I’ve been collecting a few sayings with a similar shape.
Having antifragility is good. Aiming for it is bad.
— Brian Lui
The way out of mimetic theory is to stop thinking about it so dang much.
— Luke Burgis
The single most important thing is not to look for the single most important thing.
— Jared Diamond
They come from different arguments, but together they suggest something I keep noticing: pursuing a quality directly can undermine the very thing that allows it to arise.
Take this scenario. I sit outside in the 4pm October light. Heat on my neck and face. The grass moves with a breeze I wish would cross me as well. Then I think: “I’m appreciating this.” My attention becomes self-referential. In that shift, the experience can turn into words. A moment ago, I was simply in it.
Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension gives me a way of describing this shift. Some things are understood or achieved by attending through their particulars to the whole they compose. When we turn those particulars into separate objects of scrutiny, we can disrupt the integration that gives them meaning. Language can guide us into that understanding, but cannot substitute for it.
For example, a pianist can read “Cantabile.” The instruction finds its meaning in the playing. Start supervising every finger separately and the playing falls apart. Something similar happens with the directive “be happy”: attention turns towards producing and checking a state, drawing us away from what we were enjoying. Jon Elster calls these “states that are essentially by-products.” Target fixation is another example: naming what we want to avoid can make it the very thing we steer towards. Trying to be safe can interrupt the attention that keeps us safe.
Another example. Say “telephone” over and over, as a mantra with your eyes closed. It becomes meaningless. Your connection to the object goes. In that moment, there is no “telephone” in the word. What was a word is now sound. You have broken linguistic meaning. This is semantic satiation. Alan Watts’s record This Is It comes to mind here. Polanyi uses this example too.
Usually, hearing ‘telephone’ brings the thing to mind. After all that repetition, the reference falls away. What we hear is simply sound.
What joins these examples is participation. Something happens through our involvement, and the attempt to secure its result can draw us out of that involvement. Explicit control can disturb something sustained by participation.
Language lets us step back from an experience, distinguish its parts and examine their relations. We can bring what we learn back into the experience, aware of the difference between our words and what they point towards.
Owen Barfield takes this much further in Saving the Appearances. What Barfield calls ‘final participation’ must be consciously experienced, with imagination becoming an activity through which we perceive.
He finds its beginnings in Goethe’s study of plants: attending to their forms, then following their transformations in imagination, so that the process taking shape through them becomes perceptible.
“The systematic use of imagination, then, will be requisite in the future”, Barfield writes. When receptivity to the world and our imaginative activity are integrated, we can respond to what we encounter while developing our capacity to participate further.
This bears on the instrumental habit of treating everything we encounter as information to extract and put to use. Iain McGilchrist writes “Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” An encounter changes when the first question is always “what can I get from this?”. Even appreciation becomes something to acquire.
Perhaps that’s the interesting thing here: learning to bring consciousness into an engagement without making the engagement answer to our demand for a particular experience.