Late Learning

In advancing age come insights almost intended to be private—or to be shared only with one’s life-long mate—not because they shouldn’t be shared but because they require experiences that humanity only achieves in its advancing years. One has to be adequate for such knowledge—and it cannot be shared with those who haven’t gotten there yet.

In this category belongs the notion that conceptual intellection is merely a tool, an artifact, developed principally for practical purposes—and because, within these bodies, we cannot communicate directly with others mind to mind. Another is that all life is intelligent, in the higher sense—but cannot communicate that state to us because it lacks the artifact of conceptual language. Vast aggregations of habit—especially if one has lived largely in a conceptual world—make it almost impossible to believe that one can communicate, not least great complexities, without using abbreviations, tokens, which is what language is.

This came to mind today, again, reading a post on Laudator Temporis Acti (“Almost too Pitiful to Bear”) where one John Buchman hears the anguish of the trees as a grove is felled. We assign that sort of thing to the imagination—but even if we think we know a lot, in advancing age, it is obvious that we have a whole lot more to learn—and that that learning will come when we have passed.

Reading—or Not Reading—Philosophy

I can never seriously attend philosophers. That would require reading them carefully and slowly, cover to cover, accepting the rules of their thought. I’ve only ever made the effort here and there—and in those few cases, finally, only with a kind of grim determination that I apply to certain stains—the kind that only ultimately yield to steel brush and razor blade. Thus, for instance, I once made that effort reading Sartre’s opus, Being and Nothingness, in English, and then, in that grim mood, even acquiring a French version to check those passages that struck me as incoherent; and they still were. More recently I read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, after which my main reaction was that all this effort for this pathetic conclusion appears to have been a waste. And, of course, I’ve read often huge chunks of many other philosophers just to keep the secondary commentators and summarizers honest. An almost tangible savor, odor, or aura of the philosophers’ personalities reaches me in about a hundred pages or thereabouts, which, in combination with the content, is most valuable and informative—and lacking in secondary renditions. I’ve also read, in full and many times over, the works of people classified as philosophers who, however, transcend the subject. They might be better labeled as theologians or, put more generally, students of the ineffable. And no. I’m not here using other phrases for “metaphysics.”

The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.

One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.

The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.

Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.

He Sold More than Razors

My reference here is to William of Ockham (1290-1349), famed for the principle of parsimony, usually rendered as Ockham’s Razor, which says that we should always prefer the simplest hypothesis able to explain the available facts. I came across Ockham in a conscious sort of way a couple of days ago, pondering the subject of the unity of the soul or self—and discovered that he asserted that intellect and will were a single unity. He is not alone in this. Among scholastics Duns Scotus held similar views; Aquinas said that “will and intellect mutually include each other,” but he set the dominant tone in scholasticism and gave the nod, the priority, to intellect.

Interesting, all of this. I’ve concluded long ago, based on little else than the sovereign power of intuition—and the lame sort of feelings I always get when abstractions begin to multiply and take on life—that the soul is a single unity in which intellect, will, and feelings are all facets of one thing; by feelings here I don’t mean sensory experiences but inward motions of the self—joy and revulsion, attraction and repulsion. The more I learned of Ockham—and it’s difficult to find things—the more I felt myself in sympathetic company.

Mortimer Adler, whom I admire, opted to omit Ockham from the Great Books of the Western World, a reliable source I managed to get cheaply long ago. (People buy such works with best intentions, but when the kids leave home, out they go, never read.) Internet summarizers of Ockham’s thought opt to focus on matters of modern interest, of which the soul does not happen to be one. My source of knowledge is therefore principally the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, W.L. Reese, editor, where, for instance, I discovered that Ockham held man to be “a complete rational being, incapable of inhering in anything and not supported by anything” [p. 629, emphasis added]. Ridiculous although that sounds, bound as we are to our bodies, I’ve long, long felt the same intuitive certainty in the very face of all contrary evidence.

Perusing that article, I noted that Ockham’s views on matter and form are also more simpatico. He saw matter simply as matter (“body”) and form as its arrangement (“structure”) —which strikes me as much more pleasingly parsimonious than the ultimately Aristotelian notions of prime matter and form together somehow fusing to make substance. Prime matter must be conceived of as pure potential lacking all actuality, and form a kind of agency of actualization. The energy involved in this fusion is never seemingly addressed.

I also lean in Ockham’s direction in seeing intuition as the genuine source of knowledge. The Aristotelian/Thomistic division of intellect into a passive (read matter) and an active or “agent” (read formal) duality—rejected by Ockham—also strikes me as carrying the concept of substance-dualism too far—especially if you think of the soul as the real thing and intellect as one of its powers.

