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I'm a dilettante. My governing word is “curiosity.”
- Ian Hacking
Let me begin by saying that I enthusiastically embrace my status as a dilettante; my doctoral dissertation was on the virtues of frivolity as a way into imagination, pulling from Kant’s work on the “purposefulness of purposelessness.”
Often, when I am seeking inspiration for an article or a talk, I’ll go on a meandering quest to find an unexpected spark of wonder or rebellion, from etymological gleanings or a fortuitous quote.
A Philosophical Paradox
This quote from philosopher Ian Hacking did the trick. Hacking was a prodigious and vastly curious thinker, in the arguably most dilettante field in the world: philosophy), whose thinking spanned science, math, phenomena, probability, metaphysics, and human nature, and more. He has inspired and goaded scholars in a wide range of fields to shake out un-regarded assumptions about their thought constructs.
He was also a nominalist, which might simply be defined as the notion that the world is made exclusively from particulars and any universals are of our own making.
As a mythologist, I find the idea of a curious dilettante philosopher who dives into the world of metaphysics and challenges ideas about what does and doesn’t actually exist really tempting. For me, the most enduring definition of myth comes from Sallustius, in his treatise on fourth-century Hellenic paganism, On the Gods and the Cosmos: "Myth is what never was but always is" and “Now these things never happened, but always are.”
In this definition, myth becomes that which is simultaneously least and most true, sitting in the duality of what is real and what is not, and combined with the energy of metaphor–to transfer–finding insights and meaning in the abstract connections between ideas. For me, this is the heart of the logos that sits within mythos and is its greatest strength.
On A Razor and an Ass
However, building on the work of medieval philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (1288-1348) and philosopher Jean Buridan (1300-1358), various forms of nominalism challenge the ideas of universals and abstract objects.
Ockham, of course, remains in modern awareness through his Razor, which pop culture has translated as “the simplest explanation is usually the best one.” A more nuanced version of the idea that is bandied about in philosophical circles, though also not in precisely Ockham’s words, is Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity."
Much of the work in mythology, particularly when perceived through lenses such as those shaped by C.G. Jung and his work on the collective unconscious, as well as Joseph Campbell’s instinct as a literature scholar to look for larger patterns, multiply entities with ruthless enthusiasm.
However, I believe that the cold light of questioning those multiplicities that the nominalists encourage is a viable discipline. In a field that can get rather repulsively precious about its broad embrace of the meta, a dash of the empiric can be precise and demanding. As I think about this, I feel the tug of the concrete. It holds its own allures. I find myself frozen between the binaries, wondering which might bring clearer understanding.
I find myself frozen between the binaries, wondering which might bring clearer understanding.
Like Ockham, Buridan has also stayed with us, not in a razor’s edge, but in the conundrum of an ass, faced by two equally delectable piles of hay. This image emerged long before Buridan’s work, but it was re-energized in a satirical reduction of his work on empiricism, determinism and free will.
From a particularly irreverent portion of my dissertation; a dictionary of words both frivolous and frivolously defined:
Buridan’s Ass
Starve with reason
Flourish without
Sometimes to act
Is better than doubt
Melander, The Pointless Revolution: Frivolity and The Serious Business Of Subversive Creativity. 2005. Unpublished.
Towards Curiosity and Wonder
I think that Ian Hacking would challenge the idea that these must be binary. He characterized himself as a transcendental nominalist, which in itself is a delicious bit on non-binary ontology.
Philosopher Peter Kügler illuminates how this actually connects into the logic of the non-empirical, in an article on ontological relativism and transcendental nominalism, stating:
Transcendental nominalism construes the pre-conceptual as an experience of individuals. Following a suggestion by Dominik Perler, we may understand this experience, which medieval nominalists called “sensory intuitive cognition”, as encoding information about individuals in analog form … Conceptual schemes classify individuals, particularly objects of experience. They do not structure an unstructured something, nor do they “carve nature at the joints.” (269-278)
And from Ian Hacking himself, in his obituary in the New York Times:
Even in retirement, Professor Hacking maintained his trademark sense of wonder.
In a 2009 interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, conducted in the garden of his Toronto home, he pointed to a wasp buzzing near a rose, which he said reminded him of the physics principle of nonlocality—the direct influence of one object on another distant object—which was the subject of a talk he had recently heard by the physicist Nicolas Gisin.
Professor Hacking wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality—if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”
“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”
In the spirit of the dilettante (and the ass, of course), I wonder if the answer is to toss all of the hay up into the air and eat with relish. Perhaps the methodology is less important than the question itself. Be curious. And eat.
MythBlast authored by:
Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss
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This Week's Highlights
"Then there is the problem of what’s known as the generalist against the specialist. Just as in medicine, sometimes it’s better to go to a generalist than to a specialist—depends on what your problem is. A specialist can come up and say, in all seriousness, “The people in the Congo have five fingers on their right hand.” If I say, “Well, the people in Alaska have five fingers on their right hand,” I’m called a generalist. And if I say that the people in the caves in 30,000 B.C. had five fingers on their right hand, I’m a mystic!"
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning 237-238