“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence. “And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” But if an experience is spoken yet unheard, half of its reality is severed and a certain essential harmony is breached. The great physicist David Bohm knew this: “If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature,” he wrote in his excellent and timely treatise on the paradox of communication, “we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”
How to do that is what the influential humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explored in a 1974 seminar in Switzerland, the 400-page transcript of which was eventually adapted into the posthumously published The Art of Listening (public library).
Erich Fromm
Listening, Fromm argues, is “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:
The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is equally a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience.
I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.
So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.
For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
The great gift of science is that it continually reveals to us what is real, unpeeling the wallpaper of our knowledge to reveal newer and newer layers of nature, deeper and deeper substrata of reality. The great peril of science — this eternal impulse of human nature — is that the human mind continually limits what is possible, erecting walls of assumption between itself and the reality of nature. And yet the entire fact of life — your individual life, and mine, and life itself as a feature of the universe — is a matter of probable impossibilities.
This interplay, and how to liberate our search for truth from our craving for certainty, is what Italian physicist Chiara Marletto explores in The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals (public library) — part field guide to her particular realm of study, part manifesto for the countercultural courage to keep unmasoning the walls of the imaginable and bending the mind beyond the accepted horizons of the possible. What emerges is an impassioned, scrumptiously reasoned insistence that all breakthroughs in science require “as much imagination and perceptiveness as you need to write a good story or a profound poem.”
Counterfactuals — explanations about what could or could not be caused to happen in the physical universe, as distinct from the standard scientific theories about what is bound to happen based on what has happened in the past — are one such thrilling mode of rotating in the palm of the mind the unsolved mysteries of nature in order to examine them from revelatory new perspectives, perspectives blind-spotted by our present assumptions. Counterfactuals are the science of otherwise — the physics counterpart to Jane Kenyon’s excellent poem — shimmering with new ways of understanding everything from information to time to free will.
In the foreword, Marletto’s collaborator David Deutsch observes that the rate of scientific discovery over the past few centuries has been increasing exponentially, but the discovery of new fundamental truths about nature has stalled and an indolence about attempting new modes of explanation has set in. He writes:
There has never been a time when there have been more blatant contradictions, gaps, and unresolved vagueness in our deepest understanding of nature, or more exciting prospects to explore them. Sometimes this will require us to adopt radically different modes of explanation.
Illustrating the validity of counterfactuals as a mode of understanding, he gives the example of a computer, which could record and process nothing new if every change to the contents of its memory were pre-set in the factory — a computer “can hold information only if its state could have been otherwise.”
Marletto places at the heart of her case for counterfactuals the notion of resilience — not resilience in the creaturely sense, to which we aspire and which trees so perfectly embody, but a deeper kind of resilience, existing on the fundamental level of information yet giving rise to all the physical reality that makes the creaturely kind possible — resilience as the dazzling, rare feature of our universe, even within the no-design fundamental laws of which a system can continue existing in an ever-changing environment. With an eye to genes — those recipes for keeping a species in existence, peppered with mutation — she writes:
What distinguishes helpful changes in the recipe from unhelpful ones? It is a particular kind of information: information that is capable of keeping itself instantiated in physical systems. It is resilient information.
[…]
“Knowledge” merely denotes a particular kind of information, which has the capacity to perpetuate itself and stay embodied in physical systems — in this case by encoding some facts about the environment… Knowledge is the key to resilience… In fact, knowledge is the most resilient stuff that can exist in our universe.
There are no absolute sources of certain truth: any good solution to a problem may also contain some errors. This principle is based on fallibilism, a pillar of Popper’s explanation of rational thinking. Fallibilism makes progress feasible because it allows for further criticism to occur in the future, even when at present we seem to be content with whatever solution we have found. It leaves space for creating ever-improving theories, stories, works of art, and music; it also tells us that errors are extremely interesting things to look for. Whenever we try to make progress, we should hope to find more of them, as fast as possible.
