Motus Mentis

In yesterday’s post I remarked that one of the reasons I’d been slacking off around here was that “I’d begun to wonder if I can really think as well as I used to.” I mentioned Eric Hoffer, who’d wondered the same thing (about himself, of course), at the age of seventy-two.

Vito Caiati commented that “As for the sense that one does not think as well as in the past, it is, in my experience, partly a reflection of an awareness that nothing is as clear or evident as it once was, which one could take either as a sign of mental enfeeblement or, more positively, of greater wisdom.”

Thank you, Vito. In the hope of the latter, I’ll quote Hoffer again, from the beginning of Before The Sabbath:

“The reasoning capacity is unimpaired. I can still tell sense from nonsense, and my judgment of books I am reading and of my own writing is sound. It is true that I have noticed a tendency toward wishful thinking, a lessened interest in what is happening in the world, and a marked weakening of memory. But I sense that the crucial difference lies elsewhere, in a loss of alertness.”

So: where do matters stand? What am I to make of these diagnoses?

Taking Vito’s first: a younger me would have said that as time went by things became more clear, and more evident, but at this point it is indeed becoming less clear, and less evident, that they do. Some things certainly do: as Chesterton said, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” But as one lives and learns, and the radius of one’s sphere of knowledge and experience increases linearly, the volume of that sphere increases cubically. This means that the number of things it encloses — and most importantly, the number of possible connections between them — increasingly tends to overwhelm us with its complexity as we get older.

Where wisdom enters the picture, if we’re lucky, is when we stop trying to keep the whole thing in our heads; indeed, the beginning of real wisdom may be when we stop flattering ourselves that such a thing is possible at all. But for certain types (and I’m one of them), who always imagine that the stupendous complexity of the world, if we just work at it hard enough, is systemizable, reducible, algorithmically compressible —  for such types, the realization that this simply cannot be done is a hard thing to accept, and when it finally becomes impossible to deny, it can give one serious pause.

This is what happened to me, I think — and as readers will have noticed, I paused for quite a while. If mere reason, pure cognitive horsepower, isn’t going to be enough (and is even going to fall farther and farther behind the more it takes in), what other roads to understanding are there? This is what has been harrying me for years now, as I began to see that I was far too “zoomed in” to make any further progress. And this, I think, led me to what Hoffer described as “a lessened interest in what is happening in the world”, and it’s why I stopped writing. When it began to seem pointless to do what I’d always done — pick some little thing, and either dissect it, or connect it to some other little thing in some novel way —  I really didn’t know what to do. I’m still trying to figure that out, and it will be the subject, when I get around to it, of the next Pilgrim’s Progress entry.

But writing things down can help, and so I think it’s important to get back to doing that. And while I’m sure I will still do some dissecting-and-connecting — old habits die hard! — I know this by now, at least: that wisdom, at the next level, involves something that is almost the exact opposite of “thinking real hard”.

And as for Hoffer’s remark about “a loss of alertness” — all I can say is that I’ll try to stay awake.