Richard Melson | Meta Intelligence

Essay 11: Sartre Gives Us a Clue About a Kind of Holism

In his book chapter, “Existentialist Psychoanalysis,” Sartre (1905-1980), the French thinker, offers us a “flashlight” of understanding when he writes:

“The principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a totality and not a collection. Consequently he expresses himself as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superficial behavior. In other words, there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human act which is not revealing.

“The goal of psychoanalysis is to decipher the empirical behavior patterns of man. The essential task is an hermeneutic; that is a deciphering…”

(Existentialism and Human Emotions, Citadel Press, 1985, page 68)

In other words, if you think of a person as an unofficial novelist (i.e., storyteller) of his or her own life, with a philosophical commentary that accompanies the novel, you have not a laundry list of attributes, but a meaning interpreter on a short physiological leash of food, rest, headaches, skin rashes, sprained ankles and all the other bodily reminders of the biomedical pressures that accompany the person-as-novelist situation.

Essay 10: Towards a Cosmopolitan Re-Education

Education today is still completely parochial and we will now give an example of making education completely cosmopolitan (i.e., based on global “inputs”).

There’s a Japanese critique of the entire Western tradition of technology-and-man defeating nature. We will come to the Japanese critique in a moment. First, we remind the reader of Western ideas of man as conqueror of nature: think of Sophocles’ classic play Antigone where perhaps the most famous choral ode in Greek drama occurs, “Ode to Man” which celebrates man’s techno-rise (our word technology derives from Greek “techne”):

“Humanity has built ships to conquer the seas, crafted plows to tame the earth, bent animals to his will, raised houses to defeat the rain and the snow.”

Nearly everything is about humanity asserting its will over nature.

One finds a restatement of this conquest-of nature theme in fellow Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his great Prometheus Bound, where he criticizes the men of old in their pre-Promethean ignorance:

Prometheus:

“They handled all things in bewilderment and confusion. They did not know of building houses with bricks to face the sun; they did not know how to work in wood. They lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of the earth. For them there was no secure token by which to tell winter nor the flowering spring nor the summer with its crops; all their doings were without intelligent calculation until I showed them the rising of the stars, and the settings, hard to observe. And further I discovered to them numbering, pre-eminent among subtle devices, and the combining of letters as a means of remembering all things, the Muses’ mother, skilled in craft.

“It was I who first yoked beasts for them in the yokes and made of those beasts the slaves of trace chain and pack saddle that they might be man’s substitute in the hardest tasks; and I harnessed to the carriage, so that they loved the rein, horses, the crowning pride of the rich man’s luxury. It was I and none other who discovered ships, the sail-driven wagons that the sea buffets. Such were the contrivances that I discovered for men.

“Greatest was this: in the former times if a man fell sick he had no defense against the sickness, neither healing food nor drink, nor unguent; but through the lack of drugs men wasted away, until I showed them the blending of mild simples wherewith they drive out all manner of diseases…It was I who made visible to men’s eyes the flaming signs of the sky that were before dim. So much for these. beneath the earth, man’s hidden blessing, copper, iron, silver, and gold—will anyone claim to have discovered these before I did?

“One brief word will tell the whole story: all arts that mortals have come from Prometheus.”

(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, University of Chicago Press, Aeschylus II, 1956, pages 155-156)

One can begin to see how “Promethean man” culminates in Francis Bacon’s (died in 1626) admonition to “place Nature on the rack so that man might force her to tell her secrets.”

Thus, the Western tradition comes close to a war on nature itself.

Now we come to a critique of this from Japan on the other side of the Pacific:

Natsume Sōseki (died in 1916), the greatest writer in modern Japanese literature, has a protagonist in the 1913 classic Kojin (“The Wayfarer”):

“Constant motion and flow is our very fate.”

“Man’s insecurity stems from the advance of science. Never once has science, which never ceases to move forward, allowed us to pause.

From walking to rickshaw, from rickshaw to carriage, from carriage to train, from train to automobile, from there on to the dirigible, further on to the airplane, and further on and on—no matter how far we may go, it won’t let us take a breath. How far it will sweep us along, nobody knows for sure. It is really frightening.”

