THE SPOTLESS MIND
LEISURE AND THE LIFE OF THE MIND
Albert R. Jonsen
Chit Chat Club
January 9, 2012
Cicero, banished from Roman political life and dwelling at
his beloved Sabine farm, defined his retirement as Otium cum dignitate, “leisure with dignity.” [1]
The Latin word for business is negotium,
which is literally “not leisure.”
Leisure is “not business,” that is leisure is free time, time free of
the demands of daily duties, time open to do what one wills to do, not what one
must do. Leisure is not laziness, lethargy or lassitude. What is it then? This essay is about leisure—in particular,
one type of leisure, the leisure of the mind.
Some of us here are, in some sense, retired. We now have the leisure that we could not
have enjoyed when we were engaged, if not swamped, by the demands and pressures
of parenting, doctoring, lawyering, brokering, teaching, and all the pulls and
pushes of daily life. We can use our new
found leisure by travelling, by trying, usually in vain, to improve our golf
game, or by just loafing. But leisure offers an unprecedented opportunity—one
that costs little and benefits greatly-- indulging the life of the mind. We now
have time to read the books we wanted to read or thought we had read. We can
press beyond the first four chapters of War and Peace. We peer at more
impressionists than we knew existed. Leisure frees the mind for the liberal, or
free, arts.
In our college days, we were walked or marched through the
liberal arts, whether we intended to be engineers or investment bankers. Every college had its Western Civ, its
English Lit, its list of prerequisites that must be navigated before getting
down to the business of our majors. In Jesuit colleges, the prerequisites were
requisites: every student was required to take one philosophy course every
semester for four years. My teaching career began by expounding such daunting
subjects as metaphysics and epistemology to students who were, at that time,
mostly vets on the GI bill. I tried in vain to persuade these tough, practical
guys such arcane topics were of value.
One of my senior, smarter colleagues was in the habit of telling his
skeptical students that these philosophy courses were of no value, that they
were the most useless courses they would ever take. He meant, of course, that
they would not contribute to their future income. But he was revealing the very nature of the
liberal arts: history, literature and philosophy provide no practical or
technical skills—save perhaps logic—but they free the mind, and are thus called
liberal. They free the mind to inquire beyond the immediate demands of living
and working. They free the mind for
leisurely thinking.
The life of the mind is, for the most part, not in a leisure
mode but in a working mode. Its working
mode rehearses daily problems to be solved but also generates the great
questions that instigate serious investigations in the sciences or plunge into
the daunting problems of public policy. All of these questions are driven by
the need for answers, large answers that promise us progress and survival. The
working life of the mind devises business plans, produces books and plays and
poetry. It issues in ingenious
inventions
Leisurely thinking is different. It generates very special
questions. They are not the questions
that make the brain bustle in the search for solutions: how do I get my
promotion? how do I pay my bills? how do I finance this investment? They are not the anxious questions that
circle around how to find the right job, the right school, handle a rebellious
teen or an unreliable colleague, how to prepare for the future. The questions of the leisured mind are
different.
Several years ago, a film appeared with the title, “The
Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
I did not see that film, which was about a company that specialized in
erasing unhappy memories, but I love the title.
It is drawn from Alexander Pope’s poem, Eloise and Abelard. It provides a brilliant metaphor for the
leisured mind: it is a place of endless sunshine. That bright light is emitted by its own sun,
which is not round, but has the shape of a great question mark. That brilliant space is also spotless, since
it contains none of the derelict projects or unsolved problems that clutter our
working minds. Even more, it is free of
the instant bits of data that speed over our omnipresent electronic devices,
seeking a place to nest.
The spotless mind is not blank, white space. The leisured mind is filled with activity
which neuroimaging captures in vivid color. Studies of the brains of Buddhist
monks at meditation, presumably a high form of leisurely mind, show vital
activity of the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate regions, as
the monk’s consciousness retreats from the executive functions and responses to
external stimuli to deeper interiority. For what it is worth, the spotless mind
is rather a kaleidoscope.
When the life of the mind is operating in leisure mode, it
may not be interested in answers. At least it is not compelled to find
them. The questions generated in leisure
are questions that do not need to be answered. They are questions for their own
sake, quiet questions that satisfy merely by being noticed, lingering long past
any urgent moment to come up with the right answer. They might be called
questions of curiosity, of inquiry and of wondering.
There are some questions of mere, simple curiosity, questions
for which you really don’t need answers, but would enjoy having them. These questions of curiosity are the first
signs of a leisured mind. You look into
corners, not to find something you’ve lost but just to see if anything is
there. It may be curiosity that summons
us into museums and book stores. Many a nineteenth century parlor held a
curiosity cabinet, filled with odd stones and strange bones. Curiosity does not follow a system, is not
confined by the rigors of a method: it rambles about and it happily
discovers. Its success is not expanded
understanding, as is the success of scientific research. Its success is insight: a delightful spark of
the mind that says, aha, I didn’t know that before, I see it, as I didn’t see
it before.
