The toughest state for a human being to maintain is that of open-endedness. We might know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we might know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and but in our eager for certainty we preserve propping ourselves up from the basic wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few issues are extra seductive to us than a prepared opinion, and we brandish few issues extra flagrantly as we transfer via the world, slicing via its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes. The difficulty with opinion is that it immediately islands us within the stream of life, chopping off its topic — and us together with it — from the interconnected totality of deep fact.
A mighty antidote to that very human and really life-limiting impulse comes from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) by John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968).
In 1940, as humanity’s most ferocious conflict was rupturing the world, Steinbeck and his marine biologist good friend Ed Ricketts decamped to the nonhuman world and its elemental consolations of interdependence, embarking on an exploratory expedition within the Sea of Cortez, also referred to as the Gulf of California — “a protracted, slender, extremely harmful physique of water… topic to sudden and harsh storms of nice depth.”
Wading via the tide swimming pools, his fingers callused from accumulating specimens, his toes stung by toxic worms and spiked by urchins, his thoughts invigorated by the ravishing interconnectedness of life, the 38-year-old author discovered himself considering the deepest strata of actuality and its intercourse with the human creativeness. What emerges is a meditation on the character of information — a sort of prose counterpart to Elizabeth Bishop’s deep-seeing poem “At the Fishhouses” — disguised as an expedition journal: a wanderer’s delight within the adjoining pleasure gardens of science and philosophy of thoughts, composed 20 years earlier than Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for his fiction. Regardless of his magnificent novels, regardless of his large-souled letters, I contemplate this his slender guide of nonfiction his best work.
At its coronary heart is Steinbeck’s passionate refutation of the Western compulsion for teleological considering — the tendency to elucidate issues by way of the aim they serve, antithetical each to science and to the Jap notion of being: the concept that every part simply is and fragment of it, anybody factor examined by itself, is just because it’s. Science — the supreme artwork of remark with out interpretation, of assembly actuality by itself acausal and neutral phrases, free from the tyranny of why and its tendrils of blame — places us a leap nearer to understanding each particulate and sample via non-teleological considering — which, as Steinbeck astutely observes, is an insufficient time period to start with, for it asks of us greater than considering in how we parse any type of data:
The strategy extends past considering even to residing itself; in reality, by inferred definition it transcends the realm of considering potentialities, it postulates “residing into.”
[…]
The best fallacy in, or slightly the best objection to, teleological considering is in reference to the emotional content material, the idea. Individuals get to believing and even to professing the obvious solutions thus arrived at, struggling psychological constrictions by emotionally closing their minds to any of the additional and presumably reverse “solutions” which could in any other case be unearthed by trustworthy effort — solutions which, if confronted realistically, would give rise to a wrestle and to a potential rebirth which could place the entire downside in a brand new and extra important gentle.
Such rebirth of perspective permits us to maneuver past questions of trigger in considering and blame in feeling, that are associated reflexes of the teleological mindset. The second we regard one thing merely as it’s, as a result of it’s, we have now understood it extra absolutely, for we have now shed the narratives layer of why:
The non-teleological image… goes past blame or trigger. And the non-causal or non-blaming viewpoint… arises emergently from the union of two opposing viewpoints, resembling these of bodily and non secular teleologies, particularly if there’s battle as to causation between the 2 or inside both. The brand new viewpoint very regularly sheds gentle over a bigger image, offering a key which can unlock ranges not accessible to both of the teleological viewpoints. There are fascinating parallels right here: to the triangle, to the Christian concepts of trinity, to Hegel’s dialectic, and to Swedenborg’s metaphysic of divine love (feeling) and divine knowledge (considering).
The elements we have now been contemplating as “solutions” appear to be merely symbols or indices, relational elements of issues — of which they’re integral elements — to not be thought-about by way of causes and results. The truest cause for something’s being so is that it is. That is really and really a cause, extra legitimate and clearer than all the opposite separate causes, or than any group of them wanting the entire. Something lower than the entire kinds a part of the image solely, and the infinite complete is unknowable besides by being it, by residing into it.
A factor could also be so “as a result of” of a thousand and one causes of larger or lesser significance… The separate causes, regardless of how legitimate, are solely fragmentary elements of the image. And the entire essentially consists of all that it impinges on as object and topic, in ripples fading with distance or relying upon the unique depth of the vortex.
In a passage of beautiful mental magnificence and emotional fact, Steinbeck considers the continuum that’s the essence of actuality — the continuum we artificially sever into fragments with our teleological explanations and causally compulsive opinions:
Nobody factor ever merges step by step into anything; the steps are discontinuous, however typically so very minute as to appear really steady. If the investigation is carried deep sufficient, the think about query, as an alternative of being graphable as a steady course of, shall be seen to operate by discrete quanta with gaps or synapses between, as do quanta of power, undulations of sunshine. The apparently definitive reply happens when causes and results each come up on the identical massive plateau which is bounded a good way off by the steep rise which proclaims the following plateau. If the investigation is prolonged sufficiently, that distant rise will, nevertheless, inevitably be encountered; the reply which previously appeared definitive now shall be seen to be a minimum of barely insufficient and the image should be enlarged in order to incorporate the plateau subsequent additional out. Every thing impinges on every part else, typically into radically completely different programs, though in such instances faintly. We doubt very a lot if there are any really “closed programs.”
