Ep 4: What This is All About
the art of understanding
Not to weep at, not to laugh, not to curse, but to understand.
— Baruch Spinoza
Sooner or later, we all realize that life is neither easy, nor fair. Baruch Spinoza surely learned it when he was formally cursed and excommunicated, by his own community, at the age of twenty two.1 And that’s why his point above. Its message is about all the curveballs that life keeps throwing at us. It’s about our personal relationships and the economy. It’s about Putin and Russia. It’s about Hitler and Nazi Germany, about Israel and Hamas, about the biblical Job and God… It’s about life itself — not to weep over it, not to curse it, but to understand. Understand how it works so that we can make it better.
In practice, however, we tend to skip that crucial step. Faced with adversity, we feel compelled to act before we are ready, before we understand what we are dealing with. So we take shortcuts by acting on intuition, on our best guesses… This is how the road to hell gets paved with good intentions. And yet we keep doing it — why?
Well, I keep driving this same point home. We take shortcuts because doing it properly is hard. If life is unfair, it is for this very reason, for making understanding it so difficult. And because it has long become the norm to give up on trying to.
I was no exception either — I too had given up on it at some point. Luckily, I was given another chance. And then another, and another… ‘cause that’s what it takes, apparently.
I was fourteen when I got accepted into a school program with emphasis on science and math — and things were not going well for me. After just two months in the program, I was on the verge of expulsion. My older brother, a university student at the time, took on a job of tutoring me… and it wasn’t going well either. It must have been difficult to watch. I just could not get it! After much frustration on both sides, my brother gave up — but not before he said something that I remembered decades later. Referring to the kinematics problem he was helping me with, he asked, “Why don’t you just imagine it? How this ball bounces down the slope, every next jump getting longer… Why don’t you?”
Even though it was not apparent to me at the moment, this was the breakthrough I was looking for. Instead of relying on intuition to guess the answer, I needed to use my imagination to understand — to see — the problem. To visualize, in my mind, the process behind it and how its different parts interact. ‘Cause there is always a process behind any pattern — and it is that process that we want to discover and, thereby, understand.
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
— Rabindranath Tagore
My grades soon improved and I finished the trimester at the top of my class. Again, at the time I didn’t make the connection. When you are fourteen, the change is constant, and many things happen for the first time — way too many match them against their causes. Only in retrospect I could see how using imagination was the key — because I kept using it to understand things, people, and myself until, many years later, I became once again conscious of it. Of how I’ve been doing it.
Now, while I keep saying that this is how I do it, I am just as positive that I cannot be unique in this regard. I cannot be because the mental capacity involved is simply too huge to be something one could acquire by accident (as opposed to stumbling, by accident, on the potential that was already there). What we are talking about is the ability to put together and run, in one’s mind, a full-blown three-dimensional simulation of the Reality, of the world outside. The main purpose of this mental simulation is to predict the outcomes of our actions before incurring the costs of taking them in the real world. Needless to say, this ability comes quite handy — but it does not come cheap.
The brain’s “hardware” required to run such a simulation2 must be as complex as it is costly to maintain. Our brains are energy hogs, each gram of brain matter consuming ten times the body’s average. It must have been just as expensive to develop — in fact, it must have been this “hardware” that our ancestors spent five millions of years to evolve. One can argue that this is what makes us human, what makes us different from other species on this planet — ‘cause other major human traits, traits like intuition, emotional intelligence, creativity, and even the sense of beauty, we can observe in animals as well. If there is, therefore, anything that sets humans apart, it is our capacity for rational understanding, combined with our ability to share it through language — to share our understanding and, thereby, our experiences with others.
All this is to say that the ability to daydream a mental simulation of the Reality cannot be just my personal way of understanding. And neither is the feat of assembling this simulation — I am not the only person who managed to accomplish it, to piece together the “puzzle”. In fact, it appears that both the simulation and process of assembling it was more commonly known in the past — because many old languages actually had a word for it. In ancient Greek that word was logos (λόγος).3 It is a derivative from the proto-Indo-European root *leǵ- which means to gather, to assemble (much like another its derivative, the proto-Hellenic lego). Tocharian läk-, yet another derivative, meant literally “to gather with one’s eyes”.4 And, finally, in English we still sometimes substitute “I understand” with “I gather”.
Now that we have an idea of what it might actually mean, consider these ancient quotes about logos:
“Even though the Logos always holds true, people fail to comprehend it, not even after they have been told about it.” (Heraclitus, 450 BC)
“In [the Logos] was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light in the darkness shined; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:5, King James Version)
Which is to say that we’ve been struggling with understanding of how we understand, of the very process of it, for quite some time.
In the previous posts I already mentioned the main reason why: even now, as we put huge resources into teaching knowledge to our children, we still don’t tell them what they are supposed to be doing with all that information! From a child’s perspective, it must look like they are being asked to memorize a bunch of random facts. Nobody explains to them that those facts should be treated as puzzle pieces, and that putting it all together — assembling their copy of the Logos, their mental simulation of the Reality — should be the whole point of education.
Your intellect is in fragments, like bits of gold scattered over many matters. You must scrape them together, so the royal stamp can be pressed into you.
Cohere, and you'll be as lovely as Samarcand with its central market, or Damascus. Grain by grain, collect the parts. You'll be more magnificent than a flat coin. You'll be a cup with carvings of the king around the outside.
— Rumi
See, understanding is, essentially, the work of a detective. So the first step would be discovering your inner Sherlock Holmes.5 Then you’d have to master the art — the art of unraveling mysteries, of piecing puzzles together, the art of understanding. And then you’d have to do the actual work, to solve the actual “crime” — which, in our present circumstances, is so difficult because when you start, you don’t know any of that. You don’t know that there is a “crime” — a puzzle — to solve. You don’t know that this — all this — is a “crime” scene and should be treated as such…
In the next episodes we will be discussing other reasons as well. Before we go there, though, maybe let’s focus on a different part of the puzzle, on something that philosophers refer to as “metaphysics”. Specifically, we are going to take a closer look at the subject of our understanding — the nature the Reality itself.
Stay tuned!
It appears to be necessary, for a future great thinker, to go through an ordeal of one kind or another. Socrates, Descartes, Nietzsche, Tolstoy were all war veterans. The Buddha nearly starved himself to death while trying to attain enlightenment. Dostoyevsky has gone through a mock execution by the prison squad, his death sentence commuted at the last moment. I can only guess what Jesus was baptized with, but I bet it was no water either.
Think of it as of our “software”. We don’t come preinstalled with it, unfortunately, leaving it up to each individual to piece together their copy. This may be the reason why humans have evolved to spend several extra years in our childhood — it gives us the time to complete this task before we can take on adult responsibilities.
Or, think of it as a holistic worldview, holistic philosophy — the holistic part denoting the all-encompassing nature of the simulation. It does not have to be so, and most of us only complete the simulation of some parts of the Reality, if even. But it could cover the Reality as a whole, and that’s what we should aim for.
And that’s why this Greek word has been so difficult to translate — because no modern language has the word for the simulation! Latin, the language of Ancient Rome, was already too modern — so in Gospel translations logos ended up as “the word”. In a different context, namely the Greek mathematician Euclid explaining geometrical proportions, they translated logos as “ratio” — hence, “rational”, or “rationality”… See what I mean?
And so could have been the English look, at least originally — the difference between seeing and looking being the same as between hearing and listening… understanding of what was heard or seen, that is, being the difference.
Or Copernicus, or Galileo, Newton, Einstein — because this “detective” work is also what real science has been about. And, yes, imagination is key — that’s how we discover the missing piece to the puzzle, the story behind the observable outcomes.