Through finding one man fit
Judge another unfit.
Life and death, though stemming from each other,
Seem to conflict as stages of change,
Difficult and easy as phases of achievement,
Long and short as measures of contrast,
High and low as degrees of relation;
But since the varying of tones gives music to a voice
And what is is the was of what shall be,
The sanest man
Sets up no deed,
Lays down no law,
Takes everything that happens as it comes.…
He is really saying, Don’t make distinctions, because every distinction simultaneously defines its opposite, and in many cases the interplay of opposites is indivisible, just as varying tones make up music. He says, If you approach the world through distinctions, you can never untangle your perceptions.
The surest test if a man be sane
Is if he accepts life whole, as it is,
Without needing by measure or touch to understand
The measureless untouchable source
Of its images.…
The attitude of Lao-tzu represents one way to deal with the fact that whatever we say about reality is inevitably wrong or incomplete. Lao-tzu says you must “accept life whole, as it is, without needing … to understand.”
This attitude is in a sense antirational, and certainly anti-intellectual. But it is another perspective, clear and consistent. Although it may not be to everyone’s taste, we are obliged to acknowledge that it is a genuine solution to a genuine problem.
* * *
In his day Jacob Bronowski was at some pains to address a predominantly humanistic audience, persuading them to pay attention to science by drawing connections between humanistic pursuits and scientific pursuits. Thirty years later the balance has shifted to the other side. Now it seems to me it is the scientists who need to be reminded of the similarities between their activities and those of other men, and in particular to be reminded that the rational, scientific, reductionist method is not the only route to useful truth.
I find this the most striking prejudice among the scientists I know. My friend Marvin Minsky, in a recent book, writes about mystical states in a highly critical way. He finds these states “sinister” and speaks of the “victims of these incidents.” His view is expressed thus: “One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.… To offer hospitality to paradox is like leaning toward a precipice. You can find out what it is like by falling in, but you may not be able to fall out again. Once contradiction finds a home, few minds can spurn the sense-destroying force of slogans such as ‘all is one.’ ”22
Even more bluntly, Stephen Hawking says that mysticism “is a cop-out. If you find theoretical physics and mathematics too hard, you turn to mysticism.”23
Such statements, broadly speaking, agree with Asimov’s comment that intuition is for those who have “lost their nerve.” Hawking takes the idea further, implying that mysticism is a procedure for those who aren’t bright enough to do physics.
I disagree with this attitude. Perhaps the easiest way to state my objection is to say that I do not find the content of physics sufficient to explain the behavior of physicists’ themselves.
Where does the physicists’ belief in consistency, in unification, come from? This belief is so strong that men and women devote their lives to proving its existence. Yet it is nothing visible in the world. What we see before us is a world of apparently disunified objects and events. The underlying unity is something we seek and find. Granted that the scientific perception of unity is not the same as the mystic’s perception of unity, there is still a question: what provokes a scientist to look for unity at all? Is it just a matter of tidying up the mathematics? Does any thoughtful scientist seriously believe that purely formalistic concerns are sufficient to make him work long hours, year after year? Is science such a totally self-referential system that making inner connections between theories is the only driving force?
I think not. I suspect that scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there—reality—contains a hidden order, and the scientist is trying to elucidate the hidden order in reality. And that impulse is what the scientist shares with the mystic. The impulse to get to the bottom of things. To know how the world really works. To know the nature of reality.
A Nobel Prize-winning physicist wrote:
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside: a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.24
Some of you may recognize the writer as Richard Feynman, a distinguished member of the Cal Tech faculty. I cite the passage because it appears, in broad strokes, to express exactly the kind of unified insight that other scientists denigrate. And also because, from this most confident and unpedantic of authors, the statement is heavily qualified: Feynman says his feeling is “analogous to the feeling one has in religion.” It’s an appreciation only of the mathematical beauty of nature. And the awe is expressly scientific awe, as if scientific awe were somehow different from regular awe.
This strikes me as an oddly cautious expression of what is, I suspect, a nearly universal human emotion.
And while we are talking about Feynman’s artistic career, it’s worth mentioning one of the discoveries he later made. Sometime after he began drawing, he visited the Sistine Chapel. He had left behind his guidebook, so he just went around looking at the paintings. He found some of the paintings to be very good, and others to be, in his word, “junk.” Back in his hotel room, he found that his judgment of the paintings agreed with the guidebook.
