs of a millipede should detach itself from the long black body of the creature and go walking off by itself.”[7] If I am a member of a group-centered culture, I believe that I am social by nature and that without the group, I would not exist. Each person about me understands himself or herself as part of a group. I see that I am always in need of other persons; thus, when I do not know something, I seek out a person who possesses knowledge and wisdom. In this way, I form a second habit of thinking: Seek guidance from masters. Hopi children frequently hear from their parents, “Your old uncle taught us that way; it is the right way” and “Listen to the old people; they are wise.”
I also realize my experience is neither unique nor private; I understand what happens to me in terms of experience common to my family, clan, or humanity. I recognize that my understanding is limited, but I have a common treasure to draw upon — the accumulated knowledge of my people. Life, for me, is governed less by abstract thinking and more by a common store of wisdom. Thus, I acquire a third habit of thinking: Experience will confirm the truth of what the masters say and reveal the wisdom behind their words.Hopis say, “Our way of life was given to us when time began.”
The habits of thinking of group-centered peoples do differ in some important ways. For instance, the Eastern Indians emphasize universals, while the Chinese concentrate on particulars.
The advantage of the ancient habits of thinking is that they are founded on our social nature; the curse is that our nearly unlimited freedom is not recognized, nor is our capacity to command nature. When the Hopis say, “Our way of life was given to us when time began,” they praise that their way of living never changes, unlike we modern Westerners where nothing seems fixed in our social and economic life.
Modern Habits of Thinking
Tocqueville, in “Concerning the Philosophical Approach of the Americans,” an absolutely brilliant chapter of Democracy in America, argues that since an American always begins with the self, each citizen forms the intellectual habit of looking to the part, not to the whole, and as a result is a Cartesian reductionist: “Of all the countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.”[8] Tocqueville explains this paradox. In a modern democratic society, the links between generations are broken; consequently, in such a society, men and women cannot base their beliefs on tradition or class. Social equality produces a “general distaste for accepting any man’s word as proof of anything.”[9] Therefore, “in most mental operations each American relies on individual effort and judgment.”[10] Like Descartes, each American employs the philosophical method to seek for the reason of things for oneself and in oneself alone.[11]
One general conclusion Tocqueville draws from his study of American life is that “the Americans have needed no books to teach them philosophic method, having found it in themselves. Much the same can be said of what has happened in Europe.”[12] Francis Bacon, in natural science, and René Descartes, in philosophy, “abolished accepted formulas, destroyed the dominion of tradition, and upset the authority of the masters.”[13] Luther, Voltaire, and several centuries later, the man on the street in America submitted traditional beliefs to individual examination.
Proceeding by leaps and bounds, Tocqueville does not stop to give in detail the modern habits of thinking, so at the risk of appearing slightly redundant, let me flesh out his insights.
First, let me note that to grasp the habits of thinking of premodern peoples, I had to imaginatively use published accounts by Africans, Native Americans, and Chinese, while to understand modern habits of thinking, I just had to look at myself.
As a member of a modern democratic culture, I could not base my beliefs on tradition, custom, or class, because the links between “the peasant and the king” no longer exist in Modernity. By the sixth grade, I did not understand myself in terms of either family or nature; my Romanian heritage meant nothing in America, and although I spent my boyhood summers playing in rural Michigan, I never received any instruction at home or in school about my connection to nature. I understand myself as an isolated, autonomous individual. My constant reference point, then, was always myself. Consequently, I formed the habit of always thinking of myself in isolation from other people, and this habit carried over when I thought about other things. Thus, my first culturally-given habit of thinking was To understand something isolate it so it exists apart from all relations.
Hence, I believed that every part can be separated from the whole and that the whole can be understood as a collection of parts. With such a habit of mind, I attempted to understand every whole solely in terms of its parts. But the smallest parts of anything are material. Consequently, the culturally-given habit of thinking the whole is a collection of parts made me a firm believer in materialism — I could not think any other way. I just “knew” that the universe, including all aspects of human life, was the result of the interactions of little bits of matter.
