Twisted Together

The concept of complexity suggests an approach to thinking about values. Complex means, minimally, twisted together, entwined. Something made of many parts linked together in meaningfully related ways has more value than something simple existing without relationships. A slice of bread has more nutritional value than a lump of sugar with the same caloric value. Both produce energy in the body but the bread will provide more balanced nutrition owing to its more complex structure.

Another case. You come into a new community and meet two people. Both belong to important and well-connected families. One of them, Arthur, is a leading figure in his family, young but already widely accomplished. The other, Beaumont, is his family’s problem child, the source of many conflicts, with a very patchy history to put it generously. — This, by the way, is how a novelist develops a plot. He says: Who’s going to be more valuable to you in your work in the new community: Arthur or Beaumont? The truth is that odds heavily favor Arthur, and in most cases he will be very helpful; Beaumont may be entertaining, but he’ll be a problem sooner or later. The novelist knows this—knows how people eyeball situations—and therefore has a nice plot situation that might be exploited.

Both are complexly related to their families, but Arthur is integrated and Beaumont is not. This fact suggests that “relationship,” by itself, is not a sufficient condition for value. Relationships are central, but they range between love and hatred. Attraction and repulsion are more neutral terms, but speaking of love and hate permits us to think in terms of willful, feeling agents. We might hypothesize that creation is a movement in the direction of complexity, thus in the direction of an attractor. Destruction then may be envisioned as things spontaneously falling apart because an attractor has been removed; in its absence that which used to cohere no longer does.

Complexity, however, won’t solve the problem of morality. What is it about Beaumont that always produces trouble, mayhem, contention, flare-ups, wrecks, uproars, and the like? Why is it that whatever Arthur touches, it always turns green? Is it a willful quality? Is it grace? Is it nurture, nature, karma? Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer. I think it is a will that freely decides, but I can’t justify that thought by the mechanics of logic.

Logic depends on concepts, but in Beaumont’s (or anybody’s) actual case, a point comes where a weird concept spoils the logic. Beaumont acts on his perceptions of reality; in his own mind he chooses the good. He seems unable to perceive the full context of his choice, unable to see that, more complexly considered, the choice he makes will lead to a negative outcome. That inability to see: is that also a choice? or is it a real inability. Logic can’t untwist that one for us. When I do bad things, I willfully ignore what I do perceive. Hence arises my belief that evil is chosen knowingly. But I can’t honestly speak for Beaumont.

This all sounds innocent enough, but its implications are quite major. We’ll have to go there.

Limits

“The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody,” said Lord Peter Whimsey, the aristocrat-detective, the invention of Dorothy L. Sayers, speaking in one of her best novels, Gaudy Nights. Confessing my own limitations, I am here bound to report another Whimsey quote, in the same book (both courtesy of Wikiquotes, although I did read Gaudy Nights). There Whimsey said, “The facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.” To which I might add, by way of excuse, that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Witty things always occur to me hours after the occasion for using them is past. Thus I better quickly marshal another quote to set the stage here, that by the most famous French diplomat ever, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, who said: “Above all, no zeal.”—Which reminds me that he had the bad fortune to live with an even greater man always around, Napoleon. Napoleon once supposedly said to Talleyrand (and this sort of thing does build humility): “Look, you’re shit in a silk stocking.” I suppose I should render that more politely in French: “Ah, tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.” Which reminds me of something else—of reading certain books in youth—I remember especially A Thousand and One Nights—in which, back in those days, the sexually explicit passages would be rendered in Italian! Groan! How that used to bug me. And my parents, speaking Hungarian, would switch to German when they didn’t wish us to understand what they were saying. But I’m now really wandering from the subject. Let’s get back to boredom.

Here I simply wish to emphasize that if the faculties of Man are single—expressing themselves in multiple modalities, each of those modalities has a boundary or limit. We benefit from them only when they are used in harmony. This is best illustrated with the intellect, the chief limit of which is also its greatest power. It can delimit any aspect of reality by separating it into a concept. This greatly increases our power of understanding, but only up to a limit. Hence Whimsey is correct. Principles, which are concepts dressed as absolutes, will kill people if other modes of perception are not permitted to come to bear. Hence also Talleyrand was nothing if not wise when counseling that zeal must be avoided. By curbing zeal, we give our other modes of being scope to enlarge our sense of the reality or action we are pondering.

One of the maddening but, in the long haul, most beneficial experiences we can gain by patrolling the border zone is that absolute certainties are unachievable. Wisdom is one of those great values that simply don’t lend themselves to exploitation. You can’t beat someone over the head with it, you can’t reduce it to a slogan, you can’t turn wisdom into money, power, or fame. If fame comes, it comes after you’ve departed. Conversely, any wisdom offered for sale or as the sure thing, you can’t miss, is certain to be counterfeit. Quotes are on my mind today, so let me end with one. Wisdom? Well….

So high, you can’t get over it.
So low, you can’t get under it.
So wide, you can’t get around it.
You gotta come in by the door.