Charles Darwin was one of history’s greatest thinkers. His
mind was the paragon of curiosity. He
began his scientific career, as did most natural philosophers of his day, as a
collector of curiosities. He became a
great scientist, but a scientist who did not work out of a structured system of
hypotheses. Undoubtedly, his mind was
always busy with new questions but it was, at root, a leisured mind: he was not
driven by the need to answer. He was delighted by the insights of
discovery. His books, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of the
Species, and The Descent of Man are
delightful to read, because they expose a mind that followed its questions of
curiosity until those questions converged on his great insight, natural
selection as the explanation of evolution.
Questions of curiosity, the mark of the leisured mind, may be
converted into questions of inquiry, that is, structured exploration of a set
of problems in search of a systematic answer. Plans of action in daily life
exemplify inquiry in miniature: planning to buy a new home, to take a vacation,
to study for a degree. In large, the
systematic questions of inquiry also go on to produce all of the sciences and
all of the arts, all formulations of policy in politics and of strategy in
warfare. /Questions of inquiry produce an organized picture of how to proceed.
Needless to say, that organized picture can be distorted and misleading, but it
will always be a pattern, or patchwork of questions and answers.
Questions of inquiry must put off the delightful rambles of
pure curiosity and take on a certain austerity.
Scientific investigations or clinical examinations or litigation cannot
wander at will: they must have the discipline to distinguish relevant from
irrelevant, the cogent argument from the clever one. Answers to questions, in
these activities, are mandatory. Our formal education, even in liberal arts,
has become structured around questions of inquiry.
But the great questions of the leisured mind are questions of
wonder. They enliven the leisured mind.
In English we use the word “wonder” in several rather different ways. We can
say, “I wonder if it will rain today,” a preface to a question that hopes for
an answer. We also say, “I wonder at the
genius that could create The David.”
Here we expect no answer, we simply admire the wonderful. Questions of wondering are not stimulated by
puzzles, problems and paradoxes, as are the questions of the busy brain. They antecede these stimuli. The question marks for questions of wondering
are like Spanish question marks, placed not only at the end of an asking
sentence but also at the beginning. Questions of wondering are the original
questions that start the mind moving and give it a perpetual energy to ask all
other questions and push it toward all practical answers. Questions of
wondering also are the final, quiet musings over the deeps of life, beauty,
love, sacrifice and generosity, and even the questions of pain and loss: ‘why
could this happen to me?
What do these three kinds of questions, of curiosity, inquiry
and of wonder, have to do with leisure and in what way do they enliven the
mind? Throughout your life, whether occupied by your business or profession, or
rejoicing in retirement, your mind will be filled with questions of curiosity
and inquiry. But, among these, the questions of wonder are primordial.
Primordial questions may not have any answers. Questions of wonder expand into
a wondrous realization that is not an answer to any question, but is the
beginning of wisdom. Wisdom is a mysterious state. It is supposed to belong to
the aged and the ancient, but we who are aged and ancients know that we do not
have it, at least not as far as we know. In some cultures, wisdom is attributed
to certain classes of persons, the sages and the mystics. But perhaps wisdom
grows within the leisured mind that has encountered simple wonder.
The questions of wonder precede, anticipate and energize all
questions that have practical purpose.
Without them, no practical question could even be asked. For--. and this is my thesis today-- the very
essence of human existence is the primordial question of wonder. One of my own
teachers, the great Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, in his brilliant book Insight, called this the “detached,
disinterested, pure desire to know.”
This is existence conceived as the single, central, illuminating
question mark. To be is to question, not
about a particular problem, but about being.
Questioning is the only human activity that cannot be turned off: every
question that is answered can be followed by another question. It is never
silly or irrelevant to ask, “Why?” The most memorable question in our
literature,“To be or not to be? That is the question” is not a question about
suicide, as often supposed, but a question about existence itself.
The leisured mind, then, is the essence of human existence,
although its power almost always lies hidden beneath the continual flurry and
noise of the practical questions that make life move and survive. The questions
of wonder run quietly, like the motor of a Bentley. Yet they radiate power into
all questions and all answers, all theories, plans and above all into all
poetry and philosophy.
More than anything, without the questions of wonder that
emanate from the leisured mind, there would be neither meaning in any
experience nor in life itself. Meaning is usually thought of as an answer, an
ultimate answer. I do not see it that
way. I see meaning as the recognition of
the moving question of wonder, permeating each and all experience. To ask, “what is the meaning of this?” is to
seek the relationship of a single experience or of the experience of life to
something beyond the instant. The unquenchable question of wonder always points
beyond any experience or any answer. It
points into transcendence. The life of
the leisured mind brings us most closely into ourselves and takes us most
beyond ourselves.
The deathbed words of a woman reputed to be wise end our
essay. As Gertrude Stein lay dying, she
said to those around her “what is the answer?
There was silence. She laughed and said, “well then, what is the
question?” And then she died.