![]() ![]() The factors we have been considering as “answers” seem to be merely symbols or indices, relational aspects of things - of which they are integral parts - not to be considered in terms of causes and effects. There are interesting parallels here: to the triangle, to the Christian ideas of trinity, to Hegel’s dialectic, and to Swedenborg’s metaphysic of divine love (feeling) and divine wisdom (thinking). The new viewpoint very frequently sheds light over a larger picture, providing a key which may unlock levels not accessible to either of the teleological viewpoints. And the non-causal or non-blaming viewpoint… arises emergently from the union of two opposing viewpoints, such as those of physical and spiritual teleologies, especially if there is conflict as to causation between the two or within either. The non-teleological picture… goes beyond blame or cause. The moment we regard something simply as it is, because it is, we have understood it more fully, for we have shed the narratives layer of why: Such rebirth of perspective allows us to move beyond questions of cause in thinking and blame in feeling, which are related reflexes of the teleological mindset. Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. People get to believing and even to professing the apparent answers thus arrived at, suffering mental constrictions by emotionally closing their minds to any of the further and possibly opposite “answers” which might otherwise be unearthed by honest effort - answers which, if faced realistically, would give rise to a struggle and to a possible rebirth which might place the whole problem in a new and more significant light. The greatest fallacy in, or rather the greatest objection to, teleological thinking is in connection with the emotional content, the belief. The method extends beyond thinking even to living itself in fact, by inferred definition it transcends the realm of thinking possibilities, it postulates “living into.” Science - the supreme art of observation without interpretation, of meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms, free from the tyranny of why and its tendrils of blame - puts us a leap closer to understanding both particulate and pattern through non-teleological thinking - which, as Steinbeck astutely observes, is an inadequate term to begin with, for it asks of us more than thinking in how we parse any sort of information: Despite his magnificent novels, despite his large-souled letters, I consider this his slender book of nonfiction his finest work.Īt its heart is Steinbeck’s passionate refutation of the Western compulsion for teleological thinking - the tendency to explain things in terms of the purpose they serve, antithetical both to science and to the Eastern notion of being: the idea that everything just is and fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself, is simply because it is. What emerges is a meditation on the nature of knowledge - a kind of prose counterpart to Elizabeth Bishop’s deep-seeing poem “At the Fishhouses” - disguised as an expedition journal: a wanderer’s delight in the adjacent pleasure gardens of science and philosophy of mind, composed two decades before Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for his fiction. ![]() Wading through the tide pools, his hands callused from collecting specimens, his feet stung by poisonous worms and spiked by urchins, his mind invigorated by the ravishing interconnectedness of life, the 38-year-old writer found himself contemplating the deepest strata of reality and its intercourse with the human imagination. In 1940, as humanity’s most ferocious war was rupturing the world, Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts decamped to the nonhuman world and its elemental consolations of interdependence, embarking on an exploratory expedition in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California - “a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water… subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity.” The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject - and us along with it - from the interconnected totality of deep truth.Ī mighty antidote to that very human and very life-limiting impulse comes from The Log from the Sea of Cortez ( public library) by John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968). Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes. We may know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we may know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and yet in our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness.
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