Admittedly some lower-level laws may correspond directly with the deliverances of daily life. F = ma fits with the experience that the harder and longer you push something the faster it goes – as Quine noted in his reference, in the passage quoted earlier, to “a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill”. And one aspect of the law of gravity is captured in the observation that the longer something falls, the faster it falls. But there is much that does not fit with this: the fact that a feather typically falls more slowly than a pebble concealed the nature of the gravitational force for thousands of years. And the truth that “down” is not an absolute direction or that there is no fundamental difference between moving at a constant speed in a straight line and being at rest is equally repugnant to common sense. It took the genius of individuals like Galileo and Newton to wake us out of the folk mechanics of daily life and intuit principles that hold sway in places where common sense does not care to tread; for example, the distant galaxies or the microscopic spaces between atoms.
We accept as explanations laws that are either remote from common-sense experience, or reach beyond the scope of common sense; that involve constants identifying proportionalities – numbers without qualitative content or other sources of meaning; and – something that I have not mentioned hitherto – involve entities (atoms, subatomic particles), stuffs (phlogiston, fields), forces (intra-nuclear) and energies (ultraviolet light) that are not part of everyday sense-making and are remote from sense experience. In short, we are willing to take as an explanation – or accept as explanation – something that does not offer the usual satisfactions of either a solved puzzle (What is that noise? Why did that happen?) or conform to the visible habits of a world that seems to be behaving as usual and so not requiring explanation.
Unlike the anthropomorphic explanations mobilized in magic thinking and religious discourse, the appeal to laws of nature ultimately lacks the usual satisfactions of answers to “Why?”. Prior to science, religion, too, had addressed questions about things that could seem to be taken for granted – the usual order of things such as the sun rising in the morning – but the answers still belonged to a transcendental projection of common sense, invoking an agency that was projected from human agency. In the case of the Abrahamic religions, that agent was sufficiently close to human beings to share the latter’s emotions and even some of their historical preoccupations. The natural world of scientific explanations, rooted in measurement drained of meaning and phenomenal quality, is mindless, equally remote from human free will and divine plan. Its material causes are insentient agents of change; mere happenings that made other happenings happen. Its laws are not decrees, its forces are not the expression of a will. Law-governed nature is the unmandated tendency of what-is to repeat itself, an empty necessity exercising power without consciousness.
It is time to summarize – or at least to bundle together – the gleanings from this tour through aspects of human sense-making. We have seen how the idea of sense-making and intelligibility is distributed through a tangle of loosely associated mental states, casual observations, individual challenges, and deliberate inquiries. Its aspects include recognizing familiar objects and patterns of behaviour of the material world (including that of our fellows), summarizing them in descriptions, noting order, identifying causes and seeing physical and narrative connections. There are many layers of sense-making: realizing that such-and-such is the case; sorting out something that is puzzling; seeing a pattern in events (either through casual noticing or formal observation) that makes a kind of sense out of fulfilled expectation; and then, via formal experimentation and measurement, advancing to laws that go beyond what is available to the senses, encompassing galaxies beyond our own, the interstices of living cells, and energies imperceptible to senses. There is no well-defined ladder leading from a ground floor composed of sense-experiences continuous with those shared with, for example, our nearest primate kin to higher reaches of natural science. There is much to-ing and fro-ing between levels at which we individually and collectively “suss out” what is going on around us. This makes it more, not less, of a miracle that we have the capacity to speak of things that are billions of times larger than our mouths, to think of and be right about spaces that are orders of magnitude larger than any that could be visited or occupied by any of us. For this has its origin in our willingness to seek explanation outside of our usual sources of sense-making: to make a kind of sense that lacks the taste of everyday understanding, and consequently has little intuitive appeal.
We have implicitly indicated ways in which human sense-making is different from that even of our nearest primate kin. The parting of the cognitive ways between ourselves and the non-human animals begins at a basic level. The difference between the hunting animal and human epistemic foraging, on a quest driven by an idea, is profound. As we have noted, our cognitive reach owes much to our tolerance of delay in sense-making, separating answers from the situations that provoke question, and a willingness to provoke and address puzzlement that does not deliver immediate benefits. These virtues are connected with the uniquely human sense of that which is “out there”, that which is utterly other than myself. The hidden is sensed as an explicit possibility and as such is necessarily general. This may be rooted in our unique status as embodied subjects (as opposed to mere sentient organisms) that confer on the objects that surround us the status of items that are not consumed by our experience of them.
