This post is more disjointed than usual, being essentially a stream-of-consciousness piece. I gave my students a prompt in class today and decided to write along with them. Here is the prompt:
In Chapel today, Dr. Doody described creativity as addressing a question that is important to you. If you read the first twenty pages of Heart of Darkness as I assigned, start writing in that context. If you didn’t, pick The Trial, If on a winter’s night a traveler, or Enquiry on Human Understanding, and start with something you found interesting, intriguing, or disturbing in one of those texts. Write for the rest of the period about your starting question/observation. If your thinking about it is superficial or you’re somewhat distractible, or you’re just bubbling over with ideas, or if, like me, one thought always leads to another to which not everyone sees the connection feel free to move on to natural tangents or other ideas that suggest themselves from what you wrote at the beginning.
This is essentially a journal entry and should be emailed/handed in to me at the end of the period. Do NOT complain that you have nothing to say. If that’s the case, then tell me so, and go on to talk about how none of these works has appealed to you. And then you should go on to talk about why in the world you’re in this class and what, now that you’re stuck here another month or two, you hope to be able to get out of it.
One of the questions common in some form to all the works we’ve read is the idea of meaning. I am intrigued by the ways in which we assume we know what things mean when we don’t in fact know much at all. As Socrates is reputed to have said, the beginning of wisdom is to realize how little you actually know. Moving from that to an intellectual nihilism seems to me to be both pointless and stupid, however. The fact (assuming it’s a fact) that we can be certain of nothing does not imply that there are no reasonably general commonalities of understanding—merely that such commonalities are tentative to one degree or another and, upon further consideration, that they are mostly local in some sense.
I suppose that as a scientist by training I am quite comfortable with what seems a contradiction to many non-scientists: we investigate questions methodically and pretty much by communally accepted methods and definitely, as Kuhn pointed out, present them for communally mandated standards of evaluation. Yet, ultimately we can in science be certain of nothing because the essence of “actual” science is the principle of falsifiability, which is one way in which science differs from the “purer” forms of math.
So, I know nothing for certain yet am comfortable being confident in my knowledge. I am, however, willing to hold most of my conclusions about “life, the universe, and everything” tentatively, though the probability of certainty (a fascinating concept in and of itself) varies significantly among the different things I believe/accept.
For instance, I’m quite confident that gravity pulls things downward and that apparent exceptions are always explicable by the intervention of forces of which I’m unaware. That one’s 99.999999+% sure for me.
I’m reasonably confident that I am a good teacher, though my confidence level there varies with the subject, the age of my students, their level of interest, and other such me-independent parameters. However, I think I am more adept than a number of people—including my students, sometimes—think me to be at adapting my teaching style to some of those parameters. On the other hand, I know for a fact that some students at least do not consider me, even in retrospect, a good teacher—from which I infer (and already believe independently for other reasons) that no-one can be equally good a teacher for everybody. And there are of course larger lessons of human incompatibility or fallibility that can be drawn from that rather specific example.
Back to meaning though…. I have come to believe that meaning is a social construct (very rarely, a biological one: the “meaning” of the stimulation of certain receptors, for example, is an involuntary response in the brain; but even here, the brain takes the response and “does” something with it in terms of processing, associating with other experiences, and so on). One could say that meaning is an intellectual construct, and in a sense it usually is, but in spite of Alice in Wonderland, words do not in fact mean (unless like Tolkien you’re inventing them) whatever you want them to mean. And even then, as the speakers of modern Hebrew and every slang have discovered, once you set the word free, you lose control of it.
Some things, like money, are “purely” social constructs, with essentially no significance than that which society as a whole gives them. Most things have a combination of individual and social meanings that overlap, usually interacting in various ways, the one modifying the other to some extent. Many things have a meaning that is extremely context-sensitive: “I love you” is probably the most obvious example, but even “An A paper has a strong thesis” supports my contention.
Even most things in math, btw, ultimately rest on social/community acceptance. Few things seem more rigorous than geometric proofs, yet there is no obvious definition of a line, for instance. As Whitehead and Russell found out, even the concept/definition of a number, which is arguably what the large majority of math is based on at some level, is next to impossible to specify unambiguously. Even the “rules of proof” are essentially socially constructed, with what a mathematician expects/accepts being extraordinarily different from what your high-school geometry teacher requires…
As quantum mechanics has pointed out repeatedly and forcefully, the idea of “meaning” in science is close to indefinable as well, perhaps even non-existent, which is terribly ironic considering that scientists (or at least their popularizers) purport to “make sense” out of the world/universe.
My interest in meaning is related to my interest in interpretation, which may stem (in an academic setting, at least) to my sense as a middle schooler that I suspect most students have had at various points in their careers as readers, which is not understanding why I had to come up with my teacher’s “meaning” to get an A on a paper. My own “interpretation” was never good enough to be more than a B. I have none of those original writings now, but looking at the matter from an adult perspective, I expect the answer was a combination of two things: sometimes, my reasoning or examples were not nearly as perspicacious as they seemed to me in my early pre-teen years; and sometimes, I suspect I had teachers who on certain subjects at least would not give A’s to papers that had conclusions they didn’t like. I remember thinking in 7th grade that I was tired of getting 85’s in English (always my lowest grade to that point), and that I wanted 90’s—so, I started reading the papers of kids who got 90’s in order to find out how to get them myself. There are many lessons here, which as Fermat might have said, the margins of this paper are too small to contain.
Back to interpretation…. I continue to be intrigued by the social vs individual aspects of interpretation. At one extreme, reader-response does provide a limit to the idea that meaning depends on the reader. As commonly envisaged, though, it seems way too loose to be useful in any sense (whether in the study of literature or in the study of meaning): we all have legitimately slightly different interpretations of everything. Woo-hoo. We all (statistically, at least) have a unique DNA composition, too. There’s very little of use to be made of that observation except, perhaps, for identifications of people who were at crime scenes…. So what? It seems to me the more useful (as well as more intellectually challenging) questions start from the premise that we are all variations of some sort on some basic theme. We can then ask what that theme is, how wide the variations are, which variations are more relevant than others and in which contexts, and perhaps even by what standards we will answer these questions.
So, what do “most readers” get out of Heart of Darkness? What kinds of questions “should” they/we be asking? Why? Just as what you teach, to paraphrase a book title, depends on what you know, the questions you ask and the answers you’re willing to accept depend to a significant, but not exclusive, degree on where you stand and in which directions (and at what angles of elevation) you are looking.
While there is, I suspect, no context-independent thought, that does not mean that it’s not useful to encourage thinking. It’s probably useful to encourage thought in different contexts and from different perspectives. I personally have found the ability to analyze (break down) ideas and then synthesize (recombine) them in different ways both intellectually satisfying and pragmatically useful (in my teaching, among other areas). I wish I were more “genuinely creative” ex nihilo, but after hearing Dr. Doody’s talk this morning, I suspect that’s not the way such “genuinely creative” people look at their work. Like sleight of hand, perhaps creativity looks different to the people doing it and the people observing it or its results.