You can’t think your way to truth
I began this column on May 12, the same date on which in 1895 J. Krishnamurti was born. I had chosen a quote from him for the “Thought for the Day” feature on my blog: “A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.”
I thought I might take that as my point of departure for the column I was planning for last Tuesday. But then I started looking at some other things Krishnamurti had said. I came upon a talk he gave in Bombay in 1948 in which he said that “ideas create only further ideas.” Later in that same talk, he says, “When do you have creative moments, a sense of joy and beauty? Only when the thinker is absent, when the thought process comes to an end. Then, in the interval between two thoughts, is creative joy.”
In other words, you can’t think your way to truth. Or, to put it another way, you can’t arrive at the truth by thinking about it. Krishnamurti goes even further: “Truth cannot be invited. It must come to you. To search for truth is to deny truth.”
I found all this singularly disconcerting. After all, what else was I doing, writing a column, other than countering ideas with other ideas, and seeking truth by thinking about it?
This proved to be more than something getting in the way of meeting a deadline. It really stopped me dead in my tracks. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, and the one thing it seemed I ought not to do about it was think about it.
As it happens, I have a pretty good capacity for “sitting quietly, doing nothing,” as one Zen master phrased it. And that is pretty much what I did, along with puttering about in the garden, taking long, aimless strolls, and cooking.
I even read aimlessly. That first night, while straightening up my home office, I came upon a copy of the NYRB edition of R.J. Hollingdale’s selections from Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. I’ve never been that impressed by Lichtenberg, but I have to say I was taken by Item No. 3 on Page 1 of Notebook A:
With many a science the endeavor to discover a universal principle is perhaps often just as fruitless as would be the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover a primal universal substance out of which all minerals had arisen. Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things in the same time. These conceptions become more and more inaccurate the larger the families we invent for ourselves are.
This resonated with me because I have always thought that what makes this person or thing who or what he, she or it is is precisely what he, she or it does not have in common with anyone or anything else. Species, therefore, are categories of thought. Individuals are the genuine article.
I was, of course, thinking again. And what I was thinking was this: Suppose the proffered explanations of life and the world — religious, philosophical, scientific — are all, not so much wrong, as simply inadequate to the task. Some may be truer than others. Some may be completely wrong. One may be the best of the bunch, but still fall woefully short in all sorts of ways.
I found this somehow exhilarating. I found myself walking about looking at a world that had become newly and deeply mysterious, perhaps impenetrably so.
Then, over the weekend, my friend Dave Lull sent me a link to a post about Arts Education on a blog called The Frontal Cortex. I posted the link on my blog and commented that I thought “the most obvious justification for arts education would be the glories of art.” Certainly, Anna Karenina, Mozart’s C Major Mass, or Michelangelo’s David need no neuroscientific justification. They are their own justification.
And that was that until a couple of days ago, when I was among some pedestrians crossing Vine Street at Broad. We were crossing against the light, but the only cars headed our way were pretty far down the pike on the other side of Broad Street. I was pulling up the rear and noticed that one of those cars was moving much faster than the others. It was in the middle lane and whizzed by me just after I stepped out of the left lane onto the sidewalk. The driver of the car had never slowed down a bit. I suddenly realized that, but for a matter of inches and seconds, I could easily have been punted down Vine Street across the goalpost of life.
This momentary frisson of fear was followed for some reason — or none — by a complete non sequitur. I suddenly realized that what I had said on my blog about art was also true of life. It is its own justification. Religion, philosophy and science do not explain life, because they are contained by life. They are among the many things that life, in its human dimension at least, does.
Life needs no explanation. Just as a poem means precisely what it says precisely the way it says it, so life means what it is just the way it happens.
This was, for me, a kind of satori. Not that I experienced any blazing sense of transcendence. No, it was quite matter-of-fact, actually. As another Zen master explained: Before you enter upon the way of Zen, a tree is just a tree. But once you enter upon the way, a tree is no longer a tree. Should you arrive at satori, a tree is just a tree.
But what a tree.
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A good satori indeed. I think you’re approaching what Krishnamurti gets at, over and over again. I’ve often taken away from him the message that life is to be lived, not just thought about.
While philosophy and theology are fun to think about, ultimately I’m never able to take them very seriously, because neither are capable of anything more than supporting or justifying a lived life. The lived life is still what really matters, in the end. Scholastic theology I have no use for; it’s all mind-games. Those that confront Mystery, and can only say, in the end, “Thy Will Be Done,” are those I can stand shoulder to shoulder with.
“Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.” — H. L. Mencken
Amen.