Okay. Sufficient abstraction. Allow us to land this into the loveliness of the concrete:
The ocean, close to waves of water, is likely to be thought-about as a closed system. However anybody who has lived in Pacific Grove or Carmel in the course of the winter storms may have felt the home tremble on the impression of waves half a mile or extra away impinging on a very completely different “closed” system.
This interconnectedness, this indivisibility, is the uncooked antidote to teleological considering — one thing Steinbeck illustrates with a residing surprise noticed from the deck of his expedition vessel:
Seeing a college of fish mendacity quietly in nonetheless water, all of the heads pointing in a single course, one says, “It’s uncommon that that is so” — but it surely isn’t uncommon in any respect. We start on the unsuitable finish. They merely lie that method, and it’s outstanding solely as a result of with our blunt device we can not carve out a human cause. Every thing is probably all over the place — the physique is probably cancerous, phthisic, robust to withstand or weak to obtain. In a single swing of the steadiness the ready life pounces in and takes possession and grows robust whereas our personal particular person chemistry is distorted previous the purpose the place it might keep its steadiness. This we name dying, and by the method we don’t give nor provide however are taken by a multiform life and used for its proliferation. This stuff are balanced. A person is probably all issues too, grasping and merciless, able to nice love or nice hatred, of balanced or unbalanced so-called feelings. That is the way in which he’s — one think about a surge of striving. And he continues to ask “why” with out first admitting to himself his cosmic id.
Leaning as soon as once more on a residing metaphor from the world of marine biology, he illustrates how our multitudes compose our totality in one thing past pure equivalence:
There are colonies of pelagic tunicates [Pyrosoma giganteum] which have taken a form just like the finger of a glove. Every member of the colony is a person animal, however the colony is one other particular person animal, by no means just like the sum of its people. Among the colonists, girdling the open finish, have developed the power, one towards the opposite, of constructing a pulsing motion very like muscular motion. Others of the colonists gather the meals and distribute it, and the skin of the glove is hardened and guarded towards contact. Listed below are two animals, and but the identical factor—one thing the early Church would have been pressured to name a thriller. When the early Church referred to as some matter “a thriller” it accepted that factor absolutely and deeply as so, however merely not accessible to cause as a result of cause had no enterprise with it. So a person of individualistic cause, if he should ask, “Which is the animal, the colony or the person?”’ should abandon his explicit sort of cause and say, “Why, it’s two animals they usually aren’t alike any greater than the cells of my physique are like me. I’m way more than the sum of my cells and, for all I do know, they’re much greater than the division of me.” There isn’t a quietism in such acceptance, however slightly the premise for a far deeper understanding of us and our world. And now that is prepared for the taboo-box.
Composing a type of trendy Aesopian fable of our defective sensemaking, he provides:
It isn’t sufficient to say that we can not know or choose as a result of all the knowledge shouldn’t be in. The method of gathering data doesn’t result in understanding. A toddler’s world spreads solely a bit past his understanding whereas that of a fantastic scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. A solution is invariably the mum or dad of a fantastic household of recent questions. So we draw worlds and match them like tracings towards the world about us, and crumple them when they don’t match and draw new ones. The tree-frog within the excessive pool within the mountain cleft, had he been endowed with human cause, on discovering a cigarette butt within the water might need mentioned, “Right here is an impossibility. There isn’t a tobacco hereabouts nor any paper. Right here is proof of fireside and there was no fireplace. This factor can not fly nor crawl nor blow within the wind. In actual fact, this factor can’t be and I’ll deny it, for if I admit that this factor is right here the entire world of frogs is at risk, and from there it’s only one step to anti-frogicentricism.” And in order that frog will for the remainder of his life attempt to neglect that one thing that’s, is.
There may be, Steinbeck cautions, nothing mystical about this recognition of an underlying patter — it’s the place all science in the end factors and the place all data, as soon as free of the clutch of causality, leads. Echoing the nice naturalist John Muir’s remark that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” he provides:
The entire is essentially every part, the entire world of truth and fancy, physique and psyche, bodily truth and non secular fact, particular person and collective, life and loss of life, macrocosm and microcosm (the best quanta right here, the best synapse between these two), acutely aware and unconscious, topic and object. The entire image is portrayed by is, the deepest phrase of deep final actuality, not shallow or partial as causes are, however deeper and collaborating… And all this towards the new seaside on an Easter Sunday, with the passing day and the passing time. This little journey of ours was turning into a factor and a twin factor, with accumulating and consuming and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating exercise. High quality of daylight, blueness and smoothness of water, boat engines, and ourselves had been all elements of a bigger complete and we might start to really feel its nature however not its dimension.
No excerpt or annotation can do justice to the indivisible surprise that’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Complement these fragments from it with Hannah Arendt on the life of the mind, Thoreau on how to see reality unblinded by our preconceptions, and Ursula Ok. Le Guin on apprehending reality through the dual lens of poetry and science, then revisit Steinbeck love and the key to good writing.