Faculties: The One and Many

If I consult my own experience, I find that my various modes of being are a unity. I think of the self as a point, this despite the fact that I distinguish at least six modalities—thought, will, intuition, memory, emotion, and sensation. These are ways of perceiving the self in action; one of the meanings of modality, derived from the word mode, is form. The self may therefore be said to be a unity that manifests in different ways or forms. As we all know, these modalities may coincide, overlay, mix, fuse, etc. Each may be more or less quiescent. When I mow the lawn I immerse myself in the mode of sensation and of willing. My thoughts wander, my emotions rest except, from time to time, when I’m pleased by the attractive swaths of green that I produce; my intuition is in neutral; my thoughts wander; sometimes they latch on to a phrase left over from the last coherent run of mentation and keeps repeating that phrase over and over again; my memories are on automatic, but since my will is focused on making the lawnmower do its thing, their presentation—the stream of consciousness that still flows beneath the phrases I might be repeating, maybe something Latin and totally irrelevant but mildly pleasing—corruptio optima pessima, say—isn’t noticed. The repeating phrase need not learned, by the way. The last one I recall was “What’s hidden in that kitchen midden” which kept my mind playing like a child because it liked the rhyme.

The poet in me insists on the unity of self, but philosophers sometimes get caught up in the conceptual game too much. We separate and label the modalities, make of each a kind of hard and distinct something. Thus we have Schopenhauer who settled on the Will and would have it be the king. In modern psychiatric practice, Feeling is everything. I haven’t traced that peculiar emphasis back to its source in some philosopher or other, but it’s probably possible. But I always chuckle when Star Trek The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the empath, we might call her, comes out with her true-and-tested question: “How do you feel about that?” The Intellect is the favorite of the philosophical community. It is the faculty philosophers hone to a fine edge and brilliant sheen; is it any wonder then that it must be the king of the faculties? For the more poetic mind, intellect has serious limits. As a young man I used to joke, heading to the bar with my friends after obligatory classes in philosophy saying: “If I stop suddenly and my esse should roll out in front of me—then I’ll believe I have one.” Juvenile, to be sure, but I make my point.

Here we have yet another instance of the one and the many—the conceptualization of which is a very hard nut for the intellect to crack but not all that problematical for the poet. The wonder of the human soul, in fact, is this oneness with multiple modalities. In this low realm we do get weird adaptations. When I see trees adapted to peculiar terrain, plants that grow immensely tall because they try to reach the tiny bit of light available to them, when I see strange creatures that inhabit the total darkness of the deepest oceans—at times like that I’m reminded of people in whom one faculty is massively developed but others have had no chance to unfold. My admiration is thus for those who develop fully on many fronts, and in harmony. I am on record as an admirer of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an exemplar of such persons who reach high states of development often overcoming, on the way, what appear insurmountable odds.

Hierarchy of Faculties

We have a tendency to associate the real with the tangible, the sensory. We can’t touch thoughts and therefore it seems that they cannot hurt us. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” At the trivial level the old saying is true enough, but not in social reality. A sentence of death from the high bench has killed many people. And many millions have perished at the commands of rulers throughout time. An intention killed them—and you can’t touch intentions either. They turn physical as if by magic. Nonetheless, we live so embedded in the physical that we give it more value than higher faculties like intuitions and seemingly immaterial perceptions that reach us from the patterns of things.

What is in closer conformity with reality is that experience is basic. We’re very loyal to our experiences and defend them doggedly against abstract contradiction. Experience, however, is not by any means self-explanatory; it’s simply a datum; thus error can enter into the situation if the experience is wrongly interpreted. My rule of thumb is to trust experience above all but to test its explanation, in myself as well as in others, by the use of reason. But if the reasoning attempts to deny, denigrate, or nullify my experience, I will reject that logic no matter how pristine. The other side of the equation, therefore, is that experience is a test of reason. Thus we make progress in understanding the world.

The very highest forms of experience—of the sacred, the numinous, the poetic, the visionary—are very much real experiences. But they are impossible to share; for others to confirm such matters, they too must undergo something analogous. Attempts to share tend to take artistic forms. And those who “understand” such communications have to have what E.F. Schumacher, quoting the scholastics, called adaequatio—adequacy.* Some people get it, some don’t. The difference is that some are prepared by experiences, others lack them. The Sufis say that “the secret protects itself.” This is another way to say the same thing. We can’t grasp what we haven’t experienced. The outsider will interpret reports of experiences that exceed his or her adequacy in terms of personal experience, thus using a lower framework. And here errors are likely—not least assigning such experiences to lunacy. For this reason it’s pointless to argue about matters of this sort with those who begin to bristle defensively. Their opposition is perfectly logical. Even to consider in a neutral, tentative way what someone else is claiming is already a sign of advanced preparation. Therefore the stance or attitude of the other party foreshadows the reaction that will follow.

If reality encompasses a vast spectrum from the subatomic upward, including the material, the mental, and the spiritual, one might say then that sticking with stones is to limit oneself. Therefore the higher faculties, although very much more difficult to interpret, are of higher ranges of reality. You’ve got to get used to the altitude before you can operate with a modicum of competence there.
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*Developed in A Guide for the Perplexed, Harper & Row, pp. 40-60.