Heart Exam: Continued

Conceptual thought has a devil of a time capturing dynamism. Motion is a good example. We experience it without trouble; we find it tougher than nails to describe precisely. We have to do it piece-meal. The object was here, but now it is there, and whatever happened happened in between. We don’t know what it was, but have a name for it. We call it motion. But of course, we can usually find a spot half-way between here and there. And between that half-way point and here, there is another point that’s also half-way in between. To describe motion precisely, we have describe the tiniest increments. This is what calculus is intended to do: slicing and dicing space and time into infinitely small increments and then artfully summing them up. We get an illusion of control. At the conceptual level we never really get there—because we can’t reach infinity, but close enough for government work.

All right, but what does that have to do with heart? In looking at the dynamics of human development, we also engage in many differentiations. We have an experience of Self, but to grasp it intellectually, we parse it apart: intellect, emotion, imagination, will. They don’t exist independently, but the names do. But if we look at any one of these aspects or abstractions—these slices and dices of the Self—we detect even finer distinctions. Our feelings have many different qualities. There is raw emotion at one and joy at the other extreme; in between we find an infinity of other states. There is the emotion of watching Charles Bronson deal with the bad guys in one of the Death Wish movies. Raw emotion. There is the complex emotion at the end of watching The Death of a Salesman. There is the rock concert and Handel’s Messiah or Judas Maccabaeus. There is Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. To describe the curvature between these poles would require a kind of literary calculus no one has ever devised.

In dealing with the range of our capacity we associate different manifestations of the soul with different organs. We associate intellect with the brain, emotions with the gut, imagination with the eye, will with the fist, and all of the higher expressions of our nature with—the heart. Well, we’re finally there.

A somewhat hidden example of this is courage. Courage is an aspect of the will; and by real courage we don’t mean a man who, say, assaults a bigger, stronger fellow in a fit of rage. Rather, we call courageous someone who, in an extremely dangerous or risky situation, is able to overcome his fears to achieve a higher good. The word itself masks my point. Courage derives from the French coeur and ultimately from the Latin cor, both meaning heart. An interesting side note: the obsolete meaning of "courage" also includes mind, spirit, and temper. When we intend to speak of a lower kind of courage we label people who have it gutsy.

As we saw in the last post, Pascal associated a higher kind of reason with the heart. Paracelsus differentiated lower and higher forms of imagination. He called the higher form of it true imagination (imaginatio vera), the lower form fantasy. There is also a kind of intellectual imagination which we label foresight, thus imagination based on calculating the complex vector of events—in which the weighing of probabilities is to the front.

If heart is thus associated with a kind of thought, a kind of imagination, with courage, and with higher feelings, of which the highest is self-less love, it might be argued—I argue this point—that what tradition calls the heart, and treats as if it were a higher organ—is just a way of making a differentiation between a highly but comprehensively developed self and one that is more primitive and still largely undeveloped. The self as it appears most commonly is strongly conditioned by societal norms. Concerning this form of the self, Idries Shah has this interesting comment about this as yet undifferentiated form of the self. Writing in Learning How to Learn (pp. 157-157) he writes:

Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.

If we examine the polarities I’ve noted above using movies and other works of art, the chief difference between the low and the high is level of complexity. To appreciate the high, the self has to be developed enough to do so—and not simply intellectually. The self as a whole has to be developed, the will as much as the emotions, the imagination as much as the intellect. We are here faced with a dynamic of development. When we observe higher expressions of the self, we grope for a different way of rooting them. We recruit the heart as the organ. For lower expressions, we locate them in those organs most tangibly associated with different manifestations of the self that permeates the human body.