No mention in my piece of theology, Parsifal. Religion is mentioned. So are philosophy and science. Given that Mencken was partial to Nietzsche, a philologist posing as a philosopher, I don’t see that we need take him too seriously.
I’m with you, Art. Theology, as you say, cane be fun, even the scholastic variety — I’ve always like Aquinas’s observation that “all things run to mystery.” But I know people for whom logic-chopping about theology has become almost a substitute for faith — rather a dry substitute, bearing much the same relation to religion as explication does to poetry.
What happened to “I think, therefore I am”?
The thoughtful examination of the awareness of the world around you is the primary proof to yourself that you are real and this isn’t just some dream.
Is that not “thinking your way to truth”?
What happened to “I think, therefore I am” is that everybody long ago realized that Rene had put Descartes before the horse. The actual proposition would be “I am, therefore I think.” Thought is an effect of being, not its cause.
@ Mr. Wilson:
Let me try to use an analogy which will probably wind up being too flawed for mass consumption.
Thought may be the effect of existence, but it’s still the method by which we know that we exist. It’s much like trying to find a blackhole in space.
Since the blackhole cannot be seen (light cannot escape it’s gravity well), we have learned to locate these celestial phenomena by looking for the effects their existence has on the physical world around them. Namely, we look for the curving of light around the blackhole, or we look for the distinctive characteristics of stars and matter as they are pulled into ever smaller concentric circles while they are being drawn to the death which awaits them beyond the event horizon.
We never see the blackhole, and we have no visible proof that it exists, but the effects of its existence let us know that it is there, despite what our eyes don’t tell us.
It is much the same with thought. Thought is the evidence of the existence of your being. While you cannot know for certainty that you’re not living in the Matrix, you can know that somewhere, somehow, you exist because of the thoughts which flow through and out of you.
Thought is the evidence which leads you to the realization of the existence of self, the truth of being.
I think, Mike, we have to define more clearly what we are talking about when we speak of “thought.” Broadly speaking, and as Krishnamurti often pointed out, thought is simply the content of consciousness, and would therefore include feeling, imagination, perception, intellect, reason. The latter is what generates ideas, and saying that one cannot think one’s way to the truth is simply to say that truth cannot be reduced to a system of propositions. K. also points out (there is on Youtube video of an interview he gave to the BBC’s Bernard Levin in which he discusses this) that we also cannot do without thought. As he says there, without thought he and Levin would not be sitting in that studio surrounded by all that equipment, and he is not suggesting that we would be better off if that were the case. So we are not talking here of irrationalism (itself just another idea generated by the reasoning intellect). It is simply the notion that we cannot grasp reality simply in terms of ideas and theorems and technology — for as K. also points out, we do tend to distract ourselves from life by our preoccupation with gadgets and entertainment and the like. It is he whole person in his wholeness that must engage the world and life and it is that engagement which opens us to the truth.
Great column, like all of them. Everyone should read these essays.
@ Mr. Wilson:
It is simply the notion that we cannot grasp reality simply in terms of ideas and theorems and technology
Not to be snarky, because I actually agree with your thesis, but there is no way humans could operate in the real world without our reliance on ideas, theorems, and technology. We have no other method of knowing truth and reality BUT through these things.
Human thought is much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We are reduced to knowing the world around us through models and heuristics because the amount of inputs flowing into the system around which reality operates are simply too complex for the human mind to grasp in their entirety.
For example: You could not know the individual appearance of every dog on the Earth, but you’ve developed models which, upon viewing a strange animal, let you say “It has four legs, a wagging tail, loves bacon, is covered in hair, answers to Rover, and drags its butt across my carpet. Even though I’ve never seen this animal, it must be a dog.”
This is a thought process which leads you to a generality, yes, but isn’t the generality the truth?
Regardless of the process of keying out the animal, doesn’t the model give us some basic truth?
Maybe our understanding of the truth is limited, but truth, no matter how big or small the dose, is still truth. We don’t know this dog, thus we don’t know the “entire truth” about its existence and the reality attached to it, but our thought process does lead us to “truth” in some measure.
No, Mike, it is precisely the generality that is not the truth. And it is precisely that Platonic emphasis on species and genera that mislead us. Hermann Keyserling famously remarked that “the greatest American superstition is a belief in facts.” Facts are not the same as truth. The fact that certain dogs can be categorized as labs tells me next to about my dog Toby. The fact that you are a human being tells me next to nothing about the person you are. The really significant detail in my column is the quote from Lichtenberg and no one seems to have noticed or pondered it. But I have been thinking of little else since I wrote the piece because I still haven’t got to the bottom of it and maybe I never will.