The extraordinary cognitive ascent of humanity from a sensory field to a Weltbild, from sensing immediate surroundings to mapping the world, and ultimately to locating all spaces and times in relationship to one another, is also in part a consequence of our capacity to share our consciousness in a community of minds. The sharing goes beyond explicit teaching to the absorption of assumptions, categories, and ways of speaking and thinking, of modes of proposing, conjecturing, imagining, and supposing, as well as common practices drawing on shared facilities located in a multiplicity of common spaces. As Thomas Suddendorf has put it: “Although our individual understanding is often flawed and our foresight misguided, by linking our minds to those of others we have enormously increased our predictive capacities and powers of control. With theory of mind and language we are able to wire our scenario-building into much larger networks.”15
Working within that community we have been willing and able:
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to see what is normal as an appropriate subject for inquiry: to be as astonished at the fact that the sun rises as at the eclipse that hides it;
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to cultivate uncertainty and surprise, to welcome interruptions in sense, to problematize the world in a manner that goes beyond worrying about answers to local questions – “What is that noise?”, “Is that safe to eat?”, “What will happen if I do this?”, “What do those footprints mean?”;
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to wake out of background assumptions that define what demands explanation and what counts as a satisfactory, or at least adequate, explanation;
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to accept answers that offer very little intuitive or emotional sustenance – no gods, no minds – following the possibility of generalization beyond the point where thoughts lose contact with the visible, the audible, or the ordinarily meaningful;
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to de-localize the sources of sense, or at least of explanation;
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to await patiently the rewards of sense-making – to live with unanswered questions, and with answers whose hour of use that may never come;
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to work with hidden entities, forces, energies, that act as intermediaries connecting the widest collection of possible states of affairs and processes;
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to acknowledge the boundaries of our sense-making not only by trying to extend our knowledge and understanding but also by mocking the sense we make of things, by humour, and by cultivating nonsense: man is uniquely the (deliberate) nonsense-making animal.
Th
us, aspects of the sense-making animal.
It is evident that the “comprehensibility” of the world that Einstein spoke of with justifiable awe is the uppermost storey of the many-layered intelligibility we have collectively achieved, often driven by ever more abstract and egregious modes of surprise, of a sense of gaps in sense. Such active sense-making is always at risk of being interrupted by the passive, or at least involuntary, sense-making instanced in the response to pain, the unexpected, and the various pressures of biological and social life, and our propensity to distraction.
A point of overall convergence of sense-making eludes us. There is the episodic, localized sense-making expressed in working out what something is and there is the unrolling fabric of practical sense-making that corresponds to being in a room, negotiating a journey, coping with a stressful day. There are stories of sense-making – of acquiring knowledge and understanding, of becoming accustomed – that may unfold into explicit narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends, in which the completion of a local sense is suspended. Here or hereabouts we find the various ways in which we make sense of ourselves – our relationships, adventures and misadventures, careers, our sense of what is owing to us, duties, and destinies in the light of the kinds of creatures we are.
There is, in short, much that fills the gap between homely and grand sense-making, between working out that a heap on the floor is a pullover to developing theories about the origin and destination of the universe and any deity that may or may not have created and steers it. Between making sense of spaces – defined by buttons, doors, fences, horizons, and national boundaries with their physical, social, legal elaborations – and making sense of space as a physical category. Between on the one hand watching the time in our hurries and boredoms and anxieties, and wondering what time it is as we wait and anticipate and speculate, and on the other measuring the time of events, uncovering the clock of the universe, and making sense of time itself with and without eternity. Additionally, in the interstices of the cool hermeneutics of trying to understand the world, eluding the grasp of the purely propositional world of concepts and facts, is the intense sense-making corresponding to emotional states, those physiological storms that talk to themselves, uttering themselves into and out of existence, opening up possible worlds lit by fear, longing, excitement, joy, love, and (folded over and over) embarrassment or angry entitlement.
Thus the humus out of which the grand sense-making of theology, the arts, philosophy and, most recently, natural science arises. It now seems appropriate to take a backward glance at earlier attempts to make sense of the fact that man is the supreme sense-making animal.
CHAPTER 2
Logos: a brief backward glance
The irreducible knottiness of the present investigation will be apparent from its most succinct characterization: to make sense of the fact that we make sense of the world; or to make better sense of the fact that we progress (or seem to progress) towards better sense of the world. Thus characterized, it wears on its sleeve the impossibility it has in common with many philosophical inquiries. Trying to understand time notwithstanding that we are temporal beings, endeavouring to characterize the stuff of the universe of which we ourselves are a part, or consciously striving to get an outside view of consciousness – these seem equally self-undermining projects.
The present engagement with the enigma of the sense-making animal is a late entry into a very long conversation that has engaged innumerable thinkers approaching the matter from a variety of starting points. It may therefore be helpful to glance back at some ways in which the intelligibility of the world has been viewed. It is salutary to be aware of the struggles of those who have gone before us.
What follows is not a scholarly inquiry. I am not sufficiently deluded to imagine that I can do justice to such a vast and complex aspect of our cognitive past; even less deepen our understanding of it. It has the more modest aim of placing in a wider context the present attempt to get to grips with the fact that our minds seem to make more sense of more of the universe than one might reasonably expect. The mysterious, even miraculous, relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the seemingly intelligible order of the world is one that has exercised some of the most luminous minds. While the focus in this book will be secular, some of the most influential and profound responses to the mystery of intelligibility have involved a third party – God – mediating between mind and world and He will dominate in the present chapter.
