Notice the devilishly mis-leading use of the supposedly non-contrasting co-ordinating conjunction 'and'...Is this proof that grammarians are the minions of Satan..? Or, is it a case of my blog's namesake at work..?
Above, for example, I can provide a simple hyper-link to 'reason', but for 'passion', at the very least, I must distinguish between passion as emotion and passion as a philosophical concept.
A quick perusal of these two terms and we're immediately plunged into worlds of contrasts and dichotomies; sometimes in violent opposition, but almost exclusively polarized into camps.
I think it safe to say that not only do we come by polarizing honestly, but that it serves us to do so. To understand the world around us as well as our place within it--and amongst one another--we need to separate things, to name and identify them, so as to then understand the relationships between these things.
We learn by analogy, by referring one thing to another; by simile, metaphor, and allegory...even, by stereotype.
And, this has, for the most part, served us well; this heuristic approach.
Where it appears to fails us (ah, personification) occurs when we forget to put the artificially--however necessarily--parts back together again. The heuristic has not failed us, we have failed to fully and properly used the heuristic.
Sometimes the effect of this error--when we take something apart and forget to put it back together again--ends in one of the things becomes an Other.
Out of this, great suffering and harm has been inflicted by ourselves upon ourselves. But, let's not throw the proverbial baby out with the bath-water. Discarding an ill-used device only ignores the part we have played in it, and, ironically, this causes further harm. In so doing, we not only deny ourselves the device but also the opportunity to see into ourselves, to learn from our errors, to grow. By mis-placing the blame we enslave ourselves.
Furthermore, discarding an otherwise powerful device for a lesser one is also a colossal waste of time. At the danger of sounding like Mr. Spock: "It is inefficient. It is ill-logical." More to the point: it is digressive, if not regressive.
If one fails to read a compass properly, throwing away the compass is more than ill-advised.
Dichotomies, as such, are commonplace: 'good and evil', 'night and day', 'friends and foes', 'male and female', 'black and white', 'freedom and slavery'...'beginning and end'...
In a journey (cliches aside)--any journey--one need know where one is to know where one wishes to begin before knowing where one desires to end; however, it is only the most timid explorer whose 'journey' is seen only through the lines on a map; who myopically sees the 'start' and 'end' through longitudes and latitudes; who measures success through confirmation of place as determined via triangulation.
Here, there is no 'journey' at all. Remember: "All work and no play [made] Jack a dull boy..."
Yet a journey without preparation or goal is, equally, no journey at all. If one has no idea of where one is going, nor plan as to how to get there, he or she cannot lay claim to have found anything nor arrived anywhere, rather to have merely stumbled upon. "Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning" opens the journey of Peter and his companions to Neverland. It should also be remembered that Peter made this up to impress Wendy, and they only found Neverland because Neverland was looking for them....
Somewhere in between lies balance: somewhere between 'purpose and purposelessness'.
'Reason' and 'Passion' then are perhaps best seen as symbolic of something much larger than the sum of their parts, and certainly best understood far beyond their dictionary definitions. Individually, they are dissected only to be better understood.
We could call this 'exploratory surgery', I suppose.
We separate these two ideas so as to better understand them. We then move--converge--to re-assemble them. Out of this we hope to know--to have learned--something greater than that which we started with.
E.O Wilson referred to this as 'emergence'; and in history it is akin to conjuncture. Joyce simply called it 'epiphany'. It is the moment when we realize that, once reassembled, the thing is more than we had known, and more than we could ever have imagined. The whole is now greater.
Here, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding: "We shall never cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."
Yet, read the fine print: there will be struggle and tension in this project.
It is the very tension between the 'known' and the 'unknown', the need to dissect tethered to the struggle to reassemble, and the necessity of not leaving well enough alone, where treasure hides: "Here there be dragons."
So: 'reason and passion', the Odd Couple, perhaps, but at least together again.
In re-assembling the two, and keeping the symbolic nature of each in mind, I found myself reminded of several images that, in coming to understand them, I also came to understand 'reason' and 'passion' a little better.
First, there is the Taoist symbol for the concept of Taiji (yin and yang), called the Taijitu:
The purpose of this symbol is to represent contrasting, yet inter-connected and inter-dependent, forces within the universe and, thus, within ourselves.
