Realizing the grand adventure
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. 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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There’s a saying from the Enlightenment (was it Kant? I don’t recall at the moment) that “Man is the rational animal.”
I rather feel, however, that man is the rationalizing animal.
Because we often use reason to rationalize, justify, and explain—or explain away—our most unreasonable and irrational behaviors. Krishnamurti had some things to say about this, too. One way in which we rationalize cruelty is by using stereotypical categories to remove empathy. So reason is unreliable outside the domains in which it best operates; because like any tool of thought, it can be turned towards unreason.
The need to categorize is indeed the need to create a shorthand for thinking about larger aspects of things. Probably no one over-categorizes more than statisticians. Yet there is a benefit, beyond the purely mathematical, to grouping things into sets in order to think about them. If all we can look at is the particular and individual, we eliminate the possibility of dealing with, for example, population ecology or viral pandemics. We need to be able to look at the grand overview, at times, in order to be able to help the individuals.
I prefer fuzzy-set theory, though, in which the boundaries of the set are “soft,” even permeable, and in which not every aspect of the members of the set is known, or can be known. I also prefer fractal geometry, which is far more accurate than Euclidean geometry in describing nature.
I am perfectly comfortable not knowing everything. I am comfortable with Mystery, as comfortable as one can be. Faith is involved, but faith is also trust, and surrender. It is one thing to know that one doesn’t always intellectually know, and be okay with not always knowing why things happen. But it is something else to know that one cannot know, and surrender the idea that there even IS a why, much less a why that we will ever know. I see a lot of people claiming to have faith who are okay with never knowing why some thing has happened—but they still believe, deep down, that there IS a why, even if it’s one they cannot know. Many religious claim that the why will become clear in the postulated afterlife. Maybe so. Yet this still seems to me to not have gone deep enough, to still be a kind of rationalizing faith. The assumption that Someone knows why, and that there IS a why, is still seeking reasons and meaning where there may be none, or none that we can every understand. You see how deep this can go? It returns me to Krishnamurti’s comment that we can’t think our way out of our troubles.
As usual, riveting article.
That said, there were a few things you mentioned that I’d like to take issue with
“Darwin may have thought he figured out the origin of species, but the fact remains that no species had its origin as a species.”
This statement seems to interpret Darwin as having talked about an “origin” as one single, identifiable starting point of a species when in fact what he meant was that all, individual, living things are the result of a long process of adaptation, mutation and evolution.
Of COURSE “ …no species had its origin as a species”. But all species are the results of variations within and among individuals.
“Each must have begun with a single individual.”
Based on evidence this has been proven to be wrong by Darwin and later scientists. However interesting it may be that “ the mythic tales of man’s origin all begin with the creation of a particular individual” there is no evidence for it; and in fact, of course, the evidence says otherwise.
“The only thing individuals really have in common is also the thing that differentiates them from every other individual: their uniqueness”.
This also, simply put, not true. Most individuals of all species want to survive and procreate. Most humans want to love and be loved. The things that we have in common are what bind us together. That there are individual differences is no argument against the validity of classifications. And classification does not mean that you “must necessarily exclude everything else that they do not have in common”. Every sensible person recognises the dangers of sweeping generalisations and stereotypes etc. But isn’t it that the general classifications and the individuals themselves shed light on each other?
And as far as divesting the world of its man- made categories….. well, while you’re at it, it needs to be remembered there are whole schools of thought which regard the very notion of individuality as a man made category.
Once again, Mr. Wilson I do enjoy and look forward to your articles every week.
Hi Gracchus,
I meant no cheap shot at Mr. Darwin. I was simply stating a truism I am sure he would acknowledge. Nor would I deny that that generalizations can be useful. My point is simply that they can be misleading and that we tend to rely on them too much, that it would be worthwhile to put them aside for a bit and see what things look like without them. I think doing so would give us a fresh and perhaps even truer perspective. As for the notion of individuality itself being a man-made category, I suspect that even those who advance the notion continue to act, well, like individuals, just as those who deny free will continue to act as they possessed it.
I got your point and I have to agree with you.