She turns to the two ways in which nature and human nature generate new knowledge, the generative process we call creativity — “by conjecture and criticism, in the mind; by variation and natural selection, in the wild” — and considers the crucial difference between the two:
Natural selection, unlike conjecture and criticism, cannot perform jumps: each of the recipes that leads to a new resilient recipe must itself be resilient — i.e., it must code for a successful variant of a trait of the particular animal in question that permits the animal’s survival for long enough to allow replication of that recipe, via reproduction. But there may be viable, resilient recipes coding for useful traits that can never be realised because they would require a sequence of nonresilient recipes to be realised first, which is impossible, as those recipes produce animals that cannot survive and cannot pass on their genes.
The thinking process, in contrast, can perform jumps… The sequence of ideas leading to a good idea need not consist entirely of good, viable ideas. Nonetheless, knowledge creation in the mind, too, can enter stagnation and stop progressing. We must be wary of not entering such states both as individuals and as societies. Particularly detrimental to knowledge creation are the immutable limitations imposed by dogmas, as they restrain the ability to conjecture and criticise.
Woven into Marletto’s case for counterfactuals is her love letter to science and the art of explanation:
Physics is a dazzling firework display; it is profound, beautiful, and illuminating; a source of never-ending delight. Physics is about solving problems in our understanding of reality by formulating explanations that fill gaps in our previous understanding. The point of physics is not the particular calculation about the fall of an apple. It is the explanation behind it, which unifies all motions—that of the apple with that of a planet in the solar system, and beyond. The dazzling stuff consists of explanations: for they surprise us by revealing things that were previously unknown and very distant from our intuition, with the aim of solving a particular problem.
[…]
The appearance of the dark sky at night… can be explained in terms of unexpected underlying phenomena involving things like photons, the remarkable fact that the universe is expanding, and so on. None of those elements is apparent in the sky itself, but they are all part of the explanation for why it looks as it does, in terms of what is really out there. Explanations are accounts of what is seen in terms of mostly unseen elements.
“What we see, we see / and seeing is changing,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her ode to astrophysics. It is changing, however, only when we change the way we look, change our tools for looking, be they physical instruments — the microscope and the telescope, revealing unseen layers of reality — or the instrument of the mind, which devises the microscope and the telescope and the theory. I hear Thoreau bellowing his admonition down the hallway of time as he puzzled over what it takes to see reality unblinded by our preconceptions: “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” Marletto writes:
The traditional conception of physics cannot possibly capture counterfactual properties, because it insists on expressing everything in terms of predictions about what happens in the universe given the initial conditions and the laws of motion only — in terms of trajectories of apples or electrons, forgetting the other levels of explanation. But these other levels of explanation are essential sometimes to grasp the whole of physical reality.
Drawing on the example of Neptune and the neutrino — both discovered not by direct observation of the previously unseen planet or particle but by observing curious contradictions in the surrounding system and deducing from them that something in the set of assumptions about what the system is and how it works must be revised. She writes:
As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give.
[…]
Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.
In one of the book’s many charming touches defying the segregation of science from its sensemaking twin — art — she gives an exquisite example of counterfactuals at work in one of humanity’s most abiding masterworks of storytelling and sensemaking: the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus (which also inspired the greatest thought experiment about the nature of the self and what makes you you).
Theseus, son of Aegeus, king of Athens, went to Crete to kill the Minotaur. Theseus made an agreement with his aged father that if he defeated the Minotaur, on their return his crew would raise white sails on the ship; if he perished, they would raise black sails. So off went Theseus, and he defeated the Minotaur. But on his way back, distracted by all sorts of things (including, possibly, the presence of his fiancée, Ariadne, on the ship!), he forgot to tell the crew about the sails. The crew left the black sails on, and Aegeus, who from the highest tower of Athens could see the ship approaching, thought his son was dead. So he threw himself into the sea and drowned. This tragic story is why the sea is now called the Aegean.
