Broken Glasses, Art and True Reasoning
I was thinking about what art was and this broken glass came to represent it. What do you think?
For a long time now, maybe because my natural approach to understanding has normally been from a need not only to learn but to teach, I have approached reality thinking about the clarity of concepts and definitions. For a while, however, I have been asking myself if this is adequate given what reality seems to ask of me.
This has been a minute ‘breakthrough’ although it has nothing to do with my volition, I have not done anything purposefully to begin with. In fact, I feel I have been forced by life to look closely, to stop and really see, really listen.
What this has convinced me of is not that clarity and concepts well defined are useless or dangerous, and not that the twin siblings of these, namely, truth and logical reasoning, are not an adequate tool for navigating my way around the world. This is good! I have read a fair amount of thinkers now that have precisely chosen to get rid of this for the sake of ‘progress’. As I was listening today in a talk, one author had said that the elimination of truth was the ultimate act of charity. But what in the world is charity then? Can we know it? How can I commit to it? Without the truth of things it is impossible for us to know them and then we have no basis for committing ourselves to them. Commitment becomes the ultimate act of insanity — complete trust in the unknown, an unknown that is in principle unknowable. This seems for me impossible to do.
Now, here is the tricky bit then. If we are to remain sane and continue to think soberly, but also open to the ambiguity of life — because make no mistake, life presents itself to us as a continual realisation of fragility — there needs to be a way of looking at things that allows for the paradoxical, the contradictory, the unexpected.
True reasoning
As I pointed out at the beginning, my tendency is to clarify the concept first and then attempt to see what we can make of it, knowing neatly what it is that we are talking about. Teaching mathematics has allowed this methodological approach to happen. It works! But the more nuanced things get, the more problematic things become. Even the written proof of a given theorem tends to be already the configuration of an idea that came at once to us. It is as if we are only setting the pieces of the puzzle in the right place, hoping that they do in fact form a complete puzzle. Many times we are wrong, but many times — and this is what is curious — we are right. Why is it that very often we are able to put the pieces together? Sometimes it is clear that we lack some pieces, sometimes we put them in the wrong places, but this is, I think, to be expected. Learning is always like this. Now, whenever skill has been developed, it seems that somehow, without us knowing why, we tend to put the pieces in the right places and we tend to have the pieces needed for this. In other words, the process becomes more characterised by the tacit nature of events and less by explicit volitional deductive reasoning (Polanyi comes to mind here).
Noticing this can save ourselves of the decades of thinking about truth as merely the truth of propositions. This treats life as a list of propositions in a piece of paper and living would be finding the logical connectors that render the propositions intelligible. The reason why I am calling our attention to the tendency towards implicitness is because reasoning, or what I’m calling here ‘true reasoning’ would be something that is adequate to what the task demands of us. To put it differently, whatever reasoning is, it should be such ‘truth-seeking’ that it treats the realities it is dealing with according to the nature of these realities. A clear example of something where we face this more clearly is art.
Art invites us to true reasoning
My broken glass above is not very deep in its reality. My lovely wife Rachel dropped her phone (I think) and it hit the glass and the glass broke. I didn’t get rid of it though because I liked how the shape of the fragment inside the broken glass gave a new combination of shapes, a new light and new reflections and, I don’t know, something that I felt was not there when the glass was not broken.
The question came at once: if I take a photo of this from a certain angle, the picture shows me something that I like. How can this be? This question, which I’m not claiming to be a deep realisation (the existence of Instagram might be owed to the fact that we all are looking for an arty moment), does invite the idea of thinking as something that is shaped by what we are thinking about.
Art, in this light understood, invites us to think in a completely different way. Of course we could argue that this is true about everything. I think this is true! Like McGilchrist says, what we attend to shapes the way we attend to it and the way we attend to it shapes what we attend to. The first moment of ‘awareness’ is absolutely non-rational, we don’t think and then pay attention, something calls our attention and once we attend to it, this spiral of understanding begins.
Nevertheless, the aesthetic is I think, truly something different, because not everything is art. It became possible for me to think about the idea of the unbroken, original whole glass, and the fragment, together, I think, only because it became meaningful. Yes, it had to do with my own point of view, but that does not mean that the fragment and the whole were not there for me to see them like this. As Gadamer says, art is an increase of being.
The making of true reasoning
Art has shown us that we need to think adequately depending on the situation, depending on what is being shown and that doing this renders reality meaningful. Nice! But how can we know what kind of reasoning is adequate to what we are dealing with, if we do not know it clearly? This is where paying attention to our real-life experience gives us dividends. I think life presents itself to us already as something. Reality already shows itself to us with a certain meaning. We wake up and see the time, we are late! We seem to have already an orientation towards reality with our own purposes and things that we do because we are habituated to do them. We don’t wake up and have to wonder about what the meaning of waking up is, and then, the meaning of feeling hungry, and then thinking about whatever might fulfil this need of being hungry because it might be something that doesn’t exist, etc. Our existential crises cannot be as deep as they would like to be for if they are to be attended to by us at all first they need to exist! We face life with all our existence and it is in our existence that reality addresses us and we participate in it already without much awareness of most of it.
So, reality shows itself already as something, and the way I think true reasoning starts to happen is when we actually look! This is fundamentally impossible (I think) because it requires us to look at everything, and we don’t even know what that means. Therefore, our habituated self and the configuration of what is not us, combine themselves to narrow the endless possibilities to something that we can actually look and where we can actually be. In other words, what I’m trying to say here is that there is no way we can reason adequately if we haven’t looked, and we can’t look if we don’t recognise that most of this we cannot know explicitly but implicitly. We have to accept that things are presented to us like this and that this givenness of life is how reality is, and once we aim at responding — at entering into the conversation, I think the adequate ‘true reasoning’ becomes available. Once we recognise that life is asking us a question, we can begin to participate in the dialogue of living.
