I don’t think I’ve ever written a follow-up to any of these columns, but I feel the need to elaborate somewhat further on what I said in my last one [1]. In particular, I have been thinking quite a lot about one sentence in the passage I quoted from one of G. C. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books: “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 at the same time.”
I think this is precisely right and that we ought to ponder it more deeply. Darwin may have thought he figured out the origin of species, but the fact remains that no species had its origin as a species. Each must have begun with a single individual. Interestingly, the mythic tales of man’s origin — including the one in Genesis — all begin with the creation of … a particular individual, from whom all the rest of us are presumed to descend.
Nevertheless, we have all become accustomed to looking at things in terms of the categories by which we classify them. We walk down a street in the commercial district of the city we live in and see a bunch of guys dressed in three-piece pin-striped suits and naturally assume that all of them are businessmen or professionals on the way to the office.
We are probably right, but how much of value does that tell us about the individuals themselves? No doubt very little. And suppose that among them is a professional hit man dressed like all the rest so as not to draw attention to himself while stalking the mafia lawyer he has been hired to blow away.
The only thing individuals really have in common is also the thing that differentiates them from every other individual: their uniqueness. To return to the religious perspective, if there be a God who created us, who he created would be you and me, him and her, never us. God, the ultimate singularity, wouldn’t do species, only individuals. Indeed, would not our uniqueness constitute that image of him in which we are said to have been made? (This, by the way, would poke yet another hole in intelligent-design theory.)
Anyway, it is worthwhile trying to see the world divested of its man-made categories, and instead as the aggregate of individuals that it actually is. Who knows how deep down the individuality runs? Perhaps the trees’ leaves regard themselves as individuals, perhaps our own organs — heart, liver, brain — and the cells of which they are composed think the same.
But look about you as you stroll around town and remind yourself that it’s not a sea of humanity you are moving through, but a multitude of individuals, you among them. I have been trying to do this since I wrote my last column. You might think this would heighten the sense of one’s own isolation. But actually, what it heightens is the sense of mystery. Stripped of those categories, the world seems much less comprehensible than before.
And that, I think, is good, since those categories provide a false sense of security. They lead us to see things strictly in terms of how we classify them. What’s wrong with that? Well, you classify different individuals according to what they have in common. This means that you must necessarily exclude everything else that they do not have in common. To view the world in terms of categories is to view it in a profoundly incomplete and skewered fashion. That’s bad enough. Worse is the sense this gives us that we actually arrive at some real understanding of things that way.
I usually start each day by attending morning Mass. I find it useful for drawing myself into focus for the day. Lately, during Mass, but especially during the time that I spend sitting quietly afterward, the aforementioned sense of mystery has preoccupied my thoughts. I find myself enveloped in doubt, the sense that I am not really sure of anything, and that no one else is, either, however vehement they may be about what they think they know.
And that is when I experience — not merely realize intellectually — what John Henry Newman meant when he said that “faith means being capable of bearing doubt.” The upshot is that I leave the church invigorated by the sheer incomprehensibility of being. Suddenly, it all seems such a grand adventure.
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Frank Wilson [4]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [6])
- An illusion of precision [7] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [8] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [9] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [10] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [11] - September 13, 2012