It is not difficult to know a thing; what is difficult is to know how to use what you know.
- Han Feizi, Section 12: “The Difficulties of Persuasion,” translated by Burton Watson.
Some time ago, when lending a novel to a friend, I joked, “I’m happy for you to read it - I won’t have time to read it myself, because I will be too busy doing logic to be living.” I regard my statement as a joke because logic and living are not mutually exclusive - yet that joke made me to realise that I have two quite different clusters of interests. I had subconsciously classified the first as logic and the second as living.
The first cluster is mostly technical: modal logic, multiagent systems, ABMs, and formal models in general. (My day job, so to speak.) The second cluster is what you might call experiential: some activity, some literature, some music, some tea. (What I do in my spare time.) For the most part, my two interests have proceeded independently of each other. There’s a fun interview with Graham Priest that comes to mind:
Q: Does raising kids change your philosophical outlook?
A: Well, I guess it could. It didn't change mine.
Raising children is a task which will undoubtedly change your life, but it should not always be expected to change your philosophical outlook.
I’d perhaps put things another way. The experiential cluster gives energy to the technical one; or perhaps the experiential cluster is a reason to live and the technical cluster is living itself.
As a counterpoint, take Bryan Magee’s account of Popper in Confessions of a Philosopher. In his early life, Popper was extremely active outside of his work: he took part in political events, volunteered to help mentally disturbed children, participated in choirs, and often went mountaineering. But as he grew older he grew more isolated -
Several decades of self-isolation exacted a great toll on Popper’s knowledge and understanding of the world around him . . . after [the 1930′s] he ceased to have much social experience; and because he directed his mind predominantly towards problems in the philosophy of science he also stopped thinking about social questions with his former degree of involvement. The result is that what he had to say on such matters became undernourished and thin.
Other parts of human experience are closed off to me - some by choice, some by lack of interest, and some by lack of ability. But it is impossible to do everything, after all.
If I was a professional photographer, I would like to take the following pictures: a lamp placed underwater and giving light, a waiter serving a briefcase for dinner, someone sleeping in a corner of a room where all the furniture is on the ceiling. In other words, I enjoy juxtaposition. I find the same in my tumblr: brief connections between Wang Yangming and Goethe, Nichijou and Johan van Benthem, Koestler, Mao Zonggang and Szuma Chien, Rabbi Akiva and Lu Meng, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Norbert Wiener, Fincher and Kipling, thoughts on nature, Julian of Norwich and Jimmy Eat World, and Tokugawa Ieyasu and Robert Browning.
At its worst, I think this reveals the incurable dilettante in me: this is exactly what Zhu Xi warned about when he talked about the dangers of shallow learning. At the same time, I cannot find this overly horrific: the word “dilettante” comes from the Italian dilettare, to delight, and diletto, or joy, and I do find joy in these connections.
At its best - well, I quote first Chesterton (who I first saw quoted by Simon Leys):
A man who, deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe.
I do not think that my tendency towards juxtaposition reaches the shallow learning condemned by Zhu Xi or the serious view of the universe envisioned by Chesterton. These are merely thoughts across the surface of my mind - ripples across the surface of a lake - that I thought noteworthy.
Kim [Peek] remembers his vast repository of factual information by weaving the facts he learns together into a mental network of many thousands of different associations and interconnections . . . a word or name spoken in the middle of a sentence would suddenly elicit a flood of loosely related other words, names or facts. Kim would even sometimes respond to a word or fact by bursting into song - the lyrics of which might contain some minor link to what was just mentioned.
- Daniel Tammet, Embracing the Wide Sky, Chapter Three: “Seeing What is Not There.”
