Contemplation and the Contemporary World
By Katalin Balog, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University – Newark, originally published by 3 Quarks Daily.
As he died to make man holy
Let us die to make things cheap
(Leonard Cohen, “Steer your way”)
In the last few hundred years, since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment – an interlude of romanticism notwithstanding, which brought back a passionate engagement with the sensuous aspect of our mental life – Western culture has changed in ways that provide less encouragement and space for any kind of sustained engagement with our experience.
Part of the reason is not specific to our age. Contemplation is difficult. It is often difficult to become aware of what we feel when many other things claim our attention. On top of that, it requires a certain amount of self-denial: it requires acceptance of the pain and joy that comes with experience, even if it doesn’t cast the self in the most flattering light. This runs against strong forces in human nature. One tries to escape pain whenever possible. Freud has cataloged the powerful built-in mechanisms that help expunge unwanted experiences from consciousness: repression, dissociation, sublimation, etc.
Even a small discomfort can prompt one to turn away from experience. If I pass a homeless person on the street, I might tune out so as not to feel any pangs of guilt for not having helped. As Iris Murdoch has observed, what needs to be learned is “how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.” Contemplation requires the skill to direct attention to what’s going on impartially, without distortion, which is perhaps most difficult when it comes to understanding and empathizing with others.
But our age seems particularly ill-suited to contemplation. We are getting lost in that hopeless little screen, as Leonard Cohen said. It is getting more and more difficult to find the silence, empty places, and the experience of being off the grid that we need to renew our connection to the world. Recent developments in AI also steer us away from contemplation. People think AI, even perhaps soon, will be able to do all the human things, only better, and so we are starting to think that we might not be so different from machines. Robots have become a new metaphor for ourselves. The four horsemen of technology, the internet, social media, AI, and virtual reality, push us away from ourselves and away from the world. But, while we might be forgetting how to contemplate and how to read, we are still the same humans. A future generation perhaps will rediscover what we are now losing.
This article was originally published at 3 Quarks Daily and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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