On openness
August 12, 2011
If there was ever an instance where it was appropriate
to say “it’s funny because it’s true”, this is it. So,
without further ado:
It’s funny because it’s true.
John Cleese here adresses a certain feeling which many of us have in common. It’s a feeling of resentment towards persons and discourses that reduce complex or wondrous phenomena to something limited and thus manageable. It’s quite common to be irked or annoyed with, as Cleese puts it, reductionist views of the universe. Now, Cleese chooses to set up fundamentalist religion as a parallel to reductionism. I’d say, rather, that fundamentalist religion as well as fundamentalist scientism – the raising up of the natural sciences to an absolute – are reductionist views of the universe.
Concerning our resentment of such talk, I’ll say that I think it’s the equivalent of being lectured to on some issue of morality, and then retorting: “but you’re doing it yourself!”. We feel that the reductionist person’s closed-mindedness is an offence to us, because if they would only face up to what they don’t know, even about themselves, they’d be forced to be open to the unexpected. It would be possible to have dialogue or discussion with them, because they’d be consciously exposed to the fundamental conditions that we all have in common, even if we think we’ve explained them away – conditions such as limited knowledge, inadequate understanding, terrifying uncertainty etc. It’s a widely experienced longing and a frequently expressed wish that people be open to opinions, to other people and to the universe as such. But how does one in fact, generally, retain such an open attitude?
Where openness specifically concerns other people — as opposed to mere objects, mental or physical — the answer seems simple enough (even if its actual application is painstaking and impossible to master perfectly). A human person is an unfathomable abyss of depth and complexity. One retains an open attitude towards a human person by admitting that one has always only understood a fraction of what constitutes that person. And, more importantly, one must also always bear in mind and respect the fact that one can only truly get to know a person better if that person freely chooses to reveal more about themselves. A person, as opposed to a thing, a concept or an object, is something that must reveal himself or herself in order to be known. In human relationships, the power and necessity of revelation is plain as daylight. If we try to forcefully extract knowledge of a person, we lose sight of their personhood. The person is then no longer known as a person, but only as a mere object. (I won’t go into all the instances in which this actually happens in modern society).
But then what about openness to the universe as such? Is it possible to take a genuine interest in the really existing world around us — in which we live, move, and have our being — without reducing it so that it fits the limited concepts of our human minds? If we have nothing but human concepts with which to know the universe, can our knowledge be anything but a human reduction of the universe? Can our human view of the universe be anything but reductionist? How is it possible, from whithin the human mind, to remain open to what the human mind cannot grasp?
Well, first of all I’ll say that what we call the universe must be thought of as an aspect of something larger. This something I call reality. So the universe is an aspect of reality — namely exactly the aspect made up by our orderly and unified knowledge of reality. The universe is reality in as far as human knowledge can order and unify it.
A non-reductionist view of the universe, then, must be a non-reductionist view of reality. As such, it must assume that the known universe is not all there is of reality. And it must also assume that not all of reality will necessarily conform to human knowledge at all. As far as I can see, the only way to consistently hold this assumption is to think of reality as ultimately personal. To think of reality as something which, in analogy with the human person, can be known only in as far as it reveals itself to us.
Either there is an ultimate personhood before which we can humble ourselves and assume that there is always more to the mystery, more to be discovered as it is revealed to our open and curious minds — or else we have left only the choice of either abandoning all knowledge or becoming self-possessed, uptight reductionists (both options being elegantly illustrated by Cleese’s boxing glove).
