It’s about time we had some more visual art on the site. Norma Smith did a series of blogs on paintings during the first year of the site’s existence, but since she stopped doing those we’ve had very little art. I’m going to try to post occasional art blogs about paintings I find meaningful in relation to the Middle Way, but others are welcome to contribute likewise when they feel inspired.
The picture I’m going to look at is Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (click picture below to enlarge).
The painting depicts the building of the Tower of Babel, as described in Genesis 11. The story (for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with it) is that in ancient times people all spoke one single language. They gathered in one place (Babel, i.e. Babylon), developed brick-making, and built a city. They set out to build a tower into the heavens. God saw them doing this, and complained “now they have started to do this, nothing will be beyond their reach.” So to stop them, he confused their language and dispersed them, so that they would not be able to work together in building the tower.
Bruegel imagines the tower under construction, under the command of a king, and using technology very much of his own time rather than of ancient Babylon. But for us the anachronism can be a good prompt to understand the painting symbolically, not as a depiction of a historical event. The Tower of Babel has often been interpreted as symbolic of pride: of humans trying to be like God, but not succeeding, and being punished for their hubris.
But we could go a bit further than this in interpreting the painting. It’s a depiction of a massive construction project: think of the Three Gorges Dam. The planners think they’ve got it all worked out, but fail to take into account the unknown unknowns. What are the conditions that really operate when you build that high? It points out a limitation in utilitarian-type thinking which fails to take into account the degree of human ignorance.
But the story also closely links the planning and the over-ambitious goal with language, and in doing that it can represent the close relationship between representational language and goal-orientation in the left hemisphere of the brain. The tendency of the left hemisphere, when it gets over-dominant and neglects the Middle Way, is to think its beliefs are completely accurate, and that its words correspond with reality. The ‘dispersal’ of the builders and the loss of a single language could be related to the recognition that we don’t communicate in that way: our language has no absolute meaning, but rather its meaning depends on what is experienced by each person. The linguistic assumptions in our big plans are thus dangerous and precarious ones. We think the words in our plans must correspond to things in the world, but they may not do so at all.
Bruegel represents the pomp and power of the organising king with his big plan in the bottom left-hand corner, with his servants prostrating themselves before him. But given what virtually everyone viewing the painting will know about the subsequent fate of his construction, this power seems empty. Like Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq War, he probably throws all warnings about his tower into the waste paper basket, but things turn out rather differently from his obsessive projections.
I used to have colleague who could never use a straightforward phrase about the start or beginning of anything: instead, he’d say “Your starter for ten is…”. I’m not even quite sure where this particular catch phrase comes from (I suspect some past TV quiz game). He had a great many other similar verbal mannerisms, which I would sometimes find irritating. Similar feelings assail me when I look at a rack of popular greetings cards like that pictured below. However, both then and now, I find it difficult to justify my irritation. What is, after all, wrong with cliché? Why shouldn’t people talk (and write) in whatever ways they like? Is it just a kind of cultural snobbery to decry it?
I put my own instinctive responses to cliché down largely to early literary study, as the first subject I studied at university was English Literature (before later changing courses), and one of my earliest aspirations was to be a poet. In both literary and creative writing circles (especially poetic ones) cliché is the ultimate social no-no: the basis on which unsatisfactory texts are dismissed and the prime way we tell good poems from bad ones. One of the prime values we were looking for in culture was freshness in the use of metaphor. But, looking back, nobody in those circles ever gave me a reason why this was such an important aesthetic imperative. It seemed to be simply a matter of social agreement. Sometimes I would disagree, fro example when I found that a text that might be otherwise described as ‘littered with clichés’ did also have something interesting to say. The content did seem to me more important than the form, and too much focus on the avoidance of cliché can make one focus disproportionately on the form.
But now, looking back at these issues from the standpoint of Middle Way Philosophy, I do think that there are some good reasons for generally trying to avoid cliché in one’s own writing and speech (or, to put this more positively, trying to use fresh metaphors to convey our experience). It comes down to trying not to entrench over-used synaptic tracks. If we rely over-much on one particular kind of language, this will tend on the whole to propel our thoughts down certain well-accustomed routes. Our judgements and thus our beliefs may then more easily become rigid, and ill-adapted to new circumstances. Even philosophers and scientists, who deal primarily with the assessment of beliefs, may thus benefit from some attention to the words they are using to express their beliefs. The arts, with their emphasis on developing new metaphors and new symbols, can help to constantly expand the resources we have to draw on to develop more adequate ideas about things. Our concern with such things does matter, because we are modelling our brains and their capacities as we choose one word or another.
But at the same time it also seems important not to absolutise this general rule. There may often be an asymmetry between the originality of our language and the originality of our ideas, and some people may be better at making full use of limited linguistic resources whilst others squander the immense linguistic resources on developing inconsequential ideas. The relative importance of avoiding cliché also depends very much on where you start. For some people expressing their thoughts in any kind of language, however hackneyed, may be a big step forward. What may be a cliché to us may also not be to them, because of differences in culture and experience.
The variability of what people consider to be a cliché can be judged from an interesting Wikipedia list of words that have been ‘banished’ by bodies such as the BBC and New York Times because they are considered clichéd. Some of these words seem to be in widespread general use (“conversation”), but perhaps become clichés when used in a particular way. Some are probably clichés in particular contexts unfamiliar to me, such as ‘walk it back’. There’s no mention of the ones that irritate me most, which tend to be the language of an exclusive group (obviously not one I belong to) that is unthinkingly assumed to be universal (e.g. ‘lolcats’ or ‘man flu’).