Logos lies at the heart of the attempt to understand human understanding. The word (term, concept, idea) has waymarked a long journey of self-reflection weaving between religious and secular attempts to understand our understanding. The story visited in this chapter will end with the extraordinary climax of Christianity. Indeed, it is difficult for one such as myself brought up in the vicinity of the Christian faith not to begin with the most famous – and fateful – topos: The Gospel According to St John, Chapter 1 Verse 1: “In the beginning was the Logos [The Word]”.
For many theologians, Christianity is the religion of the Logos. The concept, however, goes far beyond even the wide realm of the Christian faith that has infused 2,000 years of human history with hope, joy, kindness, bloodshed, terror, and domestic and political oppression. St John’s assertion was not the debut of Logos. Even less was this the first report on human consciousness encountering its own awe-inspiring mystery, when the inner light of understanding tried to illuminate itself with words and reach for its own source. While the Christian Logos was the beginning of a long journey, it was also a climactic moment in an even longer one. Before we trace some of that journey, a little etymology is in order.
There are many translations of Logos. This much, however, is clear: it is derived from the Greek word “lego” meaning “I say” – hence the cognate sense: “word”, “speech”, “discourse”. More narrowly, it can be translated into “plea” or “opinion”; or it can open into “ground”, “account”, “description”, “hypothesis” or “theory”. Somewhere in the middle of all these senses is to be found reference to psychological states such as “expectation” and the inward intentions underlying a speech act. Most significantly, it can mean “reason” underpinned by logic, which, as we shall see, can be located either in the reasoning mind or in the world that is reasoned about. The register of its tentacular meanings would include ratio, proportion, principle, standard; reasoning power; hypothesis, grounds for belief or action. Logos is also the common root of all those organized, rational investigations into the world suffixed by “logy” that make up the natural and human sciences, the disciplines that aim to advance our understanding of the world in which we find ourselves and the selves we find ourselves to be. Hereabouts we find the deep connection with another root meaning of “legein”: to gather together, to arrange, and to put in order. The Proto-Indo-European root is leg which means “to collect” as well as “to speak”. There could be no more ambitious act of collection than that which results in a world picture.
If Logos seems to duck and weave between meanings, this is hardly surprising, given that (as we shall see) there is so much prior understanding involved in making sense of how we understand the world, given also that there is no stable distance between that which is being interrogated, the process of interrogation, and the interrogator. Where distances are established, they often come from extraneous sources: most notably, as in the religious use of Logos, the longings and needs of humanity and the power relations between human beings. In sum, Logos is a word, or a concept, yes; but it is more than a word or a concept. It is a semantic field of nodes here and there specified in particular translations. It speaks of a variety of responses to the astonished encounter of human understanding with itself.
And corresponding to this also, there are many characters in the story of, or the story told of, Logos. They include: The Universe (as the Great Other in which we find ourselves); God the guarantor of the intelligible order of things; the Community of Minds or
human Reason; and those prophets, priests, thinkers, scholars, whose words interpret Logos for us. What follows is an elementary historiography of ideas and world-pictures.1 As an account of this crucial aspect of the encounter of humanity with its own astonishing cognitive capacity, it is ludicrously inadequate. It will, I hope, be sufficient for the humbler purpose of making the topic of this book more visible.
It is uncertain when Logos or a concept equivalent to it was first articulated. Historians go back to the Pyramid Texts of Heliopolis, nearly 2,500 years before St John’s fateful declaration, and the myth of the god Atum, the self-created first of the gods.2 Logos makes its initial, comparatively unencumbered, appearance in the writings of early Greek philosophers, although the use they made of it was remote from the Egyptian world picture: it was less God-centred.3 The Presocratics (sixth and fifth century bce), those “tyrants of the spirit” as Nietzsche called them, “who wanted to reach the core of all being with one leap”,4 employed it partly to congratulate themselves on their own reason-based approach to questions about the nature of the cosmos.
In Presocratic philosophy, Logos is particularly associated with Heraclitus.5 He identified the philosopher as one who activated the reason within his own mind to gain access to the reason that was inherent in, expressed by, and shaped, the unfolding world. Logos justified the philosophers’ trust in their own arguments and explanations: it was that in virtue of which human rationality was reflected or expressed in discourse. There was Logos-in-the-world and Logos-in-the-mind. The latter, wisdom, was “one thing … to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things”.6 As for the former, Heraclitus developed – in flashes of mental lightning – the idea that it was both the rational structure of the world – the law-governed process of change – and the source of that structure; the principle that governs everything that is or happens and the immanent reason or plan that accounts for the orderly unfolding of things. It was the hidden harmony behind the discords and antagonisms of existence, regulating the eternal war between the elements that kept Being in motion, leaving nothing immune from change.7
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