It is important to avoid the trap of seeing this symbol two-dimensionally and statically. It is better to imagine it as fluid, dynamic, ever-changing...even elusive.
By elusive I imagine myself trying to touch a point within the taijitu as akin to my attempt to understanding a concept, yet, when you are about to make physical contact the thing moves. It is still present, you can still see it, and you can certainly reach for it, but you can never fully make contact with it.
This isn't futile--quite the opposite. In inter-acting with it you come to connect with it, to engage it, to develop a relationship with it. This is, then, similar to relationships. As you get to know another person, you connect with them, you engage with them, you're developing a relationship with them--yet, you will never fully understand them, let alone become them. But, no one would see this dynamic as futile.
Clearly, this most common version of the symbol is neither the property of a specific worldview or religion anymore than it is to be understood and engaged with in such a static manner:
And, such adaptation and re-investigation, is no less meaningful than the so-called original.
Art is, after all, taking the commonplace and re-presenting it uncommonly--even shockingly--to force us into engaging with what we have forgotten or have taken for granted (my definition of art).
The second symbol is M.C Escher's "Humanity":
In this print we're presented with two all too common dichotomies: woman and man. The tension and contradiction of the Odd Couple pales in comparison! Yet, when you follow the 'rinds' in the hopes of finding the 'end' there is none: they are as inter-connected (notice the rind on their fore-head), as they are inter-dependent (one rind) upon one another.
Wrap them together and you have a whole; a complete being (I would like to believe that Escher would, if he were alive today, have absolutely no difficulty in presenting another version representing same-sex unions and marriages).
At the same time--viewed as they are disconnected--we can fill in the gaps to discern a complete individual yet, paradoxically, cannot do so without realizing that there are gaps. These 'gaps' are, perhaps, simply the recognition that even though we can identify ourselves, we can never completely identify ourselves.
Again, like the taijitu, we need to see this at once static and dynamic to understand my previous comment. When we stop time and see this as static and two-dimensional, we see the aforementioned inter-connectivity, inter-dependency, and incompleteness.
If we see this as dynamic (also), we see that not only can we never know ourselves completely (that is, in regards to the picture, see it without gaps), but that to do so is as impossible as it would be inadvisable. That is to say, we would have reached an 'end-game', or 'zero-sum' point. We'd cease to develop...I believe we call this death.
Seeing ourselves as 'complete' as such we'd have nowhere to go to. We must keep an eye on the past, yet not be prisoners to it; we must look to the future, yet not forget the past. If we exist too much in one or the other we're living a lie as it were--our identity, our perception of ourselves, would be false, or at least oblique and obscured.
The final symbolic image I am reminded of is also from Escher. It's called the Mobius Band, and it has many incarnations (and for good reason); it is also an excellent segue from the previous image:
And, so we emerge.
In Escher's pictures the concept of time is a paradox. It is sublime in "Humanity," but it is at the forefront in the Mobius Band.
Here, time is a double paradox. On one level, as a static picture, the picture--and time--are impossible. The picture represents movement, yet there is no movement. It also represents, two dimensionally, a paradoxically three-dimensional situation--equally impossible. Yet, there it is. The ants, painted upon a two-dimensional canvas, are above and below one another. They're going forward, but nowhere. They're doing so ad infinitum without ever actually moving.
Yet, the second level, we the viewers are the third dimension--possible and yet impossible. We, by our very engagement, are existing in an impossible situation. We're giving dimension, movement, and time to that which cannot posses any of these qualities, and yet it does.
Perhaps then not so much impossible, as improbable..?
Here, although in as much danger of going cross-eyed as Austin Powers was when faced with the potential of visiting himself when time-travelling, I hear Sherlock Holmes whispering into my consciousness: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
...Reason and Passion...night and day....good and evil....woman and man....things of little meaning alone.
But, combined, representative of unimaginable struggle highlighted by epiphanies unknown yet wonderous on a journey never-ending.
If we accept this, if we adjust it to reflect these perspectives, and if we remove the non-contrasting, co-ordinating conjunction, do we emerge with a new and more meaningful way of expressing what the paradoxical inter-section of 'reason' and 'passion' is?
Or, do we already have a phrase for it?
Is this not a 'terrible beauty'..?
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