East and West (religion seeking community and individuality)

 

• 
  Jason Padgett

  To try to resolve the paradox, one might point out that language functions not only as a medium for expressing thoughts but also as a means for developing them. The act of expression often exposes gaps and sloppiness in our thinking: ideas, once spoken or written down, can turn out to be less compelling than they first appeared. As soon as we try to articulate these thoughts, our confusion becomes apparent. This common experience could naively tempt one to think that, in all cases where articulation is hard, the formulations that we eventually arrive at add something new to our initial thoughts. Clarifying what we think, according to this view, might not lie in expressing our settled thought but in making up our minds about an issue, by constructing a thought that is more definite and coherent. If our goal is not to produce words that match our thought, there doesn’t appear to be a paradox in accounting for how we manage to recognise the correct words to voice our thoughts.

  Things are not so simple, however. While it might, in some cases, dissolve the paradox to view the process of reaching clarity as the construction of thoughts, it is, at best, only half the picture. Our thoughts can be more definite than what we can readily articulate. The mathematician William Thurston, who in 1982 was awarded the Fields medal for his pioneering contributions to geometric topology, wrote that ‘there is sometimes a huge expansion factor in translating from the encoding in my own thinking to something that can be conveyed to someone else.’ Meanwhile, according to the mathematician Nicholas Goodman writing in 1979:

  some of the hardest work a mathematician does occurs when he has an idea but is, for the moment, unable to express that idea … Often such ideas first manifest themselves as visual or kinaesthetic images. As the mathematician becomes clearer about them, as they become more formal, he may discover that they manifest considerable internal structure, which is, so to speak, not yet symbolically encoded.

  And Nietzsche’s writings are filled with laments about the inadequacy of language to render his most cherished ideas entirely in words. One need not be a mathematical or philosophical visionary to have felt this frustration.

  The paradox echoes Socrates’ puzzle: how can we investigate something if we don’t know what it is?

  As cognitive science increasingly reveals, our thinking doesn’t run on a single track, like a serial computer, but seems to be organised into a variety of facilities, or modes of thought, that loosely communicate with each other. The jagged nature of the interaction might be responsible for the sense of fissure within the mind, reported by many writers and thinkers. Language is just one mode of thought, with its own characteristic parameters and limitations. Though it uniquely affords us with a distanced perspective on our thoughts, it is only an imperfect instrument for capturing them. There are other modes that can present us with aspects of reality and interface more directly with our emotions but are less amenable to explicit reasoning and articulation. Only an uncooperative (and mean-spirited) interlocutor would regard our difficulties in articulation as a sign that we lack anything meaningful to say.

  The spectrum between cases in which we start with definite thoughts and cases in which we construct thoughts in the process of expression spans the full gamut of creative pursuits. On one side, there are painters such as Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter, who minimise conscious control over their chromatic abstractions, allowing the medium, and chance, to dictate the result. On the other side, there are those who subordinate even the smallest details of their work to their initial vision. Stephen King compared the process of writing his novels to the excavation of a fossil that was already there when the writing had begun. And Marcel Proust described the musical motifs guiding Vinteuil, the composer in Swann’s Way (1913), as ‘ideas veiled in shadows … perfectly distinct one from another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance’.

  The cases in which we use language to construct thoughts might be immune to the paradox of articulation, since they don’t involve discovery of what we were thinking. But that still leaves us with the other side of the spectrum: how do we recognise the formulations of our shadowy thoughts, without knowing what these thoughts are? A closely related paradox arises in other creative domains in which we might begin with relatively complete ideas or ‘fossils’ that guide our work. Without fully knowing the fossil we seek to uncover, we can’t tell whether our product conforms to it. But knowing exactly what we’re seeking would drain the creativity and suspense out of the process of excavation – we might as well outsource the rest of the work to someone else. The paradox echoes Socrates’ ancient puzzle about enquiry in Plato’s Meno: how can we investigate something if we don’t know what it is? And if we do know, what’s the point of investigating it?