Words. They are a wonderful creation of humanity’s. They have allowed us to pass on information, to record the present to share with the future, to communicate the present to change the present, to share experiences and either laugh or cry together, and to understand. Words, coupled with the tools of logic and reason have given us knowledge – science, modern medicine, the automobile, the internet, aircraft and spacecraft. Words have proven to be our boon, our great advantage over the other species we share this planet with. And yet, when hard pressed words and logic and reason ultimately fail us.
Look at philosophy. The philosopher’s use of reason and logic to parse meanings of words – whether used in conversation, in ethics, in science – is not only laudable but a necessity. And yet, while progress is made, while improvements are made, in the end we are left with uncertainty. Words fail, logic fails.
It is striking how often questions within philosophy – ethical and moral questions, metaphysics, logic, questions about how science works, etc. eventually wind up in a place where every position has problems and strengths with seemingly no way to resolve them. And the reason they do is because words and logic and reason are only tools we use to try to understand and make sense of the world around us – they are not, however, that world. Because of that, they can only approximate reality, not be it.
Mathematics in science has been able to carry us further down the path of understanding the workings of the universe. But only at the cost of not understanding on a gut level, in a visual level, what they mean when they are used in the further reaches of science – quantum theory, string theory, relativity. And I cannot help but wonder, since they too are a construct of ours, will they ultimately fail us someday? Perhaps one day something else will be needed to deal with the truly basic questions of the universe’s existence that goes beyond mathematics, just as mathematics goes beyond words in explaining the world. And when that day comes, perhaps we will not be smart enough to figure out what that next tool, that something else, should be.
In fact, this seems to be part of the take away from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. His two theorems showed that even mathematical systems, the examplar par excellence of pure logical reasoning, cannot be proven. More specifically, they state that there will always be mathematical statements that are true but that cannot be proven to be true within that system and that because of this no mathematical system can prove that it is consistent. In other words, even within mathematics there is no certainty. As Carl B. Boyer put it in his History of Mathematics “It appears to foredoom hope of mathematical certitude through use of the obvious methods. Perhaps doomed also, as a result, is the ideal of science – to devise a set of axioms from which all phenomena of the external world can be deduced.”
This is not to argue that we should not strive to be as logical, as rational as we can be in forming our beliefs. However, it is to say that we should be aware that words and logic and reason are tools and only give us approximations of reality only. We need to be aware that what we live is richer than what they will ever be able describe, and that, at its core, our existence will always have a mystery residing. We have discovered that the universe, and ourselves, will always be greater than our understanding.
Which is one reason why I think art, music, and poetry exist, and always will.
Human Life’s Mystery
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?
The senses folding thick and dark
About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out blindly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.
We vibrate to the pant and thrill
Wherewith Eternity has curled
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;
While, freshening upward to His feet,
In gradual growth His full-leaved will
Expands from world to world.
And, in the tumult and excess
Of act and passion under sun,
We sometimes hear—oh, soft and far,
As silver star did touch with star,
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness
Through all things that are done.
God keeps His holy mysteries
Just on the outside of man’s dream;
In diapason slow, we think
To hear their pinions rise and sink,
While they float pure beneath His eyes,
Like swans adown a stream.
Abstractions, are they, from the forms
Of His great beauty?—exaltations
From His great glory?—strong previsions
Of what we shall be?—intuitions
Of what we are—in calms and storms,
Beyond our peace and passions?
Things nameless! which, in passing so,
Do stroke us with a subtle grace.
We say, ‘Who passes?’—they are dumb.
We cannot see them go or come:
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow
Upon a blind man’s face.
Yet, touching so, they draw above
Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,
Our daily joy and pain advance
To a divine significance,
Our human love—O mortal love,
That light is not its own!
And sometimes horror chills our blood
To be so near such mystic Things,
And we wrap round us for defence
Our purple manners, moods of sense—
As angels from the face of God
Stand hidden in their wings.
And sometimes through life’s heavy swound
We grope for them!—with strangled breath
We stretch our hands abroad and try
To reach them in our agony,—
And widen, so, the broad life-wound
Which soon is large enough for death.
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