Now suppose we asked our master storyteller to tell that story with the constraint that he can formulate statements only about what happens — that is, he must report the full story without ever referring to counterfactual properties. In particular, he cannot refer to properties that have to do with what could or could not be done to physical systems.
This task turns out to be impossible: for the story to make sense, and to convey fully its meaning, two attributes of the ship are essential: one, that it can be used to send a signal, by assuming one of two states — white sail showing or black sail showing; the other, that the state of having black or white sails can be copied onto other physical systems — such as Aegeus’s eyes and brain. The copiability property tells us that the flag contains information.
Without these two counterfactual properties, the myth would be robbed of sense and could not possibly produce in the mind of the reader the tragic feeling, the shift in understanding, that gives rise to its millennia-wide moral. The myth of Theseus — a sensical story of tangible things like continents and oceans, a story of profoundly human things like ships and sons — helps grasp the analogous counterfactuals at work in more abstract things. A bit — that unit of information powering our digital universe — may seem like an abstract thing, but it is essentially a Thesian ship’s sail: there are the two binary states that can switch from one to the other, there is the ability to be copied. Any system endowed with these two counterfactual properties is an information medium — a conduit of knowledge.
Marletto reflects:
Adopting counterfactuals brings entities that look superficially like immaterial abstractions into the domain of physics. Information and knowledge, for example, have been traditionally considered as mere abstractions — as things that do not belong to the physical world. However, by considering the counterfactual properties of physical systems that enable information and knowledge, one refutes this idea: because whether or not a physical system has those properties is set precisely by the laws of physics.
The ultimate promise of counterfactuals as portals to possibility comes most vibrantly abloom in one of the several short genre-bending vignettes Marletto composes to illustrate the scientific concepts — a story-upon-story set in the crucible of materialism, Ancient Greece. She imagines the childhood of the legendary conqueror Alexander the Great — who by his death at thirty-two would have created one of the vastest empires in the history of our species — and his time as an uncommonly broad-minded pupil of Aristotle: a boy asking the vastest unasked questions, hungry to fathom his own mind. In one of their conversations, Alexander wonders what it is in him that endows him with the capacity for wonder — with the ability to savor poetry and philosophy and the abstract art of mathematics — if he is made of the same material as concrete things like rocks and grass. Marletto’s Aristotle answers:
What’s clear is that the mind has characteristic properties that make it capable of relating to things that are abstract. I suspect that it obeys the same laws as rocks and grass, though we have yet to find these laws and understand how to apply them to the mind.
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure. But it need not be without reward. Admitting failure, especially moral failure, is hard enough — to others, where the temptation to displace blame and make excuses seduces most, but most of all to oneself. Accepting it is even harder — but it is on the other side of acceptance that the true reward of failure is to be found.
That is what the great Czech playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) explores in an extraordinary feat of soul-searching and reckoning with the human condition, found in his Letters to Olga (public library), one of the most moving books I have ever read — the living record of his imprisonment after being found guilty on charges of “subversion” for his plays criticizing the communist regime and his human rights work defending the unjustly persecuted.
Václav Havel
In the summer of his forty-sixth year, Havel recounts a moment of moral failure that shaped the course of his life:
Dear Olga,
Five years ago something happened tome that in many regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It began rather inconspicuously: I was in detention for the firs time and one evening, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my release. Prisoners in detention are always writing such requests, and I too treated it as something routine and unimportant, more in the nature of mental hygiene: I knew, of course, that my eventual release or nonrelease would be decided by factors having nothing to do with whether I wrote the appropriate request or not. Still, the interrogations weren’t going anywhere and it seemed proper to use the opportunity to let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a way that at the time seemed extremely tactical and cunning: while saying nothing I did not believe or that wasn’t true, I simply “overlooked” the fact that truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, and to whom, why, how and under what circumstances it is expressed. Thanks to this minor “oversight” (more precisely, this minor self-deception) what I said came dangerously close — by chance, as it were — to what the authorities wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was the fact that my motive — at least my conscious and admitted motive — was not the hope that it would produce results, but merely a kind of professionally intellectualistic and somewhat perverse delight in my won — or so I thought — “honorable cleverness.” (I should add, to complete the picture, that when I read it some years later, the honor in that cleverness made my hair stand on end.) I sent the request off the following day and because no one responded to it and my detention was prolonged again, I assumed it had ended up where such requests usually end up, and I more or less forgot about it.
