Unknowing and Uncertainty

Years ago, as a college senior, I wrote a paper entitled “The Erotic Love of Wisdom” in which I discussed three speeches on the nature of love that appear in the first half of Plato’s Phaedrus. The paper was a sort of ad hoc examination of the spirituality that I thought lie behind the famous Socratic statement, “I know that I know nothing.” The paper was poorly received.

For twenty years I have wondered about that paper. I have rolled it back and forth in my mind vacillating between the thought that paper was too far ahead of its time for mere mortals to understand and the thought that I was just a young, dumb kid who really didn’t get philosophy and was lucky that they gave me the “C” and didn’t ride me out of school on a rail.

Recently I began rereading the Vedas. I was struck, in particular by those passages in the Upanishads that talk about a state of awareness known as “dreamless sleep”, to be awake, and aware, but that the mind is so calm, and disciplined that it is as if your mind were as still as someone in a state of dreamless sleep. I like to imagine this state of awareness. The image seems freeing. To be in a state of awareness like one in dreamless sleep means that the mind is not processing everything all the time. The sights, the sounds the sensations of the universe are all taken in the moment. The mind does not distinguish between them: the cry of the bird, the scent of lavender, and the feel of cold stone are all the same. They are experienced without words or thoughts to describe them: bird, lavender, or stone.

I think I still have some of that young, dumb kid inside of me, because I tend to gravitate towards the poetry. But is worth mentioning that I completely ignored the second half of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, in which the author turns from the poetry of love and begins a dialectic examination on the nature of rhetoric, the rules of language, literally the art of persuasion. I read the Vedas and I see a world unfolding before me like Krishna revealing himself to Arjuna "an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles, and countless weapons of his power". But there is another side to the dialogue. There are the rules of speech, and the art of doing it in just such a manner if you are going to be successful. It isn’t enough to be passionate; you also have to be disciplined.

This morning I found myself wondering if there wasn’t a correlation between the notion of dreamless sleep, and Socrates “I know that I don’t know.” Probably. The idea of wisdom in ignorance is far flung and appears in many places. You hear Socrates echoed in many western philosophers from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard described it as “learned ignorance.” It is prevalent in eastern schools of thought as well, and you can hear it in authors like Confucius, who writes, “To know is to know that to know is not to know.”

Socrates statement is an affirmation of inquiry. Socrates puts the question to himself what do I know, and by examination comes to the conclusion that he does not know, and that this is the grounds for the one thing that he can definitively say, namely that he knows nothing. From this process, Socrates derives a process, dialectic, that he can then apply to all other forms of knowledge, particularly of Ethics, and demonstrate that other also know nothing.

The Socratic Methodology has been passed down to us through the generations in the form of mathematics and science. The methodologies are the same. A good scientist proposes a thesis, conducts experimentation and draws conclusions, and the voice of Socrates can still be heard in Scientists like Heisenberg, whose uncertainty principle. Seems the very model of Socratic ignorance.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. The more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured.

For Socrates much the same exists. The more we come to any kind of certainty, the more we are forced to define that certainty and frame it from our own perspective. As Plato states in the section on rhetoric from the Phaedrus, that the problems of language automatically engender a misunderstanding. Our means to describe phenomena are only as good as the speaker, and since their perspective is subjective and biased, so any attempt at a true description will follow.

Thus we find ourselves always reaching a point were our understanding falters. A good example of this might be proponents of String Theory, a theory of the universe that is so abstract, so settled in the world of Ideas, that there is no physical experiment that can prove its existence. Instead it is described in the world pure mathematics, a language that many people associate with reason and logic. But in this case it is a language that describes a world so unlike anything that we can imagine that logic has become a kind of poetry to the senses and that can convey a meaning or understanding of this world that physical science cannot touch. For Plato, it is the world of Pure Ideas.

Poetry, is seems is the world where knower and known can finally be one, and in which the identity of self and other begins to dissolve away. In many ways it is the same sort of idea that the Upanishads talk about. That it isn’t simply enough to say “I don’t know” but that beneath the idea that I understand that I don’t know is a recognition that any act of knowing does not validate our knowledge of the world, but rather undermines it, and in a way destroys it. The minute you choose speed, or direction, the world becomes a smaller place for knowledge is actually lost and not gained. So that in the end it isn’t the language of knowledge, science or mathematics, that is vital to our understanding of the world, but the language of poetry.

Finally. It is ironic then that Plato dismisses the poet, the artisan and others like them as mere imitators, as he does in his Ion and later in the Republic. For as it would seem, what Plato dismisses as “the divinely inspired” are in fact the guardians of the most profound truths known to human existence.

I chose this

You ever get an idea in your head that seems so familiar that you know you heard it somewhere before, but you can’t place it? I had that feeling driving to work this morning. I can’t even tell you the train of thoughts that lead to the one I arrived at. It might be that the thought simply popped into my head the way errant thoughts sometimes do. I was driving in my Jeep with the radio on. I was listening to the NPR newscaster discussing the events in Egypt. It was warm this morning, or at least, warmer than it has been in a while and I was trying to decide whether or not to roll down the windows, because I was about to get on the freeway and couldn’t decide if I simply wanted a bit of fresh air or the torrent of fresh air that driving with the windows down at seventy miles an hour brings. Anyway there I was, sitting in my car, I think I was approaching a red light, when this stray thought wandered through the window of my mind. It was so tentative, so fragile, like the smell of apple pie coming from the neighbor’s kitchen, or the scent of spring borne on seasonal breeze, that at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. “What” I wondered, “If in the moments before birth, our souls choose the life we wanted to live?”

There are many religions that talk about the souls experience before life. The Greeks have the reincarnated soul pass across the river Lethe and so forget everything the soul knew in the life before. The Bardo Thodol teaches that once awareness is freed from the body after death it traverses through a series of spiritual tests before it reenters the world in the form of a new birth. I don’t know about any of that stuff. I don’t know if we are born once and live the life we are given, or if we have an immortal soul that that entered and reentered the world for countless eons, in and out of life after life through the creation of universe after universe. For me none of that really matters. All I have is now. But I wonder. Did I choose now? I mean really choose this now, in a time and a place so different from this that words like time and place have no meaning. Did I, standing on the precipice, look out over the whole course of my life, and, like a contestant at a carnival booth, did I reach down into the water and pick this life knowing all that I knew then, that I would have to go through all that I know now?

Now, I don’t know if I read this somewhere, in the Upanishads, for instance, or in the Gita. I probably did, or something just like it. But for that moment in my car, listening to the radio, and feeling the wind on my face, I had this thought and what is more I was so sure of it, so sure that it was true, that I believed it. Probably because that thought, the thought that my life wasn’t the product of God or the Universe or any other force but was in fact the by-product of a choice that I made. Of all the countless lives I could have chosen, I chose this one, because there was something, many things, that this life had to offer that I needed to learn. There is no force outside of myself “doing this” to me, or inflicting this life upon me. Like a college freshman standing in front of an admissions office with a handbook full of electives, this is the litany of courses I chose for myself. Now all that's left is to figure out what to do with it.

We are all Racist

The artist Wassili Kandinsky said “art is the child of its age, and the mother of our emotions.” I often use this quote when teaching to express to my students that art is a language, a language of the time in which it was made, and that by looking at the art we can tell a lot about the time in which the artist lived, his or her beliefs and in general the social and cultural influenced that helped shape the work of art. We art the product of our culture. I tell my students this not only that they have a tool for understanding the art, but that they understand that they are also children of their culture and that as such they will approach the work from a particular standpoint, with a particular mindset that frames the way the appreciate art.

Recently, in our adult Sunday school class, we began discussing the writings of Martin Luther King. Race is one of those big three that they say you should never discuss with people if you want to keep your friends your friends. The other two are religion and politics. So we have our bases covered in church. It is an odd thing listening to people talk about racism. Many times you hear things that, in talking about racism, sound racist. For me it is hard not to judge. I grew up with grandparent who frequently made racist remarks and from whom I learned a great deal about my own intolerance of hate speech. As a result I tend to err on the side of caution and typically react negatively to words that hint at racism. And it is an odd place to sit and talk about racism, in a room full of white, middle class Protestants. There isn’t a person of color among them. So, just as I caution my students, the stetting and our own point of view must be taken into consideration in this conversation.

In talking about the speeches of MLK, we tend to talk about racism in the past. But of course racism is alive and well in the modern world, and perhaps more prevalent today than ever, as undercurrents of racist talk and thinking are swept under the table in a tide of political correctness and affirmative action. But for myself I know that I am a product of my culture, so that no matter how hard I reject hate speech and racist sentiment, I undoubtedly share in them both. We are all racist. Not all to the same degree. But we have heard racist sentiment in our schools and on television and really everywhere. It seems inescapable. About the time I think that I have eradicated every last racist thought that I have heard or been brought up with, another rears its ugly head. No I don’t think that the way to escape the tide of racism is to pretend that I am not racist. They way to avoid becoming racist is to remain vigilant of my thoughts and actions, to remain open to the words of others that might point out when I am at fault and be quick to acknowledge when I am wrong and make amends.

I enjoy the conversations we have in our class, and when I am unable to attend I am disappointed. I tend to think of racism as a fear of change or perhaps, more rightly, a fear of the different or the other. When I look at a person’s clothes or their manners I might think that these people are to be feared or worse, but really it is my own inward fear of the strange and different, my own ignorance about other people and other cultures that are different from my own, that gives my fear strength. The more we talk about racism, the more I think, and learn and grow, and the better equipped I am to deal with my own fears and insecurities. It makes me wonder though, because there is always change and there is always difference, so does that mean their will always be racism? I hope not, but I really don't know.