No system of ideas can ever come near to encompassing the wonder of reality
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
Well, no one will ever accuse Nietzsche of thinking systematically. I actually don’t have much regard for him as a thinker at all. He has brilliant insights that he expresses brilliantly, but a good deal of what he says is pretty goofy — though even that is usually entertaining.
But I have no problem with the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. In fact, I’m as mistrustful of systems and systematizers as he was. For one thing, I am not a systematic thinker myself. But that is not the only thing. There are good reasons to be skeptical of intellectual systems.
When E.E. Cummings, in his poem “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” says that “A world of made / is not a world of born,” he puts his finger on what is wrong with systems of thought, namely, that they are fundamentally mechanical and lifeless. They are attempts to accommodate the world and life to a mental construct, whereas the aim should be to expand the mind to embrace as much of the world and life as it can on the world’s and life’s own vital terms.
Anyway, the world isn’t there to be figured out, systematically or otherwise. It is there to be encountered — looked at, listened to, felt, tasted, inhaled. J. Krishnamurti, who defined meditation as “choiceless awareness,” also made it plain it was not something that could be taught, though you could notice it when it happened. As I recall, he gives as an example waking up in the middle of the night and finding oneself so alert that the silence and darkness are well-nigh palpable.
In the morning, after I put on the coffee, I usually spend the moments while the macchinetta heats staring blankly out the window at our patio garden. I focus on nothing, but am aware of the birds and the branches, the light and the sky. There is nothing mystical about this, but it does sort of rev up my consciousness and brighten my mood. Especially refreshing is the wordlessness and the absence of concepts that accompanies it.
Speaking of concepts, another problem with systematic thinking is the abstractness of it. The word abstract means to “draw away.” To abstract a document is to summarize it, focusing on highlights and ignoring the rest. (I once made my living writing abstracts.)
Obviously, a view of the world grounded in abstractions is a view that leaves out most of the world’s details. And it is interesting how such a view, organized into a theoretical system, can soon be used as a standard by which to judge reality. We see this again and again in all those stories in which a given behavior is explained in terms of how such a behavior would have given our remote ancestors a survival advantage.
The problem with this is that the principal reason for explaining the behavior in terms of survival is the mere fact of survival. In other words, because our ancestors did such-and-such and so-and-so and survived, doing such-and-such and so-and-so must have been the reason for their survival. Maybe. But the mere fact of their survival doesn’t prove it. Moreover, survival is not the be-all and end-all of living. We want to survive in order to live fully human lives, and a fully human life is hardly one preoccupied exclusively with survival.
It is also not one that would give pride of place to the ideas about the world and life rather than to the world itself and the creatures living therein. No system of ideas can ever come near to encompassing the wonder of reality. To view the world through the lens of theory is to deprive oneself of the greater part of what life has to offer.
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Frank, I enjoy reading your columns. I would humbly add to what you have provocatively said: Following the aesthetics of Keats (and others), I suspect that poetry–at its most sublime–has the best potential to “capture” and represent reality.
RT, perhaps that is why years after writing the great, systematic, flawed Tractatus, Wittgenstein said he wished to write philosophy as a form of poetical composition; likewise Kierkegaard (who emphasised that a theory must have only a loose hold on things, or it is easily broken) who referred to himself as a poet, despite never writing a line of poetry in his life.