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The God Delusion

I. On Understanding Things

We often hear it said that philosophical inquiry is largely rooted in the misuse of words. Unfortunately such a viewpoint has the effect of trivializing philosophical inquiry, which takes it upon itself to examine the most serious life issues we face. Yes, philosophical discussion is invariably conducted by means of words. And it is certainly true that professional philosophers (if such a thing can be said to exist) often turn their attention to technical matters of no interest to anyone but a circle of academic colleagues. But when we ask ourselves what “loyalty” or “spirit” or “beauty” is, we're not merely examining words, we're exploring some of the most interesting and problematic aspects of expereince.

One word that we often use and largely take for granted, yet which harbors an array of meanings that might profitably be explored, I think, is the verb “understanding.” What do we mean when we say that we “understand” something?

[Pause here for a moment's reflection.]

Off the top of my head, I can think of several meanings.

1) We may be said to understand something when we see how the various parts function, how they contribute to the overall process or effect. We understand something when we see how it works.

I understand a little of how an internal combustion engine works—the gasoline, the compression, the spark, the piston, the camshaft, etc. I understand a little of how a phonograph works—the grooves, the needle, the electric impulses, the amplifier, the woofers and tweeters, etc. I do not understand how a CD player works, though I know that there is a laser bouncing off the vinyl at some point in the process.

2) We sometime say that we understand an event when we feel we've unearthed what caused it. The bridge collapsed because the metal had been corroded by the salt. etc. etc

3) This same sense of “understanding” might also be applied to people, as reflected in the phase that we have discovered what “makes someone tick.” We understand someone when we can pinpoint the motivation that drives their actions. Yet this equation, character = motivation, is limited in its range of application. Salespeople perhaps make use of it in closing a deal, and we also find ourselves resorting to it when attempting to explain the actions of people we know only slightly but have come to dislike. “He is driven by sheer vanity." "Her ambition knows no bounds." "All they care about is their stupid little poodle.”

With people we know well, our understanding goes deeper, but is also less easy to describe. We celebrate those novelists who can bring a character to life, but most of us would be hard pressed to summons words adequate to describe our friends, their endearing quirks, their admirable dedication to their chosen causes and interests, or the brio with which they tackle a challenge or enliven a social event.

Can we be said to understand these people? I think we can.

These types of understanding are not mutually exclusive. It's possible that we might develop a familiarity with a Haydn string quartet, and come to know how the parts relate to one another—to understand how it “works” as a piece of music. We may feel that with some works of art, our understanding is enhanced by bits of biographical scuttlebutt. We learn what drove the artist to use the images in just that way—we come to understand his or her motives, and therefore, in a sense, what “caused” the work to be shaped the way it is.

But neither of these two ways of looking at a piece will bring us to the heart of a great piece of music. We can arrive at that point only by listening, and sensing, and understanding the “rightness” of the arrangement. Matters of compositional technique fall by the wayside, as do all thought of “motive” or “cause.” Those who appreciate beauty most fully tap into the same source of energy as did those who created those forms in the first place. At that point we are no longer asking what, how, or why. As we listen we are moved, and we come to appreciate, not conceptually—not in a way we could pass on to others—but viscerally, in way that's mysterious and deep.

In other words, we understand art (and people, and lots of other things) in so far as we appreciate it, and feel the rightness of it. All of aesthetics is an attempt to share that feeling with others, to draw a map to the treasure. Lectures are given, TV shows are produced, attempting to put the pieces together, to flesh out the background, to relate the parts to the whole. Although the effort is certainly worthwhile, it is often in vain. We may “get it.” We may not. If we try harder, if we renew our acquaintance with a painting or a film, it may “grow” on us. Then again, maybe not.

Can we say, then, that in appreciating something, we understand it? If we truly appreciate something, do we really need to understand it in any other way?

I have no difficulty accepting the physicist's idea of dimensions—length, width, height, and duration—and I am pleasantly stupefied by the thought that there are several more dimensions lurking in the recesses of time and space, dimly intimated by the logical requirements of string theory and other mathematical stuff. Yet the word “dimension,” used as a singular but all-encompassing adjective, also refers to something a good deal more subtle. When we say that a wine has great “dimension,” we aren't referring to its width, length, or height. Similarly, when we call an actor's performance “one-dimensional,” we are referring not to the space the performance has taken up on the stage (which would be a straight line, if the performance were truly one-dimensional), but to depths of character which the actor has somehow failed to plumb.

(I picked up the weight of this common expression, “dimension,” many years ago from a crusty old priest named Father Stockel at a Catholic retreat, who used it differentiate between flighty, inconsequential people, and those other people who were somehow engaged in life in a serious way.)

This second notion of “dimension” may be said to be metaphorical, I suppose, in so far as the reality to which it refers cannot be measured—the word dimension derives from the word for measurement. Similarly, we often describe something as having body, fiber, atmosphere, texture, gravity, or resonance, without thinking carefully about what it is we're referring to.

Let me suggest that it would be well worth our while to think more carefully about these qualities, which give character and dimension to things. Such an exercise will free us from the unpleasant apprehension that understanding must be equated exclusively with numbers, or with that morose and weighty type of depth that is more often distressing than illuminating.

One of my favorite treatises on aesthetics is Six Memos for the Next Millennium, by Italo Calvino. In these lectures Calvino examines five qualities—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—attempting to show what part they play in artistic creation. His claims for these qualities are not exclusive. For example, he begins his first essay with the comment:

“I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the value of lightness. This does not mean that I consider the virtues of weight any less compelling, buy simply that I have more to say about lightness.”

In point of fact, Calvino is not a weighty writer, or thinker, and the book itself is perhaps more frothy than profound. But it has the great merit of being clear and quick, and Calvino's efforts to focus our attention on particular qualities, one by one, is both admirable and rare, in an age when so many efforts are directed to plumbing the depths to unearth a single overarching cause, motive, formula or equation for everything.

We do not understand things, or people, by viewing them in the light of all-encompassing but simple-minded concepts that strip them of their character and dimension.

It seems to me, on the contrary, that understanding takes us in the opposite direction, drawing us toward the appreciation of nuance, detail, and the relations between things, a pursuit which may lead us in time to a sort of inarticulate love field, wherein we come to feel comfortable, and perhaps might even wish to abide.