Category Archives: language

Cognitive arrogance

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I discourse frequently about cognition and its limitations.  This is no accident as it is very relevant to me personally.  So much of my life has been limited by various cognitive grasps of reality which only later do I discover to have been very confining and….ahem….very narcissistic.  The key is, not to attempt to discard cognition….as if that were possible in the first place…but to recognize that there is a world out there beyond our cognitive grasp of the world and that in embracing that “world out there” we become a little bit more humble and tolerant of those who look at things differently.

Here are a couple of quotes I’ve ran across recently on the subject:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. — William James

I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic. — Lisa Alther

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape — not from our own time, for we are bound by that — but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. — T. S. Eliot, Unknown 

And this last one I came across 30+ years ago but just cannot remember the author.  He said, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  To summarize, he was saying, “We think just what we want to think.”

Richard Rohr on ideologogy

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Following up on yesterday’s post, and on a recent post on ideology, I offer you the daily-posting of Richard Rohr:

We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction, and of the mind in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself.

Addiction to our mind is subtle but its reach is incredible.  We then find ourselves failing to adhere to the wisdom of Buddha, who said, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The “word” is not the “thing.”  Words are but pointers.  We don’t own “the Truth”.  But, this does not leaving me doubting the presence of Truth in this void, doubting only grasp of it.  Or, as said yesterday and so frequently, “We see though a glass darkly” or “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

Ideology run amok

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A mind run amok is dangerous.  If life is reduced to reason, life is impoverished.  There is more to life than ideas.  There is more to ideas than ideas.  Ideas without that “more” are very limiting.  I guess I’m talking about ideologues here.  And they are scary as hell.  These people…in many cultures… will kill if you don’t believe their ideas.

Goethe had this in mind when he noted, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being beastial.”  And, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. “

Rules for speech

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A fundamentalist preacher from my youth once posed three rules for speech:  Is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?

Hmmm.

This should give us pause from time to time.

Just for the record, the above bromide was brought back to my attention today by Steve Roberts (coolmindwarmheart.com) who attributed it to Eknath Easwaran and an old Arab proverb:  The words of the tongue should have three gatekeepers.

 

Paean to Julia Kristeva

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I discovered a blog that I really find interesting.  It is entitled “The Rumpus.net” and is about culture.  The posting which caught my attention is the author’s paean to one of my heroes, Julia Kristeva, who I feel is one of the best critical thinkers/writers of our time.  The author describes his “love” of Kristeva, based on her critical mind but also on her beautiful face on the cover of one of her most important books, The Powers of Horror.  I could relate completely.  I was taken with that book and also found that she was beautiful.

One of her teachers and mentors, Roland Barthes, describes what it is about Kristeva that I find so intriguing:  she changes the order of things; she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could  be proud.  What she displaces is the already-said, that is to say, the insistence of the signified.  What she subverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiation.

In short, she is very subversive.  She questions “the assumptions in which we are drenched” (Adrienne Rich)


 

Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she displaces is the already-said, that is to say, the insistence of the signified; what she subverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiation.”

Listening

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It must have been exhilarating when we learned to talk, when we learned to assign meaning to our “these squeaks of ours” (Conrad Aiken), and to recognize that these meanings were by and large shared with others.  And even now it is very rewarding when we share something very personal, something rich in emotional valence, and intuitively know that the one listening understands.  Aiken noted, “And this is peace; to know our knowledge known.”  This is the heart of the therapeutic enterprise—being a good listener.  (And I’m made to think of the opposite of “listening”, recognized in this line from some old tv show, “You aren’t listening.  You’re waiting.”)

Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci had profound insight into the enterprise of listening:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them.  (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)