Mystery Lessen

From Hans Jenny. The Soil Resource (1980, Reprinted 2012)

Rainwater falls randomly from the sky into a tree where the rain becomes organized into drip patterns defined by the shape of the leaves, branches, and bark of the tree until, dripping into the soil, the water becomes randomly organized once again. Wendell Berry, in a letter to Wes Jackson (reprinted in Home Economics, 3-5), critiques this description from a scientific book on soil by arguing that randomness is not “a verifiable condition,” but is “a limit of perception.” He asserts that “random” is a misleading word that assumes there is no possible pattern in what is observed; the more proper term is “mystery.” “Random” assumes that there is not possible pattern; “mystery” assumes we just can’t see it.

While Berry emphasizes practicality, he associates mystery with religion and there is danger in letting mystery come trailing that umbilical cord. The earliest uses are theological and often were associated with secret religious rites. The most common and comprehensive theological use of “mystery” today is probably based on this Oxford English Dictionary definition: “A religious truth known or understood only by divine revelation; esp. a doctrine of faith involving difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving.” Defined this way, “mystery” becomes as much of a dead end as “random,” shutting down further exploration with certainty. If we posit a god capable of creating unsolvable mysteries, in a sense the mysteries disappear into God, who embodies the solutions. Why do we die? God does not die. Why are there evil people? God is perfect and entirely good. Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? It will all work out because God is perfectly just. God resolves all mysteries, but if we take God out of the picture, what remains are the mysteries for which there are no facile answers.

The most expansive non-theological use of the term “mystery” is related to the OED definition, “A hidden or secret thing; something inexplicable or beyond human comprehension; a person or thing evoking awe or wonder but not well known or understood; an enigma.” Despite the use of the word “inexplicable” in the definition, a Google search on “solve a mystery” or “solve the mystery” yields 8.6 M hits, so that for many of us a mystery is something to be solved; it is open-ended, and in that sense calling something a mystery in the non-theological sense is a beginning.

The popular genre of the murder mystery turns on the axis of logical analysis. A satisfying ending generally involves explaining motivations and events with proof that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, though such stories also allow for the operation of “justice” outside the law. Such an extra-legal conclusion would be unsatisfying, would become a crime in need of solution.

I have argued earlier that not all conflicting dualities can be resolved and that perhaps our best understanding is to accept both and see the world in 3-D. Maybe the better way to describe our response should be to say we can’t ignore dualities. They suggest enigmas, mysteries, in need of deeper exploration, though I suspect that we will discover deeper mysteries that allow us to understand our state more clearly; it will likely be mysteries all the way down.

Science should be done surrounded by mystery. Religion and science could both use more respect for mystery. Perhaps if religions treated God as more mysterious and thought twice before claiming to know what God wants and to speak in God’s behalf, the world might be a more peaceful place.

Foundations

If we are condemned/blessed to see always double with our two, separated eyes, this biological fact may point to a philosophical assumption: we cannot know the one, unquestionable truth about anything. What we know should be built on a foundation of uncertainty, but that does not mean we can build in a shoddy manner.

Wright's Imperial Hotel in the 1930's (Wikipedia)

On September 1, 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright's new Imperial Hotel opened in Tokyo. That same day a 7.9 scale earthquake struck Tokyo causing widespread destruction. Wright received a telegram from Tokyo: "Hotel stands undamaged as a monument of your genius hundreds of homeless provided by perfectly maintained service congratulations[.] Congratulations[.]" The building was designed to sit on alluvial mud so it was not anchored to the heaving and twisting earth but built to ride on that uncertain foundation.

The story of the hotel’s response to the earthquake, an episode in the legend of Frank Lloyd Wright, has a heroic ring to it, and we depend on such heroes who stand as shining mountains among the lowly hills and valleys to give us a sense of security about our value as a species.

A photo taken shortly after the 1923 earthquake. The hotel is 

on the left, and a burning bank is on the right. (Wikipedia)

However, not all accounts of the events are so unambiguous. Robert Reitherman, speaking at a world conference on earthquake engineering in 1980, concluded that while Wright’s Imperial Hotel was an impressive building, the success of its response to the 1923 earthquake has been overstated. The building did suffer some damage, while other large buildings in areas as or more severely affected by the earthquake suffered less or no damage. The “floating” foundation was probably of dubious value in the earthquake, and in 1968, when the building was torn down, it had been and was continuing to sink into the mud. What did help, however, were the separation joints between sections of the building, which allowed the building to flex with the undulations of the earth. The story of its unique and exceptional success persists, however, because we love such stories.