(Sōseki, The Wayfarer, Tuttle Books, 1967, page 285)

This sense of things that Promethean/Baconian man will place mankind in a runaway train with no brakes or endpoint is a critique that makes us think. The counterargument that we know of no other way out of poverty is “co-valid” and we have a kind of legitimate “argument without end” which cannot be easily dismissed. We cannot really divide the world into proponents of science/technology on the one side and Luddites on the other. That is too simplistic. There are legitimate concerns about de-humanization through modern science and technology in Adorno and Horkheimer, say, who fear a global shipwreck based on this “runaway train with no brakes or endpoint.” The current climate change crisis comes to mind.

Our main point here is not to enter this argument or to take sides but to show the reader how a cosmopolitan “post-parochial” education might look and how this kind of meta-intelligent pedagogy would be deeply “eye-opening” and help the Wittgenstein process where “light dawns gradually over the whole” as we have seen.

Cosmopolitan Re-Education That Includes Movies and Songs

Another dimension of cosmopolitanism in education is the complete assimilation of movies and songs into the analysis (i.e., all-media cosmopolitanism). here’s a movie example that continues the argument between the conquer nature position and de-humanization fears.

Think of the movie Things to Come.

Things to Come is a 1936 movie masterpiece based on an H.G. Wells sociological sci-fi masterpiece.

In the last minutes of the movie, there’s an exchange between “John Cabal” (played by Raymond Massey) who looks at the stars and says, “All or nothing. We must conquer all of it or disappear. No rest for man in general.”

The other man (“Passworthy”) radically differs: “we are such small little creatures and cannot live that way.”

The storyline of this movie:

A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primitive localized communities. In 1966, a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organization which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world’s population is now living in underground cities.

In the year 2035, on the eve of man’s first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.

Essay 9: How to Read a Book Meta-Intelligently

This re-education book wishes to see a book you may read, besides the plot and story, as a site of multiple “domains” tangled up together or, to use string theory lingo, curled up with each other invisibly.

Think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. The following excerpt comes from Book 1, Chapter 7, where a dinner party is described like this:

“There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And, as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to every one at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up – the moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment, was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there.”

The second sentence above describes the relationship of the guests, their sense of themselves, the table, the universe. The German thinker Max Scheler (died in 1928) has a book The Human Place in the Cosmos where he implies that one aspect of being human is the anxiety-inducing inability to figure out where we are, what our place is, in various senses. It makes humans fated to a kind of restlessness. This Scheler-esque sense of things is conveyed by Fitzgerald as a novelist with a narrative and not as a philosopher with a proposition or theory. While this is taking place, as you’d expect, the guests at the party hear and see expected parts of the natural “soundscape” such as the baying dog and the “fireflies riding on the dark air.”

A testy political exchange now occurs where the right-wing guest, Tommy Balaban, explains his views to the others:

“Well, I’m a soldier, Balaban answered pleasantly. My business is to kill people. I fought against the Rif because I am a European, and I have fought the Communists because they want to take my property from me.”

Think of this explanation by Balaban as implying a kind of political graph: on the vertical axis, you put “who I am” (my identity) [i.e., “a European”]. On the horizontal axis put what Balaban owns, “my property” in his version. This gives you a point of intersection on the graph of being and having, the intersection of what I am and what I have. Anything that pushes against this intersection point is met by violence and murder.

The Rifs in Balaban’s discussion are the North African tribesmen fighting against French colonialism, like the Berbers. The 1920s Rif War was extremely brutal and Franco and Pétain met in this conflict.

Thus, without discussing it explicitly, we have the world situation as a kind of backdrop or envelope for this Fitzgerald fiction.

Notice that all of these dimensions, both the hidden and near (such as the fireflies riding on the night air) are all part of the discussion and “curled up” on each other.

A meta-intelligent understanding of a book would notice how various domains and realms, various dimensions of things, come together in the book and evolve with the story.

Essay 8: “Aletheia:” Unhiding Dimensions of Life as Part of a Deep Education

Greek thinkers of antiquity had a deep concept of “unhiding or rescuing truths from oblivion” and this is captured in the Greek word “aletheia” which means reversing Lethe (i.e., forgetfulness).

We claim here that “aletheia” (i.e., “unforgetting”) is in fact a pillar of real education which has a commitment to every kind of holism. The basic truths of a life are indeed part of the whole education. The student needs to see “all of it” from the start.

The Danish thinker Kierkegaard (1813-1855) says in his essay “Repetition” that any person who never at some point “circumnavigates what life is will never really have a life.”

