On knowing and truth, pt. 2

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky remarks of our instinctive - and violent - aversion towards pure (scientific) objectivity:

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point... I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?

One of my favourite bits from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey goes:

“It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” 

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Because truth, in its purest form, offends us. Its specificity startles us; it harbours an extreme devotion to itself - a degree of particularity unrivalled in all of nature. How can we know it? Surely in the face of such exceeding singularity we would cease to be individuals; we would be consumed whole, what would be left of us to call our own?

How narrow a way it seems from a distance! But if we dared approach it perhaps we would catch a glimpse of the broad expanse of path that lies just beyond its gate, stretching far and wide and deep into an infinite horizon (made up of many lines, all forming just one).

On knowing and truth, pt. 1

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I
 lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 - Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

Two things, or maybe three. How fragile our minds - how fragile our world, in which we experience only through our minds. How limited. How incapable of reaching that great height, from which we can know anything to be true - except through faith of some sort. A leap. A knowing beyond knowing.

And can even the truest skeptic live without belief in the possibility that there are things worth knowing that have yet to be known?

***

Started thinking deeper into the concept of objectivity upon encountering R.D. Laing's The Divided Selfn. Laing writes:

In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive' or worst of all, 'mystical' It is interesting, for example that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective. 

The first definition of subjectivity I came across online was this:

existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.

But what, then, isn't subjective? If it is only through our mind that we perceive anything at all. If our very existence is a purely subjective one, if subjectivity is not a crutch but the crux of all experience - how can we lay claim to any form, shape or type of objectivity?

Again, Laing writes:

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.

And I cannot help but think: Perhaps one day we will really come to believe we know all the answers, all the explanations, all for the reasons for everything, and I will be able to explain everything away - to science, to reason, to the laws that govern nature - but then, who and what will be left in all the universe, to explain me? 

***

Because now, what does it mean to know anything? It seems that to lay claim to knowledge one has to either admit ignorance, or be found guilty of it.

But what about things that can be assessed objectively? Studied, measured, calculated, deduced. In the grand court of Reason, is everything false until proven true?

If you were to make the claim that objective knowledge - quantifiable knowledge - is the only knowledge worth knowing, what evidence would you call up to the stand? Even if one could acquire the dimensions of the universe or a formula to predict every possible trajectory of the human mind an objective case would not be made.

Maybe we all have a little more faith than we realise.

On wordlessness

"A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dragon Princess

As I wrestle now with words, straining inwards to reach adequate expression, in my native tongue, for these foreign symbols - I think now of all the thoughts in the world left latent, laid in crevices beneath the surface (as unformed as man first lay in the ground), of all the beautiful and brilliant sentiments that have only ever had substance in the mind of one; substance charged with a vigour that was never reciprocated by any other - no language, no form of agency, no outlet.

And thus contained, unexpressed, suppressed by the weight of their own immensity, made void, lost forever to a collective invisible consciousness - they created something else entirely; that which haunts - and yet, escapes - us: the inexplicable.

It collapses like a candle, folding into itself in the same way 

a starving man would eat himself alive 

and nothing would be accomplished.

- "Fragile", 14 June 2012

On narratives

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- C.S. Lewis

It's the anxiety of loose ends, the chaos of possibility in a universe with no beginning or end. Each wayward thread poses a threat, waiting to unravel that timeless tapestry that stretches as long and wide as human history, as high as human ambition. Every generation past has stitched itself in, securing its place in time and space. But where are we?

***

Nouwen notes that this generation is marked by a sense of historical dislocation - "a break in the sense of connection, which men have long felt with the vital and nourishing symbol of their cultural tradition; symbols revolving around family, idea systems, religion and the life-cycle in general."He writes:

Crucial for those who live in the modern age is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. We find ourselves part of a non-history in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For modern-age people life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In this dislocated state we become paralysed. Our reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of human existence, but apathy and boredom. Only when we feel ourselves responsible for the future can we have hope or despair; but when we think of ourselves as the passive victims of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, our motivation falters, and we start drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of random chained incidents and accidents.

Barring any notion of spirituality, John Berger makes an observation of "the world today" in his latest collection of writings:

Any sense of History, linking past and future, has been marginalised, if not eliminated. And so, people are suffering a sense of Historic loneliness. The French refer to those who are forced to live in the street as S.D.F. Sans Domicile Fixe. We are under a constant pressure to feel that we may have become the S. D. F. of History. There are no longer any acknowledge occasions for us to receive the dead and the unborn. There is each day's life, yet what surrounds it is a void. A void in which millions of us are today alone. And such solitude can transform Death into a companion.

***

Perhaps the root of our disillusionment is that we no longer subscribe to the concept of narrative. The idea of an underlying connection; a single thread that runs through a sequence of seemingly disparate events in our lives. The idea that we can find in real life the same elements we discover in literature - symbols, themes, motifs, the elements that bind, so artfully, every character and setting together into a coherent, continuous whole.

As long as there have been human beings, there have been stories - myths, legends, folktales - passed along from one generation to the next. People have always told stories because people are stories; all the moments in our lives are indisputably connected by one unifying fact - they happened to us.

A thought crosses my mind every once in a while - that sometimes we live our lives as if we have lived life a thousand times over. I think of it as a Many Lives Hypothesis - it posits that the connectedness of the world today has provided each of us access to more people - and insight into more lives - than ever before, and that this knowledge has dulled our sense of expectation towards what our own life holds for us.

Because what is the point of expecting anything from the future when it seems that every outcome has been exhausted, every trajectory anticipated? When someone is always one step ahead in the game, whatever you choose to play at; when what happens next is inevitable, predictable but above all, inexplicable... an order, yes - but without sense or logic; try as you may, there is no algorithm to be found.

And the what if no longer inspires us - each possibility only reminds us of the million other possibilities we could, or will miss (or have already missed) out on. The quote from that Jonathan Safran Foer book  - “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.” 

But when did we begin to forget that in the midst of so very many lives - lives past, lives present, lives that will be, could be, should be - each of us only has one - our own? And there is so much that remains unlived. It's a wonder wonder enough to last a lifetime.

***

A little while back I found myself asking a ten-year-old this: "If you could be any age in the world, what would it be?"

She thought for a moment, then told me quite curtly that she thinks there is no point in wanting to be any another age, because "then people would end up missing out the age they really were".

On the tube

It is in these in-between spaces - on the Tube, browsing supermarket aisles, idling in line - that I feel most like I'm really living. When time seems superfluous - I do nothing, accomplish nothing, yet time is being spent - lavished - on nothing at all. As if it would never run out; as if each second we were really counting down to eternity instead of an end.

***

Walking the streets of London as the sun looms ahead, in clear sky, above the brick-laid, metal-framed horizon; it shines pure, bright, unobscured - upon meeting its glare, one is dazzled -

the pavement crowds are transformed, resembling the shadow cast by a shoal of fish in murky-green seawater that betray their presence; a collective mass lying just beneath the water's surface, in wait only of oncoming danger - the other shadow.

***

I sometimes wonder that in determined, measured - conscious - effort to attain authentic expression, we may interchange authenticity and accuracy. And that fear returns: When the meaning, the moment, passes, what does else does it leave behind but empty shells, littered phrases?