The best heroes, of course are fictional, with no existence outside their heroic stories, because no troublesome facts will emerge later like impurities in metal to pollute and weaken the hero’s stature. We climb into the willing suspension of disbelief, and we are swept along with those heroes on their great adventures. We feel as if the events happened, and when they conclude, the afterglow of triumph persists in the memory. No reality will undercut the heroics, because supported by our experiencing of them, they need no reality to support them.

Sometimes, some of us who hear the stories, want them to be real so badly, want so much to recreate that feeling of triumph in the real world, that we create organizations and gather with other Trekkies or Jedi Knights. Even though the believers know the stories did not actually happen, for them the stories embody truths that can be applied to real life, when the Force is with them. The worlds created by such untrue, true stories and floating on foundations of belief will remain intact only if they flex with the pushback from the forces outside their enclaves, for if they remain rigid those beliefs will collapse into a formless and fiery heap.

But even the most reasonable conclusions of the most reasonable of us float on a thin layer we construct atop reality. When we think our knowledge is firmly anchored in the material world, we must remember that earthquakes shake the ground, and some separation joints, allowing flexibility in our thinking, might help our ideas survive.

Science and Arts

At one point, I thought I had figured out the crucial difference between science and the arts: Science could speak with authority only about things in general; it could not say anything about a specific individual. Science draws conclusions about the species acer saccharum; the artist writes about what a specific sugar maple outside the window means to her as a window into the connection between humans and trees.

Sugar Maple planted 

in front of our house 

in Wellsboro, PA

One problem with my tidy conclusion grew out of my work with biologists in our university’s environmental studies program. When I looked at specific trees with them, they saw so much more than I did so they could spot variations that I missed. They seemed better equipped to appreciate individuals than I was.

My brother Tim is a research scientist and a medical doctor who is senior associate dean for clinical and translational research at the University at Buffalo Medical School. So I thought he might have some insight into this paradox; so one day as we were sitting on the patio during a visit to our younger sister, I summarized my theory:

Me: Science can speak only in generalities. Since scientific conclusion must be replicable, it can draw a conclusion about a species but not about one particular tree.

Tim: Actually, your statement ignores the importance of the particular in science because the foundation of science is statements about particular events, each one maintaining its individual characteristics. I run a series of experiments and then look at the outcomes of each instance, and the initial conclusion I draw is that in n% of t cases, when we did x, we obtained a result y in the range between a and b, or whatever. We make a restricted statement about what we observe in the sample we analyzed. Any subsequent generalization we draw is valid only in so far as it connects with what happened in the particular instances in the experiment we performed. If a generalization is insufficiently connected to those original specific incidents, then it is not scientifically valid.

Based on what Tim said—that scientists depend on their ability to observe and distinguish particular individuals to draw their conclusions—I concluded that I needed to revise my neat distinction. And the more I thought about his point, the more I began to question, for example, the role of the specific in literature. After all, Emily Dickinson sits in her room and writes,

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—



Dickinson packs into four brief lines the insight that a person standing under the sky (contained by it) can also contain the sky in her mind so that each one contains the other. In addition, both the mind can contain “You,” which could mean the reader, who is in the poet’s mind as she writes, or it could be the universal “you,” so that not only does a person’s mind contain the sky that contains it, but the brain also contains the person who contains it. Folding these ideas in on themselves should unbalance us a bit and force us to look with fresh eyes at our place in the world.

Dickinson exploits both her insight into experience and the elasticity of language to point to a universal experience. She draws a conclusion based on an insight; when that conclusion is (finally) published, we get to see whether it resonates with others so that, as in science, the particular is the foundation for the general. The experiment in this case is the work of literature, and where v is value, p is the number of people who read it, and t is the time over which people continue to read it, we decide whether something is a great piece of literature based on v = pt. If the poem contains an effective combination of particular and general experience, then the value is high.