This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that’s not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you’re doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, “It’s great,” or “It’s no good,” and then is not able to explain to you why.… But here I was, sunk: I could do it, too!25
Why does he say he was sunk? What, exactly, is sunk?
Throughout his memoir, Feynman rather breezily dismisses most fields of activity other than physics. He is a man of mathematical rigor, so he finds little of interest in philosophy or art or psychology. These fields make no sense to him; the practitioners “don’t know what they are talking about.” Yet in the Sistine Chapel he has experienced something that sinks his conception of these other fields. Simply by doing art himself, he has acquired the ability to make perceptions about other art that agree with the formal and codified perceptions of art history.
Feynman does not discuss this remarkable incident further, although there is clearly more to be said. For one thing, his experience would seem to imply that, although he does not try to bring his critical criteria to conscious awareness, the criteria nonetheless exist. They must exist, or else he would never manage to agree with the guidebook. Second, the criteria are not arbitrary or academic, since Feynman is able to formulate those criteria simply by the experience of making pictures. The criteria of art history do indeed have something to do with the activity of making art. There is an underlying rigor to art history, which Feynman has demonstrated by reproducin
g its conclusions.
I am discussing this at length because it seems to me that it typifies a situation in which a tremendously bright scientist, confronted by data, even admitting the data, nevertheless does not take those data to the obvious conclusion: that there is just as much rigor to art as there is to science. It may be a different kind of rigor, but it is rigor nonetheless.
When an artist such as Jasper Johns says, “I am just trying to find a way to make pictures,”26 he means it in exactly the same way a physicist means it when he says, “I am just trying to find a way to do physics.” Like a scientist, an artist must build upon the work of his predecessors. An artist can be intimidated by the work of his predecessors, just as a scientist can be.
So for a scientist to dismiss art as some kind of formless activity in which “anything goes” means only that the scientist doesn’t understand the activity of making art. He doesn’t understand what he is dismissing. The scientist has only his model of what the activity of art is, and his model is wrong. It’s uninformed; and it doesn’t fit the data.
The extent to which scientists are uninformed about the real work of nonscientists seems to me to reach some ultimate point when scientists consider meditative states, alterations in consciousness, and the disputed psychic phenomena. If you have never experienced these things firsthand, you will naturally find the descriptions of them to be outlandish. Because these experiences are different from the experiences of ordinary consciousness. There is no great mystery here, and certainly nothing sinister. It’s just different. It’s another kind of consciousness.
I have known in my life one computational prodigy, and, watching him, I could not conceive how he was able to do what he did; I was simply obliged, after checking a few times, to accept that he could do it. I know one film director with a photographic memory, but he’s rather tedious, given to impromptu lectures in exhaustive detail on all sorts of subjects. All that I learned is that I should never argue with him about an obscure fact, since he was invariably correct. But I couldn’t conceive how he could do what he did, either.
I have a rather similar feeling around people with psychic abilities. They can do something I can’t do. To them the ability is mundane, and on balance has its good and bad features.
I often hear skeptics say that, if psychic behavior was real, the psychics would be playing the stock market or the ponies. In my experience, many of them do. There is, in fact, a kind of secret level of activity in which psychics consult to major corporations and businesses. People seem to be embarrassed to admit this activity, but it takes place, just as you’d expect it to.
And I would remind you that, from one standpoint, you might expect so-called psychic behavior to exist in the first place. The eminently sensible Dr. Bronowski again:
In science … the process of prediction is conscious and rational. Even in human beings this is not the only kind of prediction. Men have sound intuitions which have certainly not been analyzed into rational steps, and some of which may never be. It may be for example, as is sometimes claimed, that most people are a little better at guessing an unseen card, and some people much better, than would be a machine which merely picks its answers by chance. This would not be altogether surprising.… Certainly evolution has selected us rapidly because we do possess gifts of foresight much above those of other animals.… The rational intelligence is one such gift, and is at bottom as remarkable and as unexplained. And where rational intelligence turns to the future, and makes inferences from past experiences to an unknown tomorrow, its process is … a great mystery.… 27
But to return to the original point, the experience of these other forms of consciousness seems to me to be ordinary, even mundane. These different forms of consciousness—whether inborn gifts or trained procedures—lead to other kinds of knowing, other perceptions of underlying order in the world around us. They are not mathematical perceptions, but they are perceptions nonetheless. Before you dismiss these perceptions outright as fraud or fantasy, it seems useful to experience them firsthand. If you’re not willing to experience them firsthand, you open yourself to the criticism that you dismiss what you don’t understand.