My suggestion for the general avoidance of cliché is just not to try too hard. Sometimes an original metaphor may come to you, but generally straightforward, moderately formal language does the job best. Instead of ‘Your starter for ten’, you could just boringly say ‘We’ll start with…’. Instead of ‘lol’ you could just say ‘that’s funny’. The more straightforward the language, the wider the range of people it will communicate with. An association between clichés and in-groups may thus be avoided, and any tendency you have to assume a certain limited audience for what you want to say also challenged.
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
I thought it would be good to follow up my recent essay on scepticism (which points out that we have no access to truth) with some positive comments about truth as a symbol. I was also particularly moved recently by finding this picture in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is an anonymous picture, dated about 1620-30, called ‘Truth presenting a mirror to the vanities of the world’.
(c) The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Artistic depictions of Truth as an allegorical figure are interesting. They are overwhelmingly female, and sometimes naked (obviously reflecting the idea of ‘disclosure’). This Truth, on the other hand, is sumptuously robed and dignified. Her expression seems appropriately severe. The use of a mirror to symbolise truth is widespread, and can be interpreted both as an indication that we should confront uncomfortable facts about ourselves, and also that we should look at our own role in creating the ‘truths’ we believe in. The skull is obviously a reminder of the ‘truth’ of impermanence and death, that we may often fail to face up to. What I found particularly striking here, though, is that Truth is also holding up a pair of scales. That suggests a particular emphasis on the need to balance our judgements in order to get closer to truth, a direct suggestion of the Middle Way as well as related philosophical ideas such as that of ‘reflective equilibrium’. From the Middle Way point of view, positive or negative metaphysical extremes would distort the scales either way, preventing the much more subtle balancing of the scales required to make judgements in experience.
As a sceptic, I don’t believe that we can have access to truth (and saying this is not itself a truth-claim but rather just facing up to our embodiment and inability to be God). However, that doesn’t in any way prevent us from imagining and symbolising truth. Indeed, maintaining truth as an ideal, and relating to it positively, seems to me an important process. There is no contradiction here. We can, at one and the same time, honour or even worship truth, whilst recognising our inability to access it. Indeed, at a more profound level it is our very commitment to truth as an ideal that drives us to recognise that we do not have it. That commitment (or faith) in truth does not consist in propositions about truth that are claimed to be true (or false), but in the meaningfulness of truth to me. I may have all sorts of neural connections that enable me to respond to ideas of truth, these being linked into embodied experience and activity in all sorts of ways, but none of these are so entrenched (I hope) that they result in claims that such-and-such is formally true.
The embodied nature of what truth can mean for us is evident in this picture, as all the ways that truth is depicted are not about ‘the truth’ itself, but rather about ways that we need to face up to conditions that we are resistant to. The scales, as I have already mentioned, are a more directly embodied metaphor for the judgement process. The mirror and skull are directly associated with often unwelcome recognitions of the imperfection of our bodies. But the woman herself is also an embodiment of truth rather than an abstraction from it, and can remind us of some facets of the meaning of truth for us: dignified, restrained, and slightly severe.
‘Truth’ has sometimes been relativised by pragmatic philosophers (such as Nietzsche and William James), who would talk about ‘our truth’ rather than ‘the truth itself’. This does reflect ordinary informal usage, where I’m quite happy to admit that the phrase ‘That’s true’ does sometimes cross my lips, meaning ‘that accords with my experience and understanding’. But in my view truth has too much dignity – is too sacred, if you like – to be treated in this way on the more formal occasions when we talk or write more reflectively about it. It’s only because we find truth meaningful in this way, and preserve its symbolic absoluteness, that we are able to be sceptical when it comes to truth claims. Indeed, it seems to me that sceptics are the people who find truth most meaningful, at the same time as recognising fully that they have never met with her in person.
The metaphor of ‘truth as a woman’ was famously developed by Nietzsche at the beginning of his ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:
Supposing truth to be a woman – what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have little understanding of women? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench? Certainly she has not let herself be won – and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged.
An attractively embodied point of view, though obviously a very male one. ‘Clumsy importunity’, though, seems quite an appropriate metaphor for how many people, male or female, treat truth. They completely misjudge her, thinking she’s like them and can easily be made part of the group. Beyond that, however, perhaps we shouldn’t push Nietzsche’s analogy too far. It is not so much Truth that has not let herself be won, but rather us who are incapable of winning her.
Some of the ‘dogmatic philosophers’ attacked by Nietzsche for importuning truth have more recently taken to more indirect, hypothetical appeals to her. The truth-dependent theory of meaning widely accepted in analytic philosophy is something like a fake cheque supposedly drawing on Truth’s bank account. We’re told that a certain claim is meaningful because we understand the circumstances in which it would be true – even though, in practice, we have never experienced and never could experience an occasion when we know anything to be true. If we were ever to pay in the cheque, rather than just passing it round as a medium of exchange, payment would be refused, because Truth does not let her account be drawn on in such a way. Hypothetical appeals to truth in practice have nothing stronger than convention to draw on.
As a symbol, Truth can also be understood as another version of the God archetype recognised by Jung. If the archetypal God in our experience is a forward projection of the possibility of our integration, Truth is very much the same, for the outward process of removing delusive barriers reflects the inner one of removing conflict: in both cases it is absolutisations that stand in our way. Just as those who really have respect for truth should not claim to possess it, similarly those who really have respect for God should not claim to be in possession of revelations that reflect God’s will.
The acceptance of truth as meaningful at the same time as recognising that we don’t possess it is a difficult balancing act, but, I think, a crucial aspect of the Middle Way. There are lots of judgement calls as to where the boundaries between truth-claim and truth-meaning lie, and different people may disagree on exactly where they lie in different cases. But if you want to practise the Middle Way, I think it is the overall balancing intention that is important here. Not getting sucked into claims about truth or falsity requires resolution on the one hand, but respect for truth as a symbol of what is out there may be equally important.
