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:

1. "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Steve Jobs

2. "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

3. "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." - Nelson Mandela

5. "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

6. "The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates

7. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.

8. "The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

9. "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

10. "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin