New Proverb

A full stomach comes before an eager mind;
An empty stomach can overwhelm a hungry heart.

- Colin Burch

Another thought on 'knowing'

Related to yesterday's post is a quote by G.K. Chesterton, who seemed to think merely abstract thinking couldn't provide an adequate account of life, human experience, and the ultimate nature of things.

Chesterton wrote that "scrappy" evidence can convince the mind of atheism just as well as Christianity (addressing how we know things, not so much what our position on some point of view might be). Chesterton continued to write, "I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books than from one book, one battle, one landscape and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion."

It's sort of like this: all aspects of our experience lead us to the convictions of our hearts, and from our hearts we choose our perspectives. C.S. Peirce knew this to be true when he wrote, "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." I hope to find Peirce's definition of "heart."

The knowing heart?

The other day I had a brief conversation with a doctor who specializes in neuro-feedback. He said Western folks live out their heads, while Eastern folks live out of their hearts. When we try too hard to do something, he said, we usually don’t do it so well. In a zen-like fashion, corresponding with neuro-feedback therapy (or at least theory), when we’re not straining to do something, we usually have more success doing it.

It occurred to me later that, even in the West, we have a thread of understanding that places the heart at the center of our essential nature. Historically, the West has not been completely wedded to the left hemisphere of the brain.

Several years ago, I found a passage from Thomas de Quincey that tried to describe the heart’s role. In The Poetry of Pope, de Quincey wrote, “The scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or co-operation with the mere discursive understanding; when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of ‘the understanding heart’ – making the heart, i.e., the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite.”

Can we know with our hearts? I’ve been trying to define “heart” in the sense that de Quincey uses it, and so far I haven’t been able to construct an adequate definition from my research of theological and philosophical ideas. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see how some thinkers didn’t believe the left-hemisphere empiricism could say everything important to being human.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher living in the 1600s, looked out into the darkness beyond the outposts of his rational faculties and said, “It is reason’s last step to realize that there are millions of things beyond reason.”

Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher, wrote in his book The Tacit Dimension, “We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Something is going on in us that is valuable yet not centered in the left hemisphere of our brains. This opens a whole can of worms regarding intuition, mind-brain issues, spirituality, and the nature of the “heart” as de Quincey uses it.

Hearts & philosophies

The philosopher Charles S. Peirce wrote, "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his Nobel Lecture on Literature, wrote, "It is in vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm."

So what do we make of our hearts?

Blaise Pascal so famously said the following, it's almost cliche to bring it up: "The heart has reasons that Reason cannot know."

The evangelical apologist Ravi Zacharias wants to reverse Pascal's flow: "What I believe in my heart must make sense in my mind," Zacharias once said.

The problem here might just be the idea of a flow between heart and mind. What if the human being was intended to be an integrated whole, not an assembly of competing parts?