When I was a young theoretical physicist, I would have staked my life on the proposition that matter is the ultimate reality. The philosophers and aspiring poets I knew in graduate school often asked me over beer and pizza about the fundamental elements of reality. With no hesitancy, I could not help but say, “atoms, genes, individuals, competition, and warfare” and, yet, believed I was thinking, not mindlessly repeating what had been programmed into me, and my philosopher and poet friends did not strenuously disagree. I now know that virtually every American forms the intellectual habit of looking to the parts, not the whole, and thus is at heart a Cartesian reductionist and thus a materialist.
Because of the principles of social equality that I had taken in, I did not trust the authority of any person and had an intense “distaste for accepting any man’s word as proof of anything.”[14] As a result, in most mental operations, I relied on my own judgment and thought. Although I found philosophy a bore and totally irrelevant to my life, yet, I proceeded just as Descartes did; the intellectual method I employed was to seek by myself and in myself “for the only reason for things.”[15] Since American culture told me that all individuals are equal and that I could recognize the truth just as well as the next person, I thought that I had no need to seek guidance from others, even acknowledged masters. Indeed, I believed that if I followed another person’s judgment, I would give myself over to that individual and thereby enslave myself and violate what was most precious to me, my personal freedom. Thus, my second habit of thinking was Rely solely on individual judgment and thought. Consequently, in American life, no masters are recognized, and, in effect, the three great teachers of humankind — the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus — are just three voices among many. In fact, if anyone holds up someone as a master to follow, most Americans will intentionally ignore or dismiss that person since it smacks of inequality.
American culture also informed me that the essence of individuality is uniqueness. Each individual has his or her own unique beliefs, tastes, feelings, thoughts, desires, and expectations. What is true for another individual is not true for me: Everybody is different. Furthermore, each individual has a different way of evaluating his or her experiences; another individual’s word or experience is not proof of anything. However, since all individuals are equal, my direct experience is not proof of anything either. From these cultural opinions, I learned to distrust my own experience. For instance, when I read in Aristotle’s treatises that “the whole is prior to and greater than the part,” “every person desires to know,” and “man is social by nature” are first principles, I did not look to my own experience for confirmation, but instead demanded a proof of some kind, and not finding an acceptable proof, I took each of these statements as assumptions that I could later deny if I so wished.
Since individual experience is unique and truth is universal, I was led to form a third habit of thinking: Accept as true only what can be proved through logic, mathematics, or scientific experiment. For me, reason and the scientific method replaced the authority of direct, concrete experience. In principle, I could carry out any logical argument, mathematical demonstration, or scientific experiment; thus, I never had to submit myself to an acknowledged master or any outside authority. I readily accepted the results of electrodynamics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics because they made no claim on my interior life and never challenged who I took myself to be.
Layered on top of these three democratic habits of thinking are religious dogmas and political ideologies — the equality of conditions does not exist in a vacuum. Many political junkies, those rabid viewers of Fox News or MSNBC, believe that they rely solely on their own judgment; when in actuality, political ideologues, left and right, often parrot what they saw on TV, heard on talk radio, or read on the Internet. Religious dogma and political ideology led to creationism and to the denial of climate change, despite scientific evidence.
No one doubts that many Americans today consult priests or psychotherapists for guidance in life, although I suspect not with the blind faith or trust they would have had in the Fifties. With the intensification of equality in the Sixties, parishioners and clients became the final judges of what is best for them.
That science is the only intellectual authority in Modernity seems to be contradicted by the widespread belief in astrology, herbal cures for cancer, and crystal-healing of a disturbed psyche. But when science proclaims life is pointless, can offer only slash-burn-and-poison for cancer treatment, and restores mental well-being through tranquilizers and psychotropics, then even the college-educated out of desperation turn to alternatives.
8 We Are More Than We Think We Are
If we lack a word for an experience, we obviously cannot talk to others about it, and the experience, no matter how intense or unsettling, will fade from lack of understanding, and later we will be unable to judge whether it was significant or not.