In other words, real education would mean a circumnavigation of what life is with a circumnavigation of what knowledge is in a kind of “double helix.”

Without confronting these circumnavigations from the beginning, one is simply stumbling along in a grades-driven fear-fog.

Hannah Arendt, the German-American thinker who died in 1975, warns us about living a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden he wants to “front” (i.e., confront or face up to) life itself and not come to the end of his life and realize he had not lived.

In the classic American novel, John Marquand’s The Late George Apley, the protagonist realizes when it’s too late that he was brought up to become who he is and was and never really reflected on himself or his life and never really understood anything. He never “saw” anything.

We claim in this educational remediation book that a university education cannot just be a frantic stint in a modern “knowledge factory” with its conveyor belt of grades, semesters, course contents forgotten three days after the course.

Stanley Cavell, the recently deceased Harvard philosopher, in his masterful memoir, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, he gives us in its title a sense of what must happen (i.e., the insight that I knew little)—if students are not apprised of these deeper dimensions of life right from Day 1, in a process of “unhiding” the whole story and aletheia.

Essay 7: Levels of Meaning in Human Affairs: Meta-Intelligent Views

We see “scientism” (i.e., the attempt to explain human behavior in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, etc. as incomplete at best:

In his book, Husserl and the Search for Certitude, Leszek Kołakowski notes:

“A baby does not see the same thing that an adult does when it “looks” at objects and is ignorant of their function and place in the purposeful order; an adult perceives objects as endowed with meaning, and he does not add the meaning to his perceptions; when I see a car, I see a car and not a colored surface that I interpret separately as part of a purposely organized universe; when I look at a text in an alphabet unknown tome I do not see what a person who can read it does, and I do not perceives differences that he sees directly, his understanding of the text converges with his seeing into one single act. It is convincing to say that a “meaning” consequently a “universal,” makes itself part of the perception.
Everyone agrees that perception is selective, because it is under pressure from biological and social circumstances.”

(Yale University Press, 1975, pages 54-55)

Professor Clifford Geertz (who died in 2006) looks for levels of meaning and meaningfulness in all human behavior to be explained “not by an experimental science in search of law but by an interpretative one in search of meaning:”

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” he states, “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be, therefore, not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.

In this meta-intelligence book, we try to help the student see that mechanical “scientism” leads to a kind of “captive mind” sterility since we cannot get around man’s search for meaning and levels of meaning: since “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”

Essay 6: Enchantment as an “Engine of Education”

We started this book mentioning Wittgenstein’s assertion, “Light dawns gradually over the whole.”

There are two “players”—light (illumination) and the whole.

The learner, especially the deeper variety of learner, then has two quests: the flashlight or searchlight that gives off the light and the “problem” of defining “the whole.”

We argue in this book only something called “enchantment” (seeing the magic in some question or phenomenon or thing) can be the engine that gives you the impetus to go on in this double search.

For example:

Think of the opening line in the great novel from 1959, The Last of the Just, which won the Goncourt Prize, the highest literary award in France.

The opening line, which serves as a kind of “overture” for the entire book, is:

“Our eyes register the light of dead stars.”

The author uses this as a figure of speech which captures the lasting influence of people who came before you who somehow are “stars” in the sense of principal actors in your mental life. When you begin the novel, you don’t know if the writer is going to use this concept not as a statement about stellar objects in the sky, as understood by astronomy or cosmology or optics, but in the personal influence sense, as he does.

This is a beautiful “overture” because it links the physical to the personal in a “dual metaphor.” There’s a secondary poetical device since stars could mean shiny objects in the sky or people as in “movie stars.”

Great writing has this “enchanting” quality and it addresses a deep human hunger for so-called “words to live by.”

Go back to our elementary math example where 1=.9 recurring.

A student gets intrigued by this and senses “how can that be? how can you add these decimal nines infinitely?

In fact, this is a deep and “enchanting” question. If you look into something called infinitesimals (smallest math “objects”) you will find that this issue is still an “argument without end” to use Pieter Geyl’s phrase.

Furthermore: If something is or seems to be “an argument without end,” what does that imply about our ability to “nail” things down in our minds? That’s an enchanting question in itself which resonates with the Descartes “epistemology” and certitude quest we have seen previously.