And you diminish your own experience of reality.
Because, as I have said, the scientific perception of reality is not reality itself. Even the most powerful scientific law is not a complete description of reality. There is always more to know.
I think it’s important to be very clear about this. Feynman, whom I much admire, says of nonscientific people, “they don’t understand the world they live in.” It seems to be a favorite saying of his; he repeated it often during the shuttle-disaster investigations.
But let’s be clear: nobody understands the world he lives in. Not you, not me, not Richard Feynman. We may each understand a part, an aspect of the whole, but, in any full or comprehensive sense, reality defies description.
And if other modes of knowing are internal, subjective, and inherently unverifiable, that doesn’t make them necessarily any less interesting or useful.
People who find numbers alien to their natures are not fringe people in the world, the disenfranchised, the despised ignorant who do not know how to solve differential equations and so are denied access to mathematical received truth.
Because science alone is not enough.
Faced with a public that embraces creationism and belief in psychic phenomena, the hard scientist is often perplexed. The scientist sees a world of beauty and complexity, entirely challenging enough for his rational approach. Why, he wonders, is someone else dissatisfied with his vision of the world?
Why is science not enough?
The simplest answer is that, while science is a tremendously powerful investigative procedure, it doesn’t tell us what we really want to know. Max Planck put it simply: “Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.”
One reason is that science can’t tell you why anything happens. Feynman again, in a popular lecture on quantum electrodynamics: “While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that. I can’t explain why Nature behaves in this peculiar way.”28
This is true, but it evades the fact that, although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what human beings really want to know is why things work. Children don’t ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.
Feynman would probably say that question has no meaning. And within the body of modern scientific thought, it does not. But it is not self-evident that this state of affairs will continue indefinitely. Physicist John Bell notes:
The founding fathers of quantum mechanics rather prided themselves on giving up the idea of explanation. They were very proud that they dealt only with phenomena: they refused to look behind the phenomena, regarding that as the price one had to pay for coming to terms with nature. And it is a fact of history that the people who took that agnostic attitude towards the real world on the microphysical level were very successful. At the time it was a good thing to do. But I don’t believe it will be so indefinitely.29
But, in the meantime, a mathematician observes that “the question of why is hardly touched by physical scientists, all the emphasis being placed on how.… The metaphysics of the cosmos is given in terms of abstract mathematics which is claimed to be absolutely devoid of goals or purposes: the reality of contemporary cosmology is a mathematical reality.”30
Yet this mathematical reality is essentially arbitrary.31 And this perception of a purposeless universe is not attained without cost. Modern science holds up its mathematical model as a triumph of reason, yet, as Hannah Arendt notes, “Modern times, dominated by technology, are characterized precisely by the fact that reason, in the sense of an originally given self-revealing contemplative understanding, is lost, and is replaced by a detached [technology], actively preoccupied with abstract mathematical
theory and physical replication.”32
To me there is nothing wrong with a mathematical perception of reality as long as that perception is not allowed to predominate. Because, as human beings, living our lives, making decisions for ourselves and our society, we must find meaning. And that meaning must be broadly based.
A mathematician:
I am aware of the ingredients out of which meaning is created … love and language, myth, rational thought and irrational impulse, human institutions, law, history, duty, ritual, religious faith, the mystic, the transcendental, the allegorical, the aesthetic sense, play, the world as a puzzle, the world as a stage, the contemplation of life and death, the necessities imposed by physics and biology; all of these and hundreds more are avenues to meaning.33
This may be why Einstein once said, “Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.”
The fact is that we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. Carl Jung said:
The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency.… If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom, or out of respect for the psychological fact that “telepathic” perceptions occur, anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond time and space … then critical reason could counter with no other argument than the “non liquet” of science. Furthermore, he would have the inestimable advantage of conforming to a bias of the human psyche which has existed from time immemorial and is universal. Anyone who does not draw this conclusion, whether from skepticism … lack of courage or inadequate psychological experience or thoughtless ignorance … has instead the indubitable certainty of coming into conflict with the truths of his blood.… Deviation from the truths of the blood begets neurotic restlessness.… Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not yet begun to comprehend.34
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