Every scientist and mathematician, professional and student, whom I have known, can give countless occurrences in their lives of hard, fruitless labor preceding effortless knowing. In the classroom or around the seminar table, I have heard an excited “I see it” innumerable times, but never in my life as a theoretical physicist did I reflect with colleagues about the meaning of such an experience. As a result, I remained in the dark for years about the deepest aspects of what we are. My enlightenment came only after reading Plato and Aristotle. Through straightforward reflection about the interior life, accompanied by clear thinking, Plato and Aristotle discovered two aspects of the mind, which they called nous and dianoia.
Note: The Latin words ratio and intellectus correspond to the older Greek terms dianoia and nous. The Greek is used here because the Latin calls to mind the English words “reason” and “intellect,” which often are used as synonyms. The English words are substantially more limited and less precise than either the Latin or the Greek.
The Two Modes of the Mind
Labor
We commonly speak of knowing as defining, comparing, analyzing wholes into component parts, and drawing conclusions from first principles. Such discursive or step-by-step thinking the ancient Greek philosophers called dianoia. Sherlock Holmes is the epitome of dianoia at work. From the analysis of a cigar ash ground into a carpet, a scuff mark on a door, and the residue in a wineglass, he concludes the criminal is a lame aristocrat who resides in Kensington.
In discursive thinking, we either apply first principles or draw out their consequences. Dianoia operates step-by-step, almost in a mechanical fashion, repeating the same procedure again and again: A = B, B = C, therefore A = C; premise 1, premise 2, therefore, conclusion 1; etc.
What we frequently call thinking is not dianoia but the association of ideas. Consider the following scenario. In a seminar, the opening question is “What does Tocqueville mean by the equality of conditions?” Three minutes later, the participants are discussing the siege of Richmond. Through associations, the discussion moved rapidly from the equality of conditions to political equality to slavery in the South to Ken Burn’s Civil War to the Siege of Richmond. And soon, if the seminar leader did not intervene, the discussion would have moved on to the film Gone with the Wind and Clark Gable’s last line: “Frankly, lady. I don’t give a damn.” There is, of course, no logical, physical, or psychological connection between the equality of conditions and Gable’s exit line. If we step back and examine our “thinking,” we would find, perhaps to our amusement, that much of what we take for thinking is the mere association of ideas that has nothing to do with the actual structure of the world or the interior life.
Gift
Nous is the capacity for effortless knowing — to behold the truth the way the eye sees a landscape. The most famous story of sudden insight — of the “light bulb going off” — is the one told about Archimedes. The ruler Hiero II asked Archimedes to determine if the royal crown was truly made of pure gold or alloyed with silver. Archimedes knew that if the crown were not irregularly shaped, he could easily measure its volume and then check if its density was that of gold. But Archimedes could not figure out how to determine the volume of the crown. He was stumped; until one day, when he stepped into his bath, the solution suddenly appeared to him: A given weight of gold displaces less water than an equal weight of silver. He shouted, “Eureka! Eureka!” and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse.
Henri Poincaré, in his book Science and Method, describes how he discovered the relationship of Fuchsian functions to other branches of mathematics. After he had worked out the basic properties of Fuchsian functions, he left Caen, France, where he was living at the time, to participate in a geological conference at Coutances. The incidents of the journey made him forget his mathematical work. As a scheduled break from the conference, attendees went on a bus excursion. Poincaré reports, “Just as I put my foot on the step [of the bus], the idea came to me, though nothing in my former thoughts seemed to have prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”[16]
When Poincaré returned home from the conference, he turned his attention to the study of certain “arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”[17]
Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss tried unsuccessfully for two years to prove an arithmetical theorem. In a letter to a colleague, he revealed, “Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”[18]
Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle relates how the solution to what seemed an intractable mathematical problem in quantum physics came to him while driving a car on the road over Bowes Moor, much as “the revelation occurred to Paul on the Road to Damascus: My awareness of the mathematics clarified, not a little, not even a lot, but as if a huge brilliant light had suddenly been switched on. How long did it take to become totally convinced that the problem was solved? Less than five seconds.”[19]
What Hoyle describes as a “huge brilliant light” and Poincaré calls a “sudden illumination”[20] and Gauss terms “a flash of lightning,” the ancient Greek philosophers named nous, whose characteristics are “conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty,” as Poincaré noted. We, clearly, cannot command nous; the direct grasp of a truth is a gift, not something we can turn on or off at will, for if we could, we would.