Then there’s the other elusive “player” in the Wittgenstein sentence: “the whole.”

Does one mean the whole of a novel or math problem? The whole of the world of metaphors and numerical thinking (i.e., math)? Does one mean everything that exists? It’s not a set or static “thing.”

The point is not to decide any of this in a “once-and-for-all” way. The point is only to allow the enchantment engine to carry the student into these realms and domains without insisting on an eternal “final answer.”

This is why this kind of meta-intelligent self-education or re-education parts company with quests such as Stephen Hawking’s, to “know the mind of God” as mentioned in the last lines of his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time.

Enchantment gives you some pre-understanding which pulls you higher and you can relax the insistence on finality or absolute certainty which characterizes the whole trajectory from Descartes through Husserl, who died in 1938 (think of his book, Cartesian Meditations) through contemporary “scientism” such as exemplified by Hawking with his undoubted analytical genius.

Essay 5: How to Sneak Up on a Field With Types of Meta-Intelligence

If you look at a typical economics book and are coming at it with no particular background (e.g., your dad was an economist at the World Bank, say, so you’ve “swum” in this water via your background and dinner table conversations), you will find it “remote” and “foreign.”

What to do? You need to “sneak up” on a field and find a door into it or a window to climb through that brings you inside.

This foreignness and remoteness is true for any field you can think of since unfamiliar fields are disorienting at first. You need a pre-understanding.

Let’s do two simple examples of how one gets a pre-understanding:

During the foreclosure crisis following the Great Recession of 2008 and thereafter, you might have asked yourself about the size in dollars of US residential housing stock to see what it might mean if values declined. You found perhaps that it was surprising difficult to come up with some “ballpark” sense of US housing as you looked through Google and other entries.

Here’s a sample of a kind of made-up workaround that points you in the right direction:

Suppose we say the population of the USA is 320 million at the time, in round figures that are convenient and approximate only. Assume, for no reason, that all Americans are members of households of four (i.e., families with two parents and two children). This is of course utterly false but serves our “guesstimating” purpose we hope.

If we divide the total population by 4, we get 80 million families. Assume all families live in single-family homes ignoring apartment buildings, multi-family homes and a zillion other forms. Make up a number like 300 thousand dollars per home at the time, based on radio news, and you will get a national housing stock value of 80 million by 300 thousand which is 24 trillion dollars.

In fact, the official value of U.S. residential housing was usually given at 24-25 trillion so our “sneaking up” guesstimating was not bad at all.

Now ask how one might have perhaps done it better, more cleverly. You have to “back into” a field by something you yourself look into and figure out before you enter the “ocean” of the textbook presentation.

It requires a kind of “sneaking up” on a field with back-of-the-envelope “meta-intelligence” in order for you to attune yourself to the field, or if you want to “parachute” in like a “knowledge spy” and get what you need. This is true for all fields. Some “homemade” familiarity you make up yourself is needed.

How to “Sneak Up” on Academic Fields With Meta-Intelligence

An accepted workhorse of economics is the Cobb-Douglas production function based on two people with the names of Cobb and Douglas.

Your economy produces, say, shirts and to do that you need machines (capital), workers (labor), energy, materials.

Think of 100 women seamstresses at one hundred tables with sewing machines plugged into 100 electrical outlets (energy) and lots of fabric (raw materials for shirt-making).

Capital (e.g., machines, equipment, structures) is denoted by the letter K (from German word Kapital), workers or labor force by L (for labor) and the whole is called KLEM. (capital, labor, energy, materials). The letter A stands for “technology level.”

We simplify and worry only about K and L just to make the math much easier. Remember capital here means machines and not money.

In Cobb-Douglas “world,” the product of your economy, shirts is called Y (we don’t have the shirt prices to keep things easier).

Then Y=A multiplied by K (to the alpha) multiplied by L (to the beta). Alpha and beta are measures of responsiveness, “elasticity,” sensitivity.

Cobb-Douglas is multiplicative (i.e., A by K by L, so the algebra goes easier). A is called “technical change” or technology.

Suppose you don’t know or don’t remember log differentiation (calculus) to easily “play with” this little equation. That’s ok.

