“Too much and too little wine. Do not give him any, he cannot find the truth. Give him too much; the same thing.”
The Similarities and Differences Principle
Hello friends,
It’s starting to feel like summer, and I hope that wherever you are, you have been enjoying the sun and finding some time to relax. Our sessions at the Mind on Fire Institute continue apace. If you feel like exploring a deeper level of the iceberg that represents our current time, please email me at mindonfireinstitute@gmail.com. Our format consists of weekly or bi-weekly sessions that are two hours in length. The first 30 minutes consist of informal conversation. In the next half hour, we examine a poem. In the following hour, we methodically work our way through a main text. Ideally, we examine something that challenges us in some way, something that would be hard for us to read on our own.
A Pascal aphorism speaks to the sweet spot that we’re aiming for here:
“Too much and too little wine. Do not give him any, he cannot find the truth. Give him too much; the same thing.”
In our context, wine might represent the difficulty of the text in relation to where we are in our personal intellectual journeys. So the obvious next question one might ask is, “How do I know whether a text is too difficult, too easy, or just right? When are we ready for something, and how do we know when to wait?”
I think that there is a way to evaluate this, although the method has to be applied somewhat subjectively and by each individual involved. I’ll call this the “similarities and differences test,” which I’d like to tell you about. But first, please find our schedule for the next couple of weeks:
Current Schedule
Monday, 6/17, 6pm EST: Creative Writing Workshop (closed)
Tuesday, 6/18, 7pm EST: On Break
Wednesday, 6/19, 7pm EST: "Dante" by T.S. Eliot (open)
Saturday, 6/22, 11am EST: Pascal's Pensees, 184 - 215 (open)
Monday, 6/24, 6pm EST: J.K. Huysmans' La-Bas, Chapters 16 - 18 (closed)
Tuesday, 6/25, 7pm EST: Livy's History of Rome, Books 1 - 2 (open)
Wednesday, 6/26, 7pm EST: Contemporary Philosophical Issues Workshop (open)
Saturday, 6/29, 11am EST: Montaigne's Essays ("Of Custom; We Should Not Easily Change A Law Received," "Various Events From the Same Counsel," "Of Pedantry") (open)
The Similarities and Differences Test
Have you ever noticed that when someone starts telling you about something you know nothing about, your mind instantly stops paying attention? Maybe someone is trying to explain the rules of a board game, and as much as you’d like to understand, you just check out. When they're discussing a topic they're clearly excited about, but of which you know little, it might as well be a foreign language.
However, when someone speaks about something you are knowledgeable about, you catch every word. Not only that, but you also have opinions and responses to everything they say.
The principle that emerges from this observation is simple: we easily understand matters similar to what we're already familiar with, but we struggle to understand what is alien to us. The unfamiliar creates discomfort, cognitive dissonance, and requires patience, focus, and open-mindedness. If we have the capacity to engage with it, over time it becomes familiar, and the range of topics we can discuss and think about broadens.
The issue is that most of us cannot easily absorb content that is entirely foreign. Our eyes might scan the words, but we pick up no meaning. It can be a painful experience, like beating our heads against a wall. For this process to work successfully, the unfamiliar works we engage with must have enough familiarity to be palatable while still containing enough difference to challenge and expand us. This is the sweet spot that can be difficult to attain. How does one find it?
There is an elegant solution to this problem, outlined in Dante’s Divine Comedy, a work that one of our MOFI groups recently finished. If one finds oneself in one state (let’s call it “Hell”) and wants to move to a new state (“Paradise”), one must first go through an intermediate state that contains elements of both the first and third states (“Purgatory”).
Hell represents the familiar state, Paradise the different state, and Purgatory the mixed state. Initially, the mix is weighted towards Hell. By the end, it is weighted towards Paradise. Dante describes it as a mountain, which is an apt image. It's much harder to enter something unfamiliar at the beginning, just as it takes longer to circle a mountain at the base, and almost no time once near the top. Once fully in the new state, the process can repeat, expanding one's knowledge even further.
This might still sound a bit abstract, so let me make it more concrete. Imagine you read a completely indecipherable book referencing many authors you've never read (Humphries, Logram, Poljik, Galghoughn, etc.). You don't understand what the author is talking about because they're responding to a conversation you haven't heard. Many people would give up here, saying, “This is not for me.” But if you read Humphries, then Logram, then Poljik, and finally Galghoughn, something magical happens. The mystery of the original inscrutable text unlocks, and you find yourself in a new state. What was alien has become familiar, and your perspective is enlarged. At this point, you could stop. But if you continue forward, the benefits accrue. The view from the top of the mountain is worth the climb, as long as you find works with enough familiarity to sustain you, and enough difference to expand you.
There is a bit of a trick here. If there are four authors being named, it would be overwhelming to read them all at once. But how does one know where to start? There is a story from Livy’s History of Rome that is instructive to us.
In the beginning of Rome’s history, there were two connected cities: Rome and Alba Longa. These two cities became embroiled in a power struggle for dominance, but since they were culturally similar enough that this constituted something like a civil war, they realized that if there was too much bloodshed in the war, the resulting power would be too weakened to survive against their hostile neighbors. So to settle the dispute each side put forward a set of triplet brothers, the Horatii from Rome and the Curiatii from Alba Longa, to fight in gladiatorial combat to the death, wherein the winners take all.
The Curiatii killed two of the Horatii triplets but at great cost to themselves. The remaining Horatii brother, Publius, was uninjured, while each of the Curiatii were wounded to various degrees. Publius feigned a retreat, and as the Curiatii chased after him, their wounds caused them to approach him at unequal speeds. Taking advantage of this separation, Publius turned and fought them one by one, defeating them consecutively and securing victory for Rome.
The lesson here is to recognize when a challenge is too daunting to face head-on and then to divide it into manageable parts, tackling the most difficult parts first to build confidence in completing the easier portions. Through this process, we discover that what was once alien becomes familiar, broadening our intellectual horizons and enhancing our capacity for learning.