Journal Assigment #1: Hammer Your Thoughts Into Unity

08.30.2004


    It is fitting that the statement that haunted William Butler Yeats should have prefaced all of the readings upon which this journal is based: “Hammer your thoughts into unity.” This quote shares a main theme, or point, with “The World Is Your Body” by Alan Watts, as well as with the articles on Dualism and Hypermedia by Jerome Bump: Unity, both within and beyond the human mind.

    Perhaps it is most useful to take the article by Watts into consideration first. In it, he calls upon the reader to accept the idea that “the world is made up or composed of separate bits or thing” (Watts 181) as a fiction. Kant’s ding-an-sich, therefore, does not exist – individual parts of the world do not exist.¹ Causality also becomes nonexistent. Objects, organisms, traits, events, actions: all are part of an interconnected network forming the universe, to which man belongs. This is a perspective almost entirely opposite from the more traditional view, in which we have “orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies” (Watts 191).

    This perspective reminded me of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which a similar quest for unity within the mind and the universe is presented. Phaedrus begins by splitting everything in the world into the categories “classical” and “romantic”, attempting to reconcile reason with intuition and creativity. He finally develops a theory for Quality, which essentially comes to mean reality. Ultimately, Quality exists when the line separating two parts of a dualism such as classical vs. romantic disappears. This monistic concept of Quality appears not only in other cultures, but also in Watts’s article. There is, I believe, an immense beauty in a non-dualistic definition of Quality or reality, which is why people like Watts and Pirsig (through Phaedrus) search for a unifying definition – the same reason for which physicists search for a grand unifying theory. 

    The duality of classical/romantic and Watts’s observation that man has separated himself, in theory, even from his own body, leads to another duality: the duality within the human mind, the left and right brains, as addressed by Bump in his article on Dualism. His statement at the beginning of the article, that we tend to examine two parts of a dichotomy while ignoring “the simultaneous presence of both and of a larger whole which contains both opposites” (Bump 862). This is precisely what Pirsig and Watts both attempt to express in their respective writings, and what “hammering your thoughts into unity” might be interpreted to mean.

    In the context of the brain, this means that learning and thinking for and using both the left and the right brain (rationality vs. creativity, defined loosely) must be integrated. Too often, one side of the brain is neglected in favor of the other. Throughout the school system, it is mostly the left brain that is favored through various methods, as is indicated by Christina Shideler in her essay “The Classroom’s Sense of Place”. I have experienced school much in the same way that she describes it, but I also feel I have been fortunate enough to have spent much of high school in a program and with teachers that placed considerable emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and connections. Nevertheless, the same trends of neglect of the right brain have also been evident to me. “The first thing that gets cut,” my creative writing teacher in high school always said, “are the Arts.”

    There is, however, a shift occurring in this unbalanced emphasis on the left side of the brain. Bump’s article on hypermedia (Left vs. Right Side of the Brain: Hypermedia and the New Puritanism) argues against those who oppose the rise in the use of the internet and multimedia in learning and reading. Bump asserts that the inclusion of pictures, music, video clips, and so on in fact contributes to a more balanced “reading” experience, through “a new genre in which linguistic access to the left side is supported by multimedia access to the right” (Bump pt. 22). I fully understand this viewpoint, especially since I have grown up in a generation that uses, for example, computer games to teach math to children. However, I appreciated the comment at the end of the article that this revolution in medium is not necessarily beneficial – after all, I see my brother wasting away hours playing virtual soccer games. At the same time, it seems that the interaction both with other people and texts provided by the internet is not only a valuable change in learning and human connection, but is also not a phenomenon that can simply be ignored or eradicated, for the good or for the bad, as those opposing hypermedia might prefer.

    There can thus be found a common thread throughout all the readings encompassed by my reflection: unity both within the physical world and within the human mind, the world of ideas. Various thinkers work on theories and ideas attempting to unify separate parts of various dichotomies, as this promises to be the most beneficial, insightful, and even beautiful way to understand the world, the mind, and to learn. 

    Ironically, even this very journal has been a way of “hammering thoughts into unity”, as it identifies this main theme and traces it through the ideas of the various articles.

[1] However, Watts’s argument that “the universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe” (Watts 193) is reminiscent of Kant’s belief, unlike Descartes’s (“I think, therefore I am”), that being sure of one’s own existence brings with it the certainty that everything else outside oneself exists also.