Ockham’s thought developed as it did, it seems, because he was intent on simplifying scholasticism. If I were intent on such a project, I too would be tempted to attack substance dualism and to examine such strange notions as, for instance, that God creates essences and then, in a separate act, gives them existence. Labors along these lines made Ockham a nominalist (“universals don't exist independently of minds”). It makes sense in Ockham's context, but when it comes to universals, my own intuition leans the other way. I plant myself in the realist camp (“universals have real existence”) because it seems to me that that something, the something that makes a horse a horse, simply has to have an independent existence somewhere. I can't help myself. I see real patterns out there. I don't “abstract” them from anything. I see them. I deal with the weirdness of “form” in the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition by thinking of that idea as intention. In the greater cosmos, the intentions are divine. In the narrow, human, I see a lot of universals that spring from human intentions.

My survey courses in college omitted Ockham too. Thus it was fascinating to meet the maker of the razor late in life. Much of what he appears to have said resonates. I like his notions of the soul’s unity, at least as I find it expressed in the singleness of will and intellect. And I like his reliance on intuition.

Intellectual Grasp, Absence of Knowledge

Someone reached this blog by using the following search phrase: “intellectually understand but don’t know.” He or she got my post titled Understanding and Intellectual Grasp. In that post I argue the exact opposite of that situation, namely that a kind of wordless understanding is frequently present before we understand a matter intellectually. So what is the situation my visitor had in mind? He or she had in mind, I think, those situations where someone has successfully explained something at the conceptual level—but after we have “got it” we still haven’t got it; we still don’t know a thing.

A good example of this might be the explanation by modern physics of the electron supposedly circling the atomic core. We are told that the electron is “everywhere but nowhere.” It is a wave of probability. At the same time, if we wish to locate the electron we can set up an experiment to do so, and when we do, we can detect the electron (say on a photosensitive film). And this detection is then explained as the “collapse of the probability wave.” This is the sort of explanation which is intellectual graspable, but it doesn’t produce the feeling of knowledge. All we can do is repeat it to others, but we don’t really understand what we are talking about. When we seek a deeper understanding, we will be given the wave equation for starters. It looks like this:

Much of physics is of this character. The experiential base consists of experimental instruments, dial readings, and points of light on photographic film. The explanation is mathematical, the math derived from instrument readings. There is here a major disconnect between intellectual grasp and knowledge as we experience it. Okay. It is useful knowledge. We can apply it in practice in the design of electronic circuits, etc. Those circuits, however, are no more knowable in the core, in the gut, than the probability wave.

Let me now present an equally arcane counterexample where experience is involved. Let us say that you were mad enough to read the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy—in a version yet where the Italian text is in one column, the English translation in the other. And you arrive, at last, on the point where Beatrice, Dante’s great love, dead these many years, reappears to Dante on the portals of Paradise. She wears a dress di fiamma viva (of living flame), a green mantle over it, veiled in white, crowned with olive branches. The image shocks Dante, and he says: E lo spirito mio…d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza—And my spirit…felt the great power of the old love.

Now in this case the reader—if ever that reader has experienced genuine love, the kind we fall into, the kind we cannot help but feel, the kind that makes us remember our first love with a kind of numb and inarticulate awe—a person like that will not be puzzled by this magical appearance, by the fantastical procession that comes first, nor by the seemingly inaccessible assertion that this takes place in earthly paradise. All those concepts were at least felt to a tiny degree in our own first encounter with the magic of love. This is understanding based on experience—and later translated into intellectual concepts. The story of the electron’s sudden flash-up as its probability wave collapses—why that is intellectual grasp without understanding—unless, by a little magical trickery, we imagine that the beautiful electron, perhaps, is alike to the beautiful Beatrice, and that the wave’s collapse is like love’s crashing arrival on our own arid, sandy beach.
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Wave equation courtesy of Wikipedia. Dante reference is to Purgatory, Canto XXX, 31-33 and 40-42, translation by Charles Williams.

The Accounting or Mapping Department

Words not only clarify, they may also obscure. I can’t help believing that what the schoolmen called Intellect is but the accounting department of the enterprise we call the soul. The counting house is important, to be sure, but the store or factory matter more. It seems clear to me that, as humans, we gain knowledge not merely and exclusively from sensory experience, which the medievals and moderns both assert; on the contrary, I think we also get knowledge from invisible dimensions. In both cases our knowledge is direct; our understanding flashes up or slowly dawns. I hold that the intellectual operations of abstraction and reasoning arise a little later—an eyewink or much labor later—as we engage in ordering and relating our direct and spontaneous grasp of reality into larger patterns of coherence.

Another way to put this is that the intellect produces maps, but maps are not, as it were, universals. We think of universals or essences—perceptions shorn of accidents, so-called—as in some manner superior to particulars. I see that as an assertion that maps are superior to the landscapes they depict. I’m very fond of maps; I’m devoted to patterns of all kinds; they’re indispensable for orientation but, ultimately, we never visit maps; we visit places.

The interesting fact here is the iterative functioning of what I view as the higher power of the soul, its intuitive grasp. The intellect is a servant; reason is a tool. Intuition first understands the particular and then, once intellect produces its patterns, intuition understands and grasps those in turn—enriched by both but never deceived by what is what: the landscape is the landscape and the map’s a map.

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.

This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.

The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.

Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.

Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.

One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.

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.