Inquiry Porn
Treating stuff as sacred interferes with thinking carefully and analytically about it:
When we talk about sacred stuff, our minds focus more on style, metaphor, word connotation, and an overall feel, and less on the literal meanings of words and order. And it seems to me that this prediction, together with other known correlates of the sacred, helps to explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena. (Recall that the sacred is more to be intuited than thought, and that we tend to be more emotional about it.) (more)
This seems a big problem for people like me, who want to treat inquiry as sacred. And this problem seems especially vivid in the case of “profound” statements, like “know thyself”. As Agnes Callard notes here, such words feel “profound” when they feel like they must be connected to important truths, but don’t actually let you understand those:
The crucial feature of profundity is that when you experience what someone says as profound, you generally don’t know exactly why. Profundity is an obscure little chunk of wisdom—you feel that you’ve learned something, but you don’t need to specify precisely what it is or evaluate its truth. It can take the form of a bon mot, a poetical turn of phrase, or someone gesturing at an argumentative terrain too complicated to walk you through. It can also take the form of someone with credentials you’re not inclined to challenge, in possession of data you don’t need to see, giving you a tidy package that may not be completely right—but you don’t need to know the details. You don’t mind a little mystery.
in the more colloquial sense of profound, where it refers to an aura of wisdom and mystery that envelops like Woolfian wrapping paper, …
Profundity warms you; it makes you feel that you are in the presence of something significant that you don’t, and perhaps don’t need to, understand. Profundity is also totalizing: Profound questions are questions that contain everything, and profound answers are answers to every question.
I’m tempted to call profundity “inquiry porn”, analogous to morality porn, and sex porn. Here “X-porn” is an experience that gives the satisfying appearance of X, but lacks the substance of X. When X is good, I’d feel more okay with X-porn if it functioned as an ad, to get you to seek out the real X. Alas, porn doesn’t tend to do that so much.
Added 9p: GPT4 gave me this list of ten examples of “profound” sentences:
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Steve Jobs
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." - Nelson Mandela
"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell
"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin
Contemporary examples of profundity fall into this trap. Examples from further back in human history may be Chesterton's fences. Far enough back they mostly serve to protect genuine evolved items of ancestral wisdom that human society at the time lacked the ability to rebuild from scratch if lost. The classic examples are how to prepare manioc in a way that prevents chronic poisoning, or how to prepare maize in a way that does not lead to chronic malnutrition. until very recently in human history, anyone who questioned the traditional wisdom of those preparation methods would have been worse than wrong (a kind of inverse of 'not even wrong').
To quote at length the dialog of Socrates and Fat Tony:
<<Fat Tony: You are asking me to define what characteristic makes a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action?
Socrates: How can you use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, while pretending to know what it means?
Fat Tony: Do I actually have to be able to tell you in plain barbarian non-Greek English, or in pure Greek, what it means to prove that I know and understand what it means? I don’t know it in words but I know what it is.
No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further down his own road and be the one doing the framing of the question:
Fat Tony: Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?
Socrates: No, he does not need to.
Fat Tony: (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?
Socrates: (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): A dog has… instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.
Fat Tony: I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?
Without waiting for Socrates’ answer (only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):
Fat Tony: Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?
Socrates: My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth knowing.
Fat Tony: The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.
Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly:
Fat Tony: My dear Socrates… you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.>>
How does study of the Talmud fit this paradigm? My experience is that it thoroughly contradicts it.