Neat Divisions

Posted on August 19, 2002 in Thinking

Neat divisions, after centuries of science and reason, should be suspect. Rainbow takes me to task rather mildly over this sentence from yesterday:

My sole problem with Karen is that she accepts as doctrine the shibboleth that the military might of United States has been and will be used to further democracy.

What exactly is the problem? she asks. Do you have a problem with Karen personally or with her opinions?

As I said at the outset, neat divisions like mind vs. body, soul vs. body, etc., should be suspect after the insights we have gleaned from scientific research and philosophical investigation. These distinctions are useful, but only lightly. They certainly shouldn’t be employed to rebut someone who makes a statement like the one I just made.

Our reason leads us to paradoxes and uncertainties. Rainbow has touched on one. Here it is, spelled out — These things are all true:

• Karen has opinions
  
• Karen’s opinions are not Karen.
  
• Karen’s opinions are a part of Karen. Things that are a part of Karen are Karen.
  
• When we question Karen’s opinions, we question Karen for having them.
  
• When we have a problem with Karen’s opinions, we have a problem with Karen because she is the actor who voices them and who holds them.

Can we live comfortably in a world of the mind where we can’t tell the apples from the oranges? I think it is all in the handling of the intellectual objects, myself. The way I live it is that while I do not like a certain opinion that Karen holds and though I accurately hold that is a part of Karen’s personality or at least a result of it, I can still like Karen. There’s an even more insidious syllogism behind the one Rainbow raises, one that many thoughtful people discover and confront in themselves every day. It’s not a sickness. It’s part of the confusion and the uncertainty of the thinking life. And that syllogism is “A friend of a friend is a friend. An enemy of a friend is an enemy. A friend of an enemy is an enemy. An enemy of an enemy is a friend.”

Seeing how this is applied in the very debate that Karen and I face together makes it easy to understand any one’s nervousness about declarations like “my problem with Karen”. I don’t think so simply about my friends. I associate with people who disagree with me on the Israel/Palestine issue, for example, but stand firmly beside me on things like civil rights for all persons, human rights, and the unsuitability of George Bush. Are they my enemies because I feel we should take a good second look at the aid we give to Israel and cut much of it away as an incentive for them to make peace with Palestine? Friends can agree to disagree, the right to which I feel Karen Zipdrive is an ally in the fight to preserve. And I suspect Rainbow is there, too. I have some problems with my wife (like the fact that she forgets to leave a note when she goes out to do something like change the oil, leaving me no idea where she has gone, like she did on Saturday), but I still love her.

Reason seems neat and easy, but I feel that it is when we apply it too stringently and simple-mindedly that it gets us into trouble. This is the “foolish consistency” of which Emerson speaks, except I feel that smart people are just as subject to its hobgoblins at times as small minds always seem to be.