I am an inveterate ‘sharer’. The shares that I take most pleasure in1 are ideas: papers, lectures, book extracts, podcasts, tweets. I see this in terms of missionary zeal: I derive pleasure from spreading the word. But the recipient does not always share my enthusiasm. Sometimes this is because I’ve overlooked some error or ulterior motive that a more patient observer would detect. I attribute much of this to a tendency for charitable interpretation. I fill out ideas with the help of memory and imagination; I smooth off the sharp edges. And even though I’m aware of this phenomenon, I miss flaws in what I share, seeing then only after someone else points them out2. But the overlooked flaws — which so often provoke irritation — are not always in the share itself, but in its source.
I’ve read that the main danger of charitable interpretation is that one gives too much credit to the originator of a half-baked idea — the interpreter has done what the original thinker ought to have. Or worse, charity becomes a failure to dam(n) a wellspring of bad behavior. All this may be true, but it is also true that an idea does not necessarily inherit the stupidity or moral turpitude of its broadcasters. If we are less concerned with attributing credit and blame to sources of ideas, then we can treat every idea as a fluctuation or wave in a depersonalized continuum of thinking3. Instead of assigning credit and blame to sources of ideas, we might surf on the ideas themselves and see where they take us.
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Abstract thought carries the whiff of the inhuman: flesh-and-blood persons are elided and concepts become quasi-agents. Perhaps anthropomorphization is not such a bad thing – it may enable an idea to speak on its own terms, independent of its upbringing. Sorting ideas into bins — personal, ethnic, historical, national, political — could block engagement with them. Conversely, thinkers who are aware that the lineage of an idea can engender suspicion may be tempted to pour old wine in new bottles. The proliferation of jargon and redundant synonym may arise in part from a desire to clear away inconvenient associations4. If someone does not like hearing the word ‘wheel’ because their ancestors were crushed under the wheel of an imperialist oppressor, then it may make sense to rechristen it a chakra. We cannot beat swords into plowshares if we are not allowed to wash away the bloodstains of earlier massacres.
These days there is no shortage of raw material to beat into any number of cognitive tools. Or, to return to an earlier metaphor, we can say that the sea of ideas is rather choppy — it isn’t always clear which waves are worth surfing on. In turbulent situations, we need to whittle down the space of options. So before making eye contact with a new idea, we glance at the company it keeps. This creates a classic trade-off: we want to avoid being inundated with pretty but useless ideas — or worse, wolf-ideas in sheep-idea clothing — but at the same time we do not want to close ourselves off to novelty and discovery5.
Here the wave metaphor can morph into a musical metaphor. We can’t enjoy any old vibration coming in from the ether. Our personal, cultural, and evolutionary histories mean that we spontaneously resonate with particular frequencies. And yet we are not so rigid that historical conditioning is our fate; we are flexible, plastic, adaptable. Even if we must use filters to keep discordant sounds from our cognitive concert halls, we can re-tune so as to pick up vibrations that harmonize with the ongoing improvisation between Self and Other. Many of the red flags triggered by an idea may stem from unfamiliarity rather than real discord. Equipped with an open musical spirit, we may find that underneath the alien timbres there are frequencies and rhythms that not only jibe with what we are already doing, but also enrich the performance, opening up the space of the possible for growth and exploration.
Roots and routes: some bibliographical strands
Some years ago I came across a beautiful paper on resonant interpretation by an anthropologist named Unni Wikan: Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance. The article describes her experiences of resonant communication in several countries, and how this way of approaching people could transcend the gulfs of culture that some anthropologists consider unbridgeable. While in Bali, Wikan knew a poet and professor who explained the local concept of resonance (ngelah keneh) to her:
“It is what fosters empathy or compassion. Without resonance there can be no understanding, no appreciation. But resonance requires you [and here he looked entreatingly at me] to apply feeling as well as thought. Indeed, feeling is the more essential, for without feeling we’ll remain entangled in illusions.”
Wikan, Unni. “Beyond the words: the power of resonance.” American ethnologist 19, no. 3 (1992): 460-482.
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Last year I read a striking book called Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought, by Brook Ziporyn. It is an exploration of an aspect of Chinese thought that throws much of western metaphysics into stark relief. China never had a ‘realist’ philosophy along the lines of Plato, and therefore never witnessed a nominalist antithesis. Chinese thinkers didn’t feel the need to posit a reality independent of human beings. Instead, they focusing on coherence — among people, and between people and nature6. Coherence — the character li 理 in Chinese — does not depend on stable, eternal universals7, but instead on a dynamic and history-sensitive harmony.
What is called for in order to find a coherence among diverse items is not determinately the same in each step, but whatever can cohere—bring diverse parts together so as to become readable as something single and determinate—with the existing situation or the preceding steps. It is something that harmonizes with what came before, not something that repeats what came before.
Ziporyn, Brook. Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li. SUNY Press, 2012.
The Chinese notion of harmony (the character he 和) does not apply solely to music, but can also connote the coming together of flavors in a dish.
Chan interprets the musical metaphor as tending toward a sense of hierarchy and compliance, on the model of a ruling melodic tone or a prior note which is subsequently harmonized with, with the food metaphor offering a more pluralist implication of diverse elements contributing equally to a collective flavor, each preserving its own individual character and without any of them necessarily leading or dominating the others.
ibid.
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The notion of harmonious food8, in which every component is able to complement all the others without dominating, resonates (!) with how I think about jazz. A jazz ensemble can improvise without the top-down influence of composer and conductor. Each player contributes to an emergent whole, but can still explore their individuality — for example, through solos. The improvisational spirit in music hints at an interesting spin on the Pythagorean notion of the music of the spheres. Whereas the classical spheres seem to twirl in a symmetrical waltz conducted by a primordial One, the jazzy ellipses of the Many engage in a collective, syncopated jam, always open to fresh rhythms and harmonic invention9.
Notes
- apart from music, of course.
- Perhaps everyone engages in what we might (charitably!) call socialized thinking?
- The idea of delocalized ideas puts me of in mind of electrons in a metal — they part ways with their native atoms and merge into an ‘electron sea’.
- Granted, sheer reinvention of the wheel cannot be ruled out.
- This type of trade-off has deep connections with the nature of life, learning, and curiosity.
- With the arrival of Taoism, ironic coherence enters the scene: the idea that coherence rests, in some sense, on a foundation of incoherence.
- which we might choose to frame in terms of the notion of invariance or symmetry, as I illustrate in this essay.
- Indian cuisine seems to be particularly focused on emergent flavors that are different from the sum of their parts.
- This jazzy metaphysics is something I have written about here and on 3 Quarks Daily , but I still haven’t quite done justice to it. I also gave a short talk on this as part of an ‘extracurricular’ talk series — it’s on YouTube.