Havel was shocked to be told one day that he was most likely going to be released and “political use” would be made of his petition. He recounts:
Of course I knew right away what that meant: (1) that with appropriate “recasting,” “additions” and widespread publicity, the impression would be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to pressure and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my previous work; in short, that I had betrayed my cause, all for a trivial reason — to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my part would alter that impression because I had undeniably written something that “met them halfway” and anything I could add would, quite rightly, seem like an attempt to worm my way out of it; (3) that the approaching catastrophe was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it would leave me on and everything I had taken part in would haunt me for years to come, that it would cause me measureless inner suffering, and that I would probably try to erase it with several years in prison (which in fact happened), but that not even that would rid me entirely of the stigma; (5) that I had no one but myself to blame: I was neither forced to do it, nor offered a bribe; I was not, in fact, in a dilemma and it was only because I’d unforgivably let down my moral guard that I’d given the other side — voluntarily and quite pointlessly — a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent gift.
The haunting price of self-knowledge is that you always know, or some part of you always knows, exactly what your own moral failures would cost you. All Havel feared would happen is exactly what happened:
I came out of prison discredited, to confront a world that seemed to me one enormous, supremely justified rebuke. No one knows what I went through in that darkest period of my life… weeks, months, years in fact, of silent desperation, self-castigation, shame, inner humiliation, reproach and uncomprehending questioning. For a while I escaped from a world I felt too embarrassed to face into gloomy isolation, taking masochistic delight in endless orgies of self-blame. And then for a while I fled this inner hell into frantic activity through which I tried to drown out my anguish and at the same time, to “rehabilitate” myself somehow.
His only relative reprieve came when he was thrown into prison again. But it took him years to fully accept his moral failure and wrest from it something larger, something the dream of blamelessness and the performance of perfection could ever secure for the life of the soul. In a testament to the indivisible yin-yang of fortune and misfortune illustrated by the ancient parable of the Chinese farmer, he writes:
I’ve only now begun fully to realize that the experience wasn’t just — from my point of view, at least — an comprehensible lapse that caused me a lot of pointless suffering; it had a deeply positive and purgative significance, for which I ought to thank my fate instead of cursing it. It thrust me into a drastic but, for that very reason, crucial confrontation with myself; it shook, as it were, my entire “I,” shook out of it a deeper insight into itself, a more serious acceptance and understanding of my situation… my horizons, and led me, ultimately, to a new and more coherent consideration of the problem of human responsibility.
[…]
It is not hard to stand behind one’s successes. But to accept responsibility for one’s failures, to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one’s own, that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else, and actively to accept — without regard for any worldly interests, no matter how well disguised, or for well-meant advice — the price that has to be paid for it: that is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead — as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me — to the renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true “peace of mind,” to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that “joy of Being.” If one manages to achieve that, then all one’s worldly privations cease to be privations, and become what Christians call grace.
In the years he spent in prison, Havel learned what it takes to turn suffering into strength and discovered the deepest meaning of hope. Upon his release, he threw himself with redoubled devotion into his political work. Not even a decade into his freedom, the Federal Assembly unanimously elected him president — the last president — of Czechoslovakia, after the dissolution of which a free people elected him the first president of the Czech Republic. Many survivors of communist dictatorships (myself included) lament that he was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the writing he left behind in his Letters to Olga is an eternal triumph of peacekeeping for the war within, the war we each wage against ourselves and in which there are no victors unless we arrive at the kind of peace of mind Havel found on the other side of facing, truly facing, his failure.
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