Physical, Mental

It’s curious but oh so true that genuine learning is enormously helped by a physical component, a physical doing. Reminded of this by a post on Laudator (link) that comments on the Latin proverb, Qui scribit, bis legit, Who writes, reads twice. I learned this long ago if in a larger context—namely the difference between doing your own research versus relying on a Research Assistant. Here a post on that a while back. Why is this true?

Is it that, for instance, copying out a quote by hand or keying means that you read it twice? Why does a graph you make yourself, laboriously in Excel, become more real than one you glance at in a paper? My own guess is that the brain stores more than merely memories. It stores a kind of invisible weight or stamp with every memory. The heavier the weight, the darker the stamp, the more accessible that memory later becomes. The brain developed as an organ for dealing with the physical world, hence physical involvement tells the brain: This is serious; he really cares. More ink on that inkpad, add some lead.

Another explanation is that the brain labels the mere reading of a page, the glance of an eye lite. It takes very little time. Hence it gets routine storage at best. Multiple readings, effort at grasping the meaning, much underlining, better yet, comments in the margin—the brain is alerted. And of course, the more time is spent, the more important.

When it comes to the genuinely experiential—say cooking or gardening—reading about it, even copying out a recipe, is as it were nothing, nothing at all, compared to actually doing the thing. Boy does that recipe expand, in my case into a veritable primordial jungle of experience, when I try to do what, for Brigitte, is effortless as she half listens to the pundits shouting at each other on the television all the while.

Experienced from Hidden Depths...

Sometimes I’m reminded how problematic it really is to view other societies from a distance—entirely through the filtering and abstracting lenses of the media. The feeling typically arises when I’m watching a genuinely good documentary or a foreign film, a film that its director made for another public, not ours, never even dreaming that it might actually be shown in America. Pictures from Persia have frequently had this effect on me. Suddenly I’m keenly aware not only how life in Iran is seen and felt but also—and seen through Iranian eyes—how diverse and surprising, for Iranians, it might be to see how their own rural populations live.

And in my mind I add to this a note or two. I’m actually experienced in this. I’ve been a rolling stone, rolling from Hungary to the altogether different environment of Germany, then from Bavaria to Saxony, from there to America. There was a time once in my life when I genuinely pictured America filled with cowboys and Indians—and when arrival in Kansas City, MO by night—our future home—shocked and depressed me. I arrived in the by now long-forgotten days when Neon Owned the Night, and the city didn’t look at all like the Wild West, not even the dark shadow of a buffalo in sight. Mind you, I was fifteen. And mind you, further, that I was plenty smart. The glittery intellectual surface was not in the least surprised, but deeper down we are—really we are—much more complex and strange beings, and something in my depth revolted at the trivialization of my imagination.

Now all this comes to mind when I’m forced to contemplate—through Afghanistani, Pakistani, or Yemeni eyes—and not urban eyes presumably already jaded by modernity—the impression that America produces by drones and mayhem that might have killed people known to me, a village over, say. And what this sort of thing does to fifteen-year olds there, who later, indeed soon—these wars have been dragging right along—are twenty-five-year-olds. Twenty-five-year-olds whose glittery intellectual surface may be entirely up-to-date but whose dark and archetypal depths do not approve and produce chthonic emotional upheavals. Is it to be wondered at that such experiences produce what we contemptuously label terrorism? As if we were, in our depths, superior to it?

Difficult to Express

Over the last several years I’ve found myself noting more and more frequently, in this and that connection, that our lives, however powerfully they’re anchored in the material dimension—and they certainly are—take place in mental spaces. The feeling is difficult to express. Someone hearing might say, “But of course. We’re conscious creatures. We live in a stream of consciousness. It’s a mixture of sense impressions, phantasms, and of memories.” The statement is true enough, but it doesn’t measure up to my odd intuition.

Pondering that intution now, I am beginning to see it better. Various relational structures adhere to every kind of activity. Back in my working days, I would work on a novel in the early hours and then travel to my office. And in that space a different set of relationships came into focus. The novel was one structure, the business another. And, being engaged with one, then with the other, I was living each in sequence because of identification. The concerns that used to exercise me in my days at North Star, in Minneapolis, for instance, have absolutely no influence on me now. I can reread one of my novels and re-enter its world again. Once more it becomes real. In the first case the various “issues” that exercised me just happened to concern real people and events; in the other case they happened to be imaginary, but, since the novel in question was realistic, it felt just as real as the flow of events at work. But even if the novel had been quite wildly surrealistic, it would still have operated as a frame for experience provided that it had had the necessary consistency and coherence.

