Sunday, July 17, 2005
Whole - or parts?
In Zen and the Art of Making a Living
, Laurence Boldt tells us:[Man has] denied the great Mystery of life and put his faith in ratio-nality. A ratio is a portion, a part. In rationality, we divide life into parts, but in endless fragmentation, we miss the experience of the whole. Life is simultaneously the ratio (the part) and the whole - at once the same and different (12-13).A few paragraphs on, Boldt tells on, "Through analysis, problems can be solved, but always new problems take their place" (13).
The word "analysis" is an interesting one. Literally, it means "to cut through." This is a popular notion in our culture. We cut through the red tape. Not to mention the crap and the clutter. We cut to the chase. And when we're done, what are we left with? Whatever it was, it's all sliced up now.
This is, in its way, where Wittgenstein went wrong with the Tractatus. It is an amazing piece of work, no question, delineating the knowable world in seven statements (divided into lots of sub-statements, of course). But the wonder of the world is not its myriad parts, but that its Creator, or the process that created it, actually managed to fit them all into one package.
We have tried rational analysis, of course. It has put us in touch with smaller and smaller particles as the purported building blocks of our universe. But that still leaves the question of what these fundamental particles are, where they came from, and most importanly, why they are fundamental? Why can't we split them in two? And cannot conceiving of something half the size of one of them still raise questions?
I picked up a magazine the other day that included an article on the Higgs' field. Or is that the Higgs' fields? Higgs' fields and Higgs' bosuns all go into a higgledy-piggledy stew that might explain why fundamental particles differ or what they are or how they are, or at least how they come to have mass. But there's a curious thing about a Higgs' field: when you diagram where things stabilize in them, it's not at the axis or 0 point. It's a little bit to one side or the other. The world does not turn, then, on moderation - the middle ground - but in fitting together disparate elements. The thing about these elements - like proton and electron, for example - is that they go to hell without each other.
Percy Walker wrote a marvelous essay, "The Loss of the Creature," looking at how our tendency to dissect leaves us with - I'm summarizing crudely - a whole lot of frog parts but no frog. For a frog is not the stuff of frog parts, but a thing that jumps and splashes and grows itself out of a tadpole. And a work of literature is not the sum of the words, nor even ideas, but the experiencing of those words and ideas - the process of reading (and writing, to start with) is the thing, not the thing itself. The same goes for life. If we live it by balance sheets, literal or internally created, we will discover that things don't add up. This leads to disappointment, for these balance sheets inevitably fail to account for the ineffable stuff that makes life more than whirling atoms, and so we feel shortchanged.
Those looking for philosophy homework, then, should eschew the creation of new tractati, breaking up into smaller pieces a world whose true miracle is being one whole thing. Far better to seek a single statement, or a single poem, that expresses baffled wonderment at cosmic unity.
To see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.
-William Blake
posted by gbarto at 10:28 PM