Dianoia and nous are not confined to doing mathematics and science but are fully present in any intellectual activity. Those poets in Modernity who explore the depths of the interior life acknowledge publicly that all artistic creation rests upon gifts. In his autobiographical essay “Catholic Education,” poet Czeslaw Milosz confessed, “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.”[21]
Theodore Roethke, in “On ‘Identity’,” a lecture delivered at Northwestern University, told how at the age of forty-four, he was in a particular hell for a poet, a longish dry period; he thought he was finished as a poet. For weeks at the University of Washington, he had been teaching five-beat line to aspiring poets but felt a total fraud because he could write nothing himself. “Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem ‘The Dance’[22] started, and finished itself in a very short time — say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down — I always do after I’ve written what I know is a good piece.” The gift arrived, and Roethke thanked the source, and “wept for joy.”[23]
We must not be misled into thinking that nous only operates in geniuses, giving them a direct grasp of profound truths. When a student of Euclid’s Elements truly grasps a demonstration, he or she shouts with joy, “I see it.” Through nous, the student, in a flash, immediately grasped the whole of the argument. Without nous, any rational argument cannot be apprehended. In other tutorials, scientific, poetic, and philosophic insights occur. A student may suddenly grasp how the Iliad forms an integral whole, or why Socrates in the Phaedo, on the day of his execution, spins philosophical “tales” about the immorality of the soul to comfort his distraught friends.
The Divine Element Within
The above discussion of dianoia and nous rests on straightforward observations of the interior life and consequently should not be controversial. As predictable, the ancient and modern ways of understanding the two modes of the mind are opposed. For Plato and Aristotle, dianoia is human and nous divine.
Plato rightly contends that to directly grasp a truth is superior to arguing to it. Consequently, dianoia is always in the service of nous. In the Seventh Letter, he explains how “after practicing detailed comparisons of names and definitions and visual and other sense perceptions, after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy, at last in a flash of understanding . . . the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light.”[24]
In Modernity, nous is denied, ignored, or misunderstood. As a result, the origin of all knowledge is taken as unaided human effort and activity. Almost without exception, scientists and mathematicians claim to be the sole source of their discoveries. When intellectual insight is acknowledged as unwilled, it is attributed to the hidden workings of an unconscious mind, not to a supernatural gift. Nothing in science or mathematics is seen as a gratuitous gift from Divine Mind, or God. Scientists and mathematicians, with their denial of nous, proclaim they are beholden to nothing beyond themselves. Instead of being thankful, they are prideful, for they believe that all knowledge and invention results from human labor alone. How different was Pythagoras! After the remarkable theorem that now bears his name was revealed to him, Pythagoras in gratitude sacrificed an ox to the gods.
Main image is of the author.
Endnotes
[1] Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 69-70.
[2] John T. Prince, Courses and Methods: A Handbook for Teachers (Boston: Ginn, 1892), p. 188.
[3] Standing Bear, p. 69.
[4] Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 8.
[5] Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, line 614, http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html.
[6] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 508.
[7] Prince Modupe, I Was a Savage (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), pp. 53-54.
[8] Tocqueville, p. 429.
[9] Ibid., p. 430.
[10] Ibid., p. 429.
[11] See Ibid., p. 429.
[12] Ibid., p, 430.
[13] Ibid., p. 431.
[14] Ibid., p. 430.
[15] Ibid., p. 429.
[16] Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), p. 53.
[17] Ibid., pp. 53-54. Italics added.
[18] Karl Friedrich Gauss, quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 15.
[19] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982): 24, 25. Available http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/527/2/Hoyle.pdf.
[20] Poincaré, Science and Method, p. 55.
[21] Czeslaw Milosz, “Catholic Education,” in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 87.
[22] For ‘The Dance’ read by Tom Bedlam see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaoXy2KaJU.
[23] Theodore Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 223-24.
[24]Plato, Seventh Letter in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 344b.