Each world we inhabit temporarily has its facts, logic, dynamism, feeling tones, actions, and consequences. The substance may be predominantly physical—which was indeed the case when I spent several weeks  redecorating the whole house, once, long ago in Kansas. The substance may be commercially toned, as it tends to be in a business. Human relations and memory may predominate during an extended family reunion. The substance may also be on a highly abstract plane—albeit never entirely divorced from physical reference—in a career, say, focused professionally on philosophy or higher math.

The striking similarity between imagined realities (the novel) and the actual (business) comes into focus when I reflect that in most business relationships the physical contact with people is often quite minimal or takes place only from time to time or at some remove (telephone, e-mail). Most of the time most of the people we deal with are mental presences, not bodies visible to my eyes. This is true above all in our era of effective mass communications. For many people the endless meetings—and these are face to face—are a distraction. Most tellingly, in most businesses, those engaged in them almost never see the actual customer unless in a generic sense—when they themselves go shopping. Back when you hawked your goods at your stall in the market—another story that.

The feeling that I find difficult to express today is, I think, a strengthened realization of the huge role the immaterial plays in our experience of living. I don’t want to call it abstract because, in most of our activities, the mental flow has feeling tone and is accompanied by imaginal traces: it is mental but alive. In fact, I must confess, I don’t and never did much like that word: abstraction. It suggests some kind of paltry residual of the physical, the last considered real, all else a derivate. In my own mental culture, I conceive of essences as intentions, thus as having more energy and a closer proximity to the Real than the actual physical manifestation.

A special case of this “life in the immaterial” is our relationship to the Media. Driven by the need to be efficient—in drawing and holding audiences for profit—they tend to create oddly deformed arrangements of reality in which short phrases are used to reference often very complex and dynamically changing relationships. To the extent that the Media optimize their content to maximize their viewership, to that extent they fail to carry out their self-proclaimed mission. And as this ratio shifts to favor the bottom line, to that extent, certainly, the medium is the message.

Layers

For a while of late I’ve been thinking about layers in culture. Such thoughts occur when I’m away from the artificial stimulations of the media, engaged in the relatively boring chores of just plain living. Writing about the noosphere is in part responsible for such reflections. Well, today, I felt that sense sharply intensified. An old friend of ours is retiring from Gale Research, the publisher, after thirty-some-odd years of service as a reference book editor. Brigitte and I were invited to make contributions to a book. Our friend will get that object as a parting gift at the ceremonies of departure.

The past, and that layer beneath the hype, thickened and densified as I wrote my contribution—and read the words that flowed from my fingers spontaneously. And with it came the realization that life sucked clear of the fogs and dusts of the swirling noosphere hasn’t changed very much at all since—to pick a year at random—1955. That’s the layer where people get married and grow old, where children take piano lessons and adults participate in choirs, where rugby is played and dogs are walked, where jobs are sought, gotten, and grow into careers.

The differences we observe down at this level are really trivial. We remember the changes that came and seemed transforming—because the human mind is always alert and eager to adapt. But on reflection the qualities that mattered then still matter, and the blunt fact is that you rapidly get used to things like Xerography, electric typewriters and calculators, to computers, internets, and digital TV—but something must me produced to be copied, the words have to be good before you type them, the numbers can be scary whether you tote them up by pen or keystrokes, the news reached us then as now, and our minds have become steeled against them and grow ever more resistant the faster the hail rattles down on the tin roof. And the news are much the same—as we can prove by demanding of the genii that it summon up old archives. Amazing how intensely people once felt about matters long since forgotten…

Boredom is good. It reminds you of values. You realize that beneath the raging storms of change, culture endures. It isn’t left untouched by all that stuff rushing about in the invisible electromagnetic flux, but that too we get used to. Gale Research. It was a wholly owned, relatively small, but very prestigious reference book company still headed, when we encountered it, by its founder. Our friend already worked there then. The company was twice sold since, first to the Canadian publishing giant Thomson, then spun off to Cengage Learning. Managements came and went. Slogans flourished like mushrooms and wilted almost instantly. One new enthusiasm after the other was organized in, organized out, in-sourced, out-sourced—and endured. All this hoopla caused a lot of laughter, down there, in ordinary life. And things went on, adapting, struggling, battling—as they had long before we became members of the publishing tribe. At the working level things endure. Some things must. And will. As Martha Stewart would say, It’s a good thing.

