LAUGH AND HAVE FAITH

Foundational crises: The Importance of Not Thinking Too Much (John Derbyshire, August 1, 2003, National Review)

As with the mechanical habit of driving a car, the social habit of marriage needs to be internalized when young, and thereafter not thought about too much.

But that, of course, is the pre-postmodern way of doing things. We are all intellectuals today, encouraged to think about everything all the time - think, and analyze, and "deconstruct." Every man a philosopher, all worshippers at the Temple of Reason. Now, reason is certainly a very fine thing. I spent much of 2002 hobnobbing with mathematicians, and I think you will walk a long mile to find someone who has more respect for the power of reason than I have. However, there are regions of life, thought and behavior that are beyond reason's s cope, and ought to stay there.

It was, after all, the pursuit of pure reason that led to a crisis in philosophy 250 years ago, when the British empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume took the "deconstruction" of everyday experience as far as it can be taken. The end point of this particular line of inquiry was reached by David Hume, who, after thinking long and hard about mind and matter, came to the conclusion that no such things could possibly exist. Hume then turned and laughed at himself, and at what he had accomplished by all that thinking:

"This sceptical doubt ... is a malady, which can never be radically cur'd, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away ... Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them; and take it for granted, whatever may be the reader's opinion at this present moment, that an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and an internal world..."

It would be nice if we could get back to that innocent state of society in which things like marriage were not thought about too much, just taken for granted with "carelessnes and in-attention." Innocence, unfortunately, is well-known to be a thing that, once lost, is impossible to recapture.

Or perhaps not. In the middle of writing out the above, and intending to proceed to a satisfyingly pessimistic conclusion, I happened to read the August 2003 Notices of the American Mathematical Society. That excellent journal has a review, by math professor Michael Harris, of a book titled Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, by Serbian-Canadian mathematician-philosopher-novelist Vladimir Tasic. (Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.)

Alfred North Whitehead put this point well:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

We must laugh with Hume and choose to believe in certain things, both those things which reason tells us should be true and those things which were written upon our hearts. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 10:50 AM