“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of
many kinds gave me great pleasure, and music very great delight. Even as a
schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. But now for many years I
cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and
found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. My mind seems to have become
a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts,
but why this should have caused the atrophy of that
part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.
The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious
to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature.”1
What an amazingly insightful admission!
Astonishing that Darwin, probably the greatest
scientist of modern times, should see so clearly that his powerful analytical
mind has cut him off from his soul, and the awful cost that entails. He has
lost his ‘aesthetic sense’, which we take to mean the feeling emotion and
sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.
Darwin recognises that
the loss of the aesthetic sense can be detrimental to our ‘moral character’ - a
rather old-fashioned expression, better stated as ‘kindness, gentleness and
sensitivity. Indeed, these qualities only come into being when I am aware of
the other as a person, only when the other person is as real to me as I am to
myself. I need the presence of another subject, a first-person singular who can
be addressed, implored, reasoned with, and loved. Without the aesthetic sense there
is no subject-to-subject encounter. The other person isn’t actually there. I ride rough shod over them and end up
with a distorted version of how they actually are.
Also Darwin sees how the enfeebling of our
emotional nature could be ‘injurious to the intellect’. True. The intellect also fails without the
esthetic sense. You have to feel what is there before you can think about it.
Without the aesthetic sense you tend to ‘intellectualise’, dismissive of small,
but vital details, again riding rough shod over discrepancies in order to bully
reality into being what you want it to be.
The intellect begins with curiosity – and
curiosity is very careful with details. Observation becomes a magical
enthrallment with the finer points of how things actually are – nothing
missed or overlooked. Only then can you afford to think.
The aesthetic sense is not interested in
theories and structures but in the immediacy of sensation, the flow of life
with all its muddle and indeterminacy. But the analytical mind wants a world
that can be relied upon. All the facts and observations that Darwin has
collected must be reduced to rational truths and so he grinds out general laws
that sideline the confusion – very successfully.
This urge to abstract precise
principles from the confusion of the world has been called ‘reductionism’. Booming,
bustling nature gets explained away. Consistency is
the watchword. Oddities get ignored. When something is odd we rush to a general
principle to explain it away.
The urge to diminish confusion drives the
compulsion to have things shipshape, like in the household where everything has
its place. ‘The fruit go there
and the loose veggies there’. Everything in its place and a place for
everything. Have you ever been in a household where absolutely nothing is out
of place? It’s kind of scary. There is no flow, no confusion, no untidiness –
everything is anesthetized and static. That’s interesting, isn’t it: an-esthetized
means a loss of sensation - precisely what Darwin was complaining of.
It’s understandable that Darwin should lose
his love of poetry and music, but why should it nauseate him. His analytical
mind has become so overdeveloped by concentration on establishing principles that
his soul has become ‘atrophied’, as he says. But why should poetry now turn his
stomach, making him feel sick?
I will
hazard that there is something about the thinking mind, the analytical mind,
that is against poetic feeling. The analytical mind doesn’t just neglect
the aesthetic sense, but actually feels threatened by it. The naked
world is too much, too overwhelming. The analytical mind feels terribly unsafe
when confronted by primitive nature. That’s why every morning you forget your
dreams. They don’t fit and so get put down.
Aldous Huxley suggested that the analytical
mind is like a reducing valve.
‘Each
person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to
him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being
overwhelmed’. 2
No wonder Darwin felt sick – and I’m not
feeling too well myself !
1 The Autobiography of Charles
Darwin 1809-1882. Collins, London
1958
2 Huxley,
Aldous. The Doors of Perception, 1952
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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