For a while I had a shiny new theory about the difference between science and art, not one based on general vs. particular, but one based on unambiguous vs. ambiguous or single statements vs. double statements of truth. The goal of science is a statement so restricted in its meaning and scope that there is no difference in understanding between speaker and listener, or that difference approaches zero. Thus, scientists can communicate (ideally) without ambiguity,

In previous posts I have argued for the complexity and ambiguity inherent in questions, in metaphors, in creative non-fiction, in art, in humor, and in the concept of truth, and have asserted that the ability of artistic and humanistic expression to embody and help us understand the ambiguity inherent in our worlds is its great strength. So, here is another tidy distinction.

Schrodinger’s Cat By Dhatfield  

[CC BY-SA 3.0 viaWikimedia Commons]

But then, of course, there is quantum mechanics, with its wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Erwin Schrödinger, by creating a thought experiment—a metaphor of sorts—tried to point out the absurdity of positing that the quantum state of an electron should be measured using probability. In his experiment, a cat in a sealed box has an equal probability of being alive or dead. Using probability, quantum theory would assert that the cat was partly alive and partly dead, a patently ridiculous idea. Unfortunately for Schrödinger, his opponents embraced his experiment as an explanation, stating that opening the box and observing the state of the cat collapses the superimposed states and resolves the conflict. Unobserved, however, the cat is both alive and dead, just as an electron can be in more than one state.

I do not pretend to understand what is going on with quantum theory yet, but out at the edge, where theoretical physics is operating, we are dealing with ideas where opposites must be held in tension, the kinds of ideas that have long been formulated in the language of art and literature. I don’t know what we will discover when we are finally able to open the quantum mechanics box and look inside, but right now the unopened box seems to be half art and half science.

So ultimately, science and art both contain ambiguities and set side by side are contained in a larger ambiguity, which also includes all of us.

One Can’t Handle the Truth.

“It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear.”

—H. D. Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (267).

I came across this passage in doing the research for another blog post. When I first noted it, the sentence struck me because it suggested that truth is collaborative: it has two participants who must coordinate their understandings. The expression captured another complexity in how we know the world. However, the statement now suggests something deeper.

Speaking	Hearing
Person A	Person B
Person A in the present	Person A in the past
Person A in the past	Person A in the present

Variations on "two to speak the truth"

Collaboration may be a potential attribute of truth, but it may not be an essential one. It may take “two to speak the truth,” but that does not mean it takes two different people; it can also be two versions of the same person. The gap between my original understanding of Thoreau’s statement and my subsequent understanding illustrate one aspect of how I can function like two people. We can also tell the truth to ourselves, perhaps after deluding ourselves for a while. On the other hand, we write things down, time passes, and we change, so the new person we become can learn the truth from the old person we were.

In the present or the past, we can tell the truth to ourselves, and though the gap between speaker and hearer in this case may be small, the two are not identical.

In addition to the speaker/hearer duality in “truth” is the statement/reality duality. In the Oxford English Dictionary one high-level definition for the word “truth” is “Something that conforms with fact or reality.” That definition means that the “Something” is not fact or reality; it bears a relationship but is not identical.

What fits between the arrows, we may accept, but beyond that 

right arrow we might decide the gap is too large.

Because the statement is always a translation of the case, there is always a gap between the case and the statement, even when we are doing no more than quoting someone (orally, the tone and timbre will not be identical and in print the context will differ). We accept some slippage in the case-statement relationship; we allow for adjustments, but sometimes the statement moves too far from the case and the statement is no longer a truth, even if the speaker believes it is true. No matter how close, however, necessarily a gap opens up between the case and the statement of it.

This doubleness of the truth is no basis for dismissing “truth” as an illusion or as relative, nor does it mean there are two truths involved when “two speak the truth.” The separation of the human eyes means that each eye sees something different; Nick Sousanis in Unflattening [page 4] suggests we can observe this effect by closing alternating eyes as we look at a finger held up against a background. The two separate images converge into a single image to give us our depth perception. The constituent elements of truth act in the same way; though those elements are a unity, they do not collapse into a single entity, but remain in tension, and it is in the tension among the speaker and the hearer and the case and the statement that the truth lies and does not lie. In both senses.