Think of the simple identity z=xy. This could be 10=5 x 2 or 12=4 x 3. You can show that if the left side goes up by 10%, the right must grow by 10 percent so that the 5, say, becomes 5.5. 5.5 x 2 is 11 so both sides are the same again, 11=11. It’s easy to show that the percentage growth on the left side of the equation is roughly the sum of the percentage growth of each of the numbers on the right.

You can easily show that the percentage growth of Y (say 6% per year) is approximately equal to the percentage change of A plus percentage growth of K+ plus that of L with K and L modified by alpha and beta.

This is a simplified version of so-called “Growth accounting” (i.e., components of growth in Y from year to year).

You will find that once you sense how this kind of “accounting” looks and works you can proceed to other kinds of accounting in economics such as Balance of Payments accounting or National Income accounting.

These exercises are key to economics as a field with its textbooks and again you have to sneak into it, so to speak, by climbing through a door or window you made up yourself to give you some bearings.

We call all this a pre-understanding before more usual understanding through textbooks.

Pre-understanding is a deep key or prerequisite to educational mastery.

On a National Public Radio call-in talk show few years ago, there was a discussion by four economists (professors plus private sector analysts). A listener calls in and asks one of them about the growth prospect for the following year. The professor responds: about 2.88 percent. Everybody goes quiet and wonder how he figures this out.

The answer will help you “sneak in” to or “parachute” into this world.

The professor, in his mind, calls the economy Y. He realizes that Y is the same as Y/L multiplied by L, where L is labor force. In Y/L by L the l’s cancel each other out so it’s just a harmless re-write of the basic variable Y.

Y/L is average productivity (e.g., number of shirts [the economy has one product, shirts]) divided by number of workers (laborers, seamstresses making the shirts).

If Y is one hundred and L=10, then the average laborer produced 100/10=10 shirts. ie that’s the average productivity.

The professor knows that approximately the percentage growth of Y (which is what the radio show caller’s question was about) is the sum of the percentage growth of Y/L and L.

He’s familiar with the latest productivity and labor force projections from the electronic newsletters he receives and the websites he checks out (e.g., BEA and the BLS, et al).

He adds them up to get 2.88 percent, the number he mentions to the questioner and the rest of the radio audience.

Once you’re familiar with these simple elements of analysis and sources of info, you can begin to lose your fearfulness and do the same as the professor, who is not solving complex differential equations in his head to answer the question for the listeners.

As a “field outsider,” you’re unfamiliar with the “landscape” and “rules of thumb” and your mind races or wanders when confronted by such a question because you don’t have these simple techniques.

You can thus “parachute” into any field and leave with what you need.

Essay 4: What Is Meta-Intelligence?

You have heard of meta-data and perhaps meta-analysis. In meta-analysis you don’t (say) study climate change directly, rather you study all the research and all the reports and papers on climate change trying to sense a grand overall conclusion and implication rather than simply making a synopsis or summary.

Meta-intelligence is in this spirit because it wants to get an overview of other overviews, a view of views.

Let’s do one example, namely, Paul Tillich (died in 1965), the famous German-American thinker.

He “walks around” human language and notices:

“Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

He also senses a missing dimension in all modern science: “Whenever man has looked at his world, he has found himself in it as a part of it. But he also has realized that he is a stranger in the world of objects, unable to penetrate it beyond a certain level of scientific analysis. And then he has become aware of the fact that he himself is the door to the deeper levels of reality, that in his own existence he has the only possible approach to existence itself.”

(Systematic Theology I, University of Chicago Press, 1951)

In other words, we design equations and experiments that suit our ways of seeing and thinking, our brains and nervous systems and we never really know if we are glimpsing eternal laws of nature or patterns that satisfy us given the way we are.

We can’t see what part of our scientific world-view is a construct as opposed to a pure discovery.

We never really know: are these problems? Difficulties? Puzzles?Mysteries?

Gabriel Marcel, the French thinker who taught at Harvard in the 1950s, teaches us that a puzzle is something we might successfully surround and solve while a mystery is something that surrounds us and cannot be solved like a puzzle, an issue, a query, a question.

Meta-intelligence is aware of these levels and layers and doesn’t fall into a Descartes-type “whirlpool of doubt” since it accepts the great historian Pieter Geyl’s (died in 1966) category of the existence of “arguments without end” (i.e., finality is always “shy”).

