When we want to understand something, most of us begin by trying to
isolate it. This approach can make perfect sense, but only as long as
that isn't the end of the inquiry. Everything exists in the midst of
something else, and before you can know anything for what it
really is -- animal or artifact, religious teaching or utopian vision --
you have to be able to see it in context: figure and ground, all of a
piece and interactive.
Before you can know anything for what it really is you have to be able to see it in context.
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I'm acutely aware how difficult it can be to see the part without losing
sight of the whole. I know that it can stretch one's cognitive powers to
their limit, because I had to do something like it as a small child, and
the memory of that struggle is locked into my neuromuscular system.
When I was just a few months old, it became apparent to my family that
my left eye had no burning interest in entering a working relationship
with the right one. Normally the brain takes in information from both
eyes, and as long as their readings differ only slightly, it can collate
them, so that when we look at a tree or a face, we see just one
tree, just one face, but we see it whole and in three dimensions.
If the difference is extreme, though, the brain can't reconcile the two
images, it effectively ignores one of them.
In my own case, it turned out that the right eye was doing most of the
actual seeing, and since the information coming in from the left eye was
more or less random, my brain favored the right eye and the left one got
weaker and weaker from disuse. If nobody had intervened, my visual world
would have been one-dimensional and because my ability to gauge
distances was impaired, treacherous as well.
Fortunately, my parents and the best ophthalmologist they could find did
intervene. Corrective treatment started when I was three or four years
old, with a patch I had to wear over my right eye; this was the only way
the left eye would find our what it could do and become strong enough to
work in tandem with the right one.
First you isolate, then you integrate.
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I described the treatment once to a friend who teaches ballet, and he
nodded in immediate understanding. When a dancer is learning a new
position or routine, he said, he or she begins by performing exercises
meant to strengthen each of the specific muscle groups that are
involved.
"First you isolate, then you integrate."
And indeed, once the left eye began to get stronger, my mother and I
started paying weekly visits to the doctor's office, where I would sit
for an hour at a time in front of a series of machines that worked the
muscles in my eyes as much as a room full of exercise equipment works
the muscles of today's eager body sculptor.
The machines were of several kinds, but the one I remember most vividly
involved a lion and a cage. Through one eyepiece I could see a cage,
through the other a lion, and my job was to turn the left eye in and
hold it there for a few seconds so that the lion was inside the cage.
There were several similar exercises. The uniting theme wasn't so much
"cage the beast" as "place the free-floating entity in an appropriate
context."
The integration phase of the treatment was desperately hard work,
bordering on painful. Even now, when I think about it, my breathing
becomes a little labored. But in time, everything fell into place. My
wandering eye settled down so that I could see quite well with glasses,
and I still do. But because of what I had to go through to become
binocular -- and because on a couple of unnerving occasions eyestrain
has put me back at square one -- I never take it for granted.
The language we use to describe how we learn and think is drawn by
analogy from the language we use to describe what our bodies do: we may
not "grasp" a particularly complex idea at first -- may not be able to
"absorb" or "assimilate" or "digest" it immediately -- but once we do,
we're able to "run with it" and even "build on it."
The ability, and before that the willingness, to embrace complexity is perhaps the essential task of human understanding.
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Maybe, though, "by analogy" is too weak a term. Perhaps the time we
spent as a species learning to walk, climb, run, and throw was an actual
apprenticeship for what our intellects would have to do further down the
road. While the ability to coordinate the input from our two eyes
develops in most of us without conscious effort, our having acquired
that skill as a species, over vast reaches of biological time,
may have constituted a long, drawn-out rehearsal for a task we would
face over and over and over as we ceased to be foragers and moved out
into ever more complex relationships with one another and the natural
world, entering that phase of our collective existence that's commonly
called "history."
The ability, and before that the willingness, to embrace complexity --
to see things with both eyes, isolated and integrated, and
address them in their wholeness -- is perhaps the essential task of
human understanding. It's invariably hard -- at least as difficult as
putting lions into cages. Ultimately, it requires that when we're
constructing a hypothesis, that hypothesis must account for all the
available data (even when the bits and pieces seem to contradict each
other), and if it's a society we're constructing, that society must
accommodate the whole range of human truths and human types -- the fact
that we are, for instance, relational and ambitious, reverent
and innovative, idealistic and pragmatic, playful
and industrious.
The easier thing always is simply to shut out information that doesn't
fit. The easier thing always is, and always has been, to limit ourselves
to what we can see out of just one eye.
