DARWINMANIA

............................... by Stanley

....To talk about the ultimate value of the individual seems absurd set against the 3.5 billion years since life began on the planet earth. Religion has fought hard not to get swamped by it. The question is: are we in the same boat. Does triumph of Darwin pose the same threat to a valid psychology of the person?

....That is seems to do so indicates that we are not at all as sure of ourselves as we might be. Biology seems set to have it all wrapped up. It seems our only recourse is to say that there are things about which science knows nothing. Of course, a good scientist would agree. ‘Certainly there is much we do not know’, but he would add … ‘yet’.

....That little ‘yet’ is threatening. It suggests that eventually he is going to snuff out your soul because he will have found out about all that stuff. Explained it all away. No room for feelings or mystery, or personality, or the great ambiguity of life. You’re gone. Old Egg-Head will claim he has worked it all out. What on earth can we possibly mean by a ‘person-centred psychology’, let alone anything we call the soul? 

....This is a paranoia based on our fragile grasp of what we are doing.  In fact, biology is not our enemy but our friend. True science is a state of wonderment, the same kind of wonderment that stands out on every page of Darwin’s notes as he voyaged around South America in H.M.S Beagle. “The day had passed delightfully”, he wrote. “Delight itself however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian rainforest”.

....There is the true naturalist’s openness to nature. In that sense we do no less than Darwin did and as every genuine scientist does. We stand before nature in the same way, with the same sense of awe – only with us, we stand before human nature.  

....There is no need to retreat into the supernatural in order to hold on to our realities and our values. We don’t have to invoke spiritual agencies, astrological influences, crystal balls, clairvoyance or the gods to escape the clutches of materialism. Neither do we have to fixate on quantum physics to reassure ourselves that even the scientists have passed beyond nature. Science is not about materialism or any kind of ism. It is about humility and a respect for nature as the great unknown. There is no need to create a realm that science cannot reach, because there is room enough in nature to accommodate our most valuable asset: our sense of the infinite vastness of what we do not know.

.....In Darwin’s time the accepted doctrine was that in the beginning God made all the species exactly as they are now. To doubt that for a moment was to face the unknown. It was to doubt what everyone knew. That Darwin did so was an act of great self-confidence and at the same time an act of supreme humility. He was confident enough to humble himself before nature and let it teach him.

....Perhaps the highest human cognition is ‘I don’t know’. This is not the same as the existentialist’s ‘nothing’. It is not the perception of nothingness, but rather that there is a something one does not know. That’s very different. And, more importantly, it is an unknown something that presses to be known. This pressure does not come from another realm, but precisely from what is observably there. Neither does this sense come from dwelling on a realm of unknowables like God, or spirit, or ‘the unconscious’, rather it comes from that which we directly know, what is directly before us. One example: for Darwin it was from the direct observation of the finches on the Galapagos Islands. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what caused the variation in their beak size, but in looking at this obvious fact, there was something pressing to be known. Species change over time and place; that was obvious. But how? Why?

....It isn’t anything outside the observable that this unformed something presses its demands on us like this. It comes directly from what we observe.

....Also, whatever it is, this something cannot be derived from what is observed – it cannot be derived in the sense of ‘deduced from’. The observed form does not directly tell us what the unknown something is that’s pressing to be known. In this situation one’s present knowledge, by definition, has no way, no language, no concepts by which to formulate it…yet. 

....For Darwin, there was something about those finch’s beaks – something that wouldn’t let him go. It was a something which was as yet unformed, not even an idea. But by paying attention to it, a new idea comes. But how do you pay attention to something that isn’t yet an idea? 

....It’s no use saying that the unconscious does it. That just puts the same problem back one step: how does the unconscious form an idea from something that isn’t yet formed as an idea. The fact is, at this point, no one has the idea. 

....This is a philosophical problem and it presses on us to give it attention – which we are doing right here.

....Let’s look at some other concrete instances: if you have a problem, say a machine breaks down or let’s say you don’t know how to write a difficult letter or you don’t know how to finish an essay. What you do is attend to the problem in a certain way; the old thoughts and solutions don’t work, so now you attend to what is before you with a certain openness. Then suddenly the answer flashes on you. Where did the answer come from? Not from you, not from beyond. All we can say with certainty is that it comes from attending to the problem in a certain way, a contemplative looking at the situation rather than thinking. Just the way Darwin observed nature, out of which, eventually, came a new idea that shook the world of science.

....Incidentally, for those who are interested, this is where we part company from post-modernism.

....You may realise that this is the essence of what we call ‘focusing’. Focusing is all about how you attend to an unknown, unformed something in this certain way. 

....However, it is helpful to recognise that the scope of this idea is much broader than that of a psychotherapeutic tool. It is also what we do in good science and philosophy and why we should celebrate Charles Darwin who was, quite naturally, very good at it. Very good at it indeed.