Abstraction and Experience

In college I did rather poorly in required science courses, owing perhaps to the disconnect I felt between an abstract and an experiential level of knowledge. In these courses the two were separated and acquired side by side—if at all. We got the conceptual material in lectures, the experience in lab work. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect the two, especially not in chemistry.

In the sciences generally, as taught at universities (at least in my day—perhaps the methods have improved), the actual experience of discovery is too much compressed. The messy lab experiments did not, for me, actually illustrate the elegant formulae of chemical transformation that I’d jotted down in notes. The lab time was too short; the stuff I dribbled from jars into tubes was alien and messy; things never seemed to work out; the smells, the fumes…. Those who had originally discovered all the formulae had spent months and years in what must have been a fascinating process. We were supposed to absorb all that in two-hour stints—without training or time enough to hone the many skills involved. It didn’t work out for me.

Passing grades could be achieved by memorizing formulae and abstract tokens in chemistry and Latin names for species and body parts in biology. Rubber stamp on forehead. Passed required course. Keep the line moving.

Later on I really did learn a good deal about chemistry by working in industry. There I saw problems in a brand new and active context. I had to understand what really transpired and why. I got my knowledge by interaction with lots of people and spending time looking at things in refineries and chemical plants. The formulae became a language by which to talk about the bigger, the real thing. In college the lab was an interlude of chaos. In working life it was the center of events, the real thing, Kant’s Ding an Sich—even if not in the way Kant meant it. Behind the abstract thought now loomed this vast, real, imposing and concrete reality. The thought was thin, the thing was thick.

Yet later—decades later—I learned a lot about biology as well. Surprisingly my greatest help in comprehending that mysterious world came from years of experience I’d had of human institutions and technology. That gave me what amounted to an almost reflexive recognition of the Hermetic slogan: As above, so below. Human experience in its complexity mirrors the arrangements of organic nature at another level, enlarges it to ordinary view. The parallel reaches way down, down to the behavior, characteristics, and arrangements of sub-cellular organelles and their constituents in turn.

I came to believe, as a consequence of this experience, that education should be inverted. First, after high school, let us say, should come ten to twenty-five years of work in the world’s economy. Then college! Only fractions of effort would be required and would then yield ten times the benefit that would have been available to the same person at eighteen or nineteen. Education could thus be seen as completing the human, not to prepare him or her for work. Real preparation could still be provided by apprenticeship programs under patient masters.

Now, to be sure, I had more native inclination in my youth to understand literature, history, and philosophy—the humanities generally—than the sciences. But the same rules, it seems to me, also apply to these fields. Experience is the real teacher. Before we learn the names we ought to have experience of das Ding an Sich. If high schools were properly organized—and here and there they are—they would suffice for minimal preparation, not least in ethics and philosophy. At higher levels these subjects really require a rich experience of life before the problems they deal with even fully surface in human life and, therefore, the raw materials for understanding become available.

My own experience is that the really educated are self-taught—yes, even if, nominally, they already have advanced degrees when this real learning begins. It is thought based on experience that educates. By thought I don’t mean simple musing—not merely the storing of knowledge into cubicles provided by a classification system ready-made by public opinion. I mean genuine, ordered reflection.

Here, perhaps, it may be well to reflect for a moment on that word itself—reflection. It rests on abstractions, concepts, immaterial memories, phantasms, but it carries the richer connotation of the inner life that I’m seeking to portray here. Abstraction is a technical sort of word—not something we experience. What we experience is reflection. And it is a rich sort of thing, not the dry, shrunken head of something that once lived—rather something still vital and alive but on another level…

Plato has Socrates say that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living” (in Apology, the text is here). The statement is odd. The person who fails in examining his life wouldn’t know, would he, having never looked; thus the opinion is that of a third party. The phrasing is poor, but the meaning is clear enough. It signals that experience, as such, however valuable and indispensible it is to genuine knowledge, does not really reach the authentically human level until we view it separated from itself, thus in reflection. The experience, needless to say, may be mental, emotional, or spiritual. It doesn’t have to be sensory. But it should have been perceived.

At the same time, reflection without experience, which seems so common in many philosophical contexts, is next to useless. It reminds me of a ping-pong game without a ball. Such a game would feature many wild gestures at two ends of a table, many loud outcries no doubt, many loud arguments about who just scored a point, with denials and passionate affirmations—but really nothing there to prove the facts one way or the other.