Reflection 13
ON BUBBLES
I have said in my previous Reflections that in philosophical practice it is not enough to understand with our abstract thinking. A deeper form of understanding is needed, one that involves more of ourselves. If we want philosophical practice to do more than theory-construction and analysis, if we want it to be woven into our everyday lives and transform them, then the philosophical process must permeate our entire being. Philosophizing must take place not just in the specific domain of theoretical thinking, but in broader, deeper aspects of ourselves.
This is not to say that abstract reasoning or critical thinking is unimportant, but rather that its role is limited. It can critique and evaluate and sharpen already-existing understandings, but its capacity to produce new understandings is very restricted. It needs insights or ideas as materials to work on. And these must come from somewhere else in us.
Here we might speak about sources of understanding that are more profound or more superficial. Thus, some ideas may be based on one-sided and limited encounters with the world, while others may be insights that give voice to the deeper aspects of human reality. This is what I mean when I talk about understanding from the depth of our being.
But what does it mean to understand from the deeper aspects of our being?
It might be tempting to answer this question with a theory about the nature of ‘depth-understanding.’ However, the problem is that such a theory would have to be formulated in the language of theoretical thinking. This would amount to imposing the format of abstract reasoning on all forms of understanding. It seems to me, therefore, that instead of trying to capture depth-understandings with a theory, it is better to point to them by way of examples.
My friend Gerald Rochelle has described one such example, and kindly allowed me to quote it:
On a tram. I am sitting on a tram near the Mexican border. It is hot. Opposite me, a young girl sits close to her corpulent mother. She pushes herself under her mother’s fat arms and smiles at me. It is a nervous but becoming smile. The mother nods and turns to stroke the girl’s forehead.
Suddenly, I realize motherhood. I see that everyone has a mother, that having a mother is a peculiar bond, that it is naturally loving, protective, that something flows between mother and child, and so something flows between all individuals; there is something which is not constrained by our natural isolation, and I see that love is what flows, and the child’s smile and the mother’s caress flow to me and I am their child, the child of the child and the child of the mother, and I realize the harmony of it all, the perfect nature of it all, and I am filled with it and I look around for others to love; and I look back again and it is still happening, and I can hardly bear it, it is too much, too much for the individual, too much to contain within isolation. It is all to do with how we fit together, how we belong to each other in all relative ways, and I see the child’s face again, and again she smiles, and it fixes in my mind, and I feel myself changing. My stomach fills with nerves because I know I cannot explain what is going on. I try to distill it, put it into order, and I realize that it will not be rationalized, it is too much, I will only be able to retain part of it, an image maybe, a shape, a smile, a caress, something to remind me, to stimulate my memory, and I relax a bit, allow it to go. I have an insight, it is inside me, and I am changed.
And the mother gets up, stretches out her hand. I shake her hand, rather embarrassed, and the young girl bows low. They both leave, and I shiver with excitement. The world has opened up something new. I have seen that some of the shadow-images are not self-animating puppets but are being operated. There is a force within the world which can be seen, it is available, it is not ‘beyond’ so much, as existing there to be seen—if we see, look, perceive. I stare through the tram window. I know I will never be the same again. I have had a revelation.
I believe that most of us occasionally experience similar moments in which some new understanding appears in our consciousness and moves us deeply: It opens for us new perspectives, often infusing us with new kinds of energy, or motivating us to embark on a certain action, or to relate to life in novel and unfamiliar ways. We are moved, but not simply because of the verbal content of the new understanding. The idea itself may not be new to us. We may have thought or read about it many times in the past, without being filled with it and moved by it—until today.
For example, some time ago, as I was cleaning my house, my eyes fell on a large grasshopper that was standing on the floor. I turned towards the insect, and it turned towards me. For a few seconds we stood face to face. At that moment I was struck by how similar we were to each other. I could ‘see’ how we both took part in the same urge to self-protect and assert, in the same impetus to individuate ourselves from our environment, how we were both enclosed in our personal concerns and worldviews. This realization inspired in me a sense of intimate connection with all forms of life, while at the same time filling me with a sense of smallness, with a realization of the absurdity of my petty personal concerns, and with a desperate desire to go beyond myself, beyond the particularity of my self-interests.
If I translate this realization into a theory—e.g., that all forms of life are self-enclosed and intimately connected—the result is a disappointing cliché. The theoretical statement does not do justice to the many meanings which the realization had for me and in me. After all, prior to that experience I was familiar with the theoretical idea, and yet it was only an abstract theory which I could recite and analyze in my thoughts. But now, thanks to the experience, the idea was understood in a broader sense, as rich with meanings that were grasped by my entire being. That is why it moved me and transformed me.
Evidently, there is a significant difference between this kind of realization and understanding-in-thought, even if both can be translated into the same verbal statement.
I call these insights ‘bubbles’, because they rise to consciousness just as a bubble rises to the surface from the obscure depth of a lake. Such bubbles are quite common, as I have discovered in my conversations with friends, counselees and students. To me, personally, they are often triggered by words. Thus, I may be half-listening to a boring conversation, or browsing through some books at a bookstore in an airport, when suddenly a sentence grabs my attention. It reverberates inside me and triggers a new understanding that permeates my depths.
This bubble-experience is one specific example of understandings that go beyond mere thought. But they are enough to demonstrate that not all understandings are the same. Different understandings are capable of conveying to us different kinds of meanings in different ways and to different extents, by involving different aspects of our being. Some forms of understanding involve merely our thinking faculty, while others involve more of ourselves, and thus open us to broader and richer horizons of meanings.
This is, of course, not a new idea. Many wisdom and spiritual traditions have developed ways to facilitate various forms of deep understandings, using a variety of techniques: meditations, contemplative reading and writing techniques, and even bodily exercises and spiritual dances. Monastic Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Islamic Sufi school are a few examples of such traditions.
To me these considerations suggest that philo-sophia—as the attempt to understand the foundation of human reality—need not be limited to intellectual argumentation. For too long Western philosophy has been focused almost exclusively on verbal reasoning. It is time now to open ourselves to broader forms of understanding. It is time that philosophers start attending not just to the voice of logical reasoning, but also to other voices of reality.
This, it appears to me, is an inspiring vision especially for philosophical practitioners. Because these deeper forms of understandings are usually born not just in abstract conversations in air-conditioned classrooms, but while riding a bus or looking at an insect or finding ourselves trapped in a boring conversation, or in short—in the midst of everyday life.
