Outside our time
Feature photo is a cropped scene from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” one of my favorite artworks. Essay is a revised submission from the University of Chicago summer public thinking workshop.
“The hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject.” Donna Tartt hypothesized this in her novel about academics who, forming an orthodoxy outside their Northeastern liberal arts school, attempt to transcend the triviality of their lives. This fatal flaw of “wandering,” the human desire to play hide and seek with our own ideas, is not one of fiction. We tend to find comfort in the movement of our thoughts rather than the arrival to their conclusion. “Our mind has a natural aversion against [stagnation],” quotes historian Hannah Arendt with Kantian absolutism. The Socratic dialogues from 400 BC, too, were aporetic. They probed, dissected, went in circles.
This reminded me of the call for “revived public intellectualism” that attracted the commentary and critique of many magazines in the twenty-first century. Today, it seems, we midwife our sentiments, quarrel with them before they mature, and watch the pendulum of ideology swing back and forth. What does it mean to wander from a subject, and what exactly does a modern mind have to do with it? The classical mind, perhaps, is one of narrowness and archaic precedent. A relic of our once Internet-free society that substituted printed press for radio and radio for television. The glorified fifties whose reflection we clutch to, possibly, that took form of “voluntary orderliness” and “ethnic harmony” as novelist Toni Morrison suggests. More importantly, how do we look outside of our time, recognize a “bedrock” for how thinking inherently is, and promote a world where we publicly agree on what it should be?
I turned to Arendt’s “Thinking and Moral Considerations” to find the answer to this.
The capital of our rebelliousness against the “old-fashioned” and the “stale” is our power and our Achilles’ heel. Our appetite for reconstructing will never be satiated, and our imagination of the revised past will never be satisfied. That is how it is. Man is a thinking being as well as a doing being. An incredibly interdependent and fragile being. Arendt’s argument with this is that thinking deals with objects “removed from indirect sense perception,” therefore we can’t help but dissociate from the reality that it manifests. The “nonappearing measures” of our concepts are our safety net. It is not what is physically there that divides us – it is what isn’t there. Our abstractions, when taken too far, counteract and contradict their own objectives. We see this in the loudest voices of our communities and the symbolic forms that they hold in politics. We see this in our distillation of political movements to psychology rather than history, as noted in Sontag’s response to Adrienne Rich’s “Feminism and Fascism” exchange. We grapple with civilizational mortality by adding more imaginative words to our collective vocabulary pool (though with real attachments) as Roy Scranton shows in “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.” We decry the invasion of the “algorithmic system” that requires us to put faith in our irrationality, we make amends, instigate corrections, and reduce complexities of our time to the “post-modern, post structuralist, post colonial,” as Morrison adds.
But all of humanity is richness differently expressed, and it is richness that we will inevitably wander with until our last day. What will make a difference perhaps is how we share it. How we choose to funnel the appreciation for our ideas, gatekeep their value, and highlight their importance. How we remain true to ourselves in the face of our own time, and not the time that the past has modeled for us. In the words of Socrates the Provocateur: “…[If] the wind of thinking, which I shall now arouse in you, has roused you from your sleep and made you fully awake and alive, then you will see that you have nothing in your hand but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is share them with each other.”