Essay 3: Why Descartes-Type Assumptions Might Confuse This Type of Holism Quest

René Descartes, who died in 1650, and whom you remember from high school Cartesian coordinates, points the way to the modern intellectual assumption that everything should be explained by means of the mathematical sciences which then eventually gives us the Steven Hawking sense of reality (i.e., science will yield final certitude and thus we’ll know “the mind of God.”)

Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time concludes explicitly with a rousing vision of science as the ultimate triumph of the rational mind eventually revealing “the mind of God.”

To get our bearings on this set of beliefs, go back to Descartes’ masterpiece from 1641/42, Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the world’s great books. “Meditation 2” of this book starts with:

“So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown as a result of yesterday’s meditation that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top. Nevertheless, I will make an effort and once more make an effort and once more attempt the same path which I started on yesterday.

Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false; and I will proceed in this way until I recognize something certain, or, if nothing else, until I at least recognize for certain that there is no certainty. Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakeable.

I will suppose then, that everything i see is spurious. I will believe that my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports ever happened.

I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain.”

The reader will sense a radical vision of infinite doubt looking for an “Archimedean point” of one certain item. The reader can easily see why mathematical constants such as the ubiquitous pi would be something to cling to since one assumes that 22/7 or pi will be the same forever. What else could it be, one thinks.

What we are doing in this book doesn’t look for any “Archimedean point” of final certainty at all. What we want to do is to introduce exercises in holism, giving a more wide-angle view of a field, course, topic, lecture, book, educational experience. We are not in Descartes-type “new certainty” business and don’t look for eternal truths or axioms.

In fact, let’s use Descartes own words here to “extract” some connectedness on the spot:

He says: “I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the doubt.”

Let’s call this a kind of “knowledge vertigo.” The reader might sense that there is a “family” of such dizziness. You think of Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. That some psychological panic attack which he tries to explain in the movie. Kim Novak, the female protagonist in the movie, has her own kind of dizziness and falls into the ocean. You can have dizziness from hunger, overtiredness, inner ear infection, salmonella, anxiety, etc. Kierkegaard (1813-1855) discusses a dizziness and vertigo of a person “lost in the world” like a sailor lost at sea with no direction.

In other words, one can use Descartes description of his own “certainty chasing” panic to build a taxonomy of dizzy feelings and get a more holistic sense of such phenomena without insisting on any “eye in the sky” perspective on everything based on a rebuilt version of certainty.

In other words, these Cartesian quests could block the reader from connecting things at a more intermediate or “meso” level, neither micro (too small) nor macro (too far away).

Essay 2: Connectivity and the Need for Meta Intelligence

Arguments without end and our attitude to them:

A reader of this book might ask:

How far does this quest for more holism go? Are there limits on this type of inquiry?

This is a very good question. In order to answer this, we quote something from the famous French historian, Michelet, who died in 1874:

“Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest….all science [i.e., knowledge] is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather all form a single system.”
(quoted in To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1940, page 8)

Our attitude to such radical system building is non-committal. Rather we say, you the student should pursue flexible forms of increased connection and holism while you acquire knowledge and extend it and not worry about some once-and-for-all system underneath or beyond everything. We propose exercises in holism and all exercises are replaceable with new ones or better ones and there’s no “final layer” or hidden “mind of God” to use Stephen Hawking language. The existence of some underlying or final system is something like an “argument without end” (to use Pieter Geyl language).

This argument is captured by the classic “fight” between Hegel (the person that Marx and Kierkegaard rebelled against and who died in 1831) and Adorno in the twentieth century.

Hegel says: The whole is the true. Adorno (who died in 1969) says: The whole is the false.

We skip all such fights.

Thinking about University Knowledge Again:

One cannot major in every field. One cannot make everything a university offers your specialty or concentration.

“Sartor Resartus:” The great British critic Thomas Carlyle (who died in 1881), close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a famous satire called “Sartor Resartus or The Tailor Retailored” where he lampoons a certain Professor Devil’s-crud who teaches at Don’t-Know-Where University and is Professor of Everything.

Obviously, we are not proposing the creation of professors-of-everything and propose nothing more than the heightened ability to “zoom out” of academic fields, topics, lectures, topics, campuses.

A person who has similar intuitions is Alfred North Whitehead of Harvard (died 1947) who says in his essays on education that the real purpose of university education is to enable the learner to generalize better using that person’s field as a help or aid. The purpose of a university cannot be fields and monographs within fields alone.