[Note: I wrote this in my journal a while ago, except for the parts in brackets, which I just added. Regarding the title, I have not read Sartre's No Exit, but these reflections make me think of it anyway. They also make me think of Jim Henson's movie The Cube (has anyone seen it?).]
Where one man sees the Closing of the American Mind, another sees the Opening. Which is it, an opening or a closing? Perhaps both. Every opening is also a closing, and vice versa. You cannot open your mind to one idea without simultaneously closing it to another. [Or can you?] This has scary implications for our freedom of choice, for people are constantly planting ideas in our minds that close us off from the complementary ideas. This also has scary implications for the goodness of learning, for it means that all learning is also unlearning, in a way. Every time you “learn” something, you are changed by it, and you can never step back into the same river again. And so our lives flow on, chaotically and heedlessly, with doors invitingly swinging open and abruptly slamming shut all the time, constant revolving doors whirring into infinity! Trapdoors may open up beneath us at any given moment, or hinges above us may squeak and a monster fall through from the attic onto our heads! [I had been reading Nietzsche, can’t you tell?]
Imagine an enormous—really an infinite—house full of doors of all sorts, regular doors and trapdoors above and below and sliding doors disguised as panels in the walls and hidden revolving doors. You are dropped into the middle of this house by yourself, without any map or any idea where you are or how you got there. So you do the only thing you can and begin to proceed through the house. But in this house, all the doors are constantly opening and closing of their own volition (or at least seemingly of their own volition). Every time one door in the house opens, another closes, and vice versa, so that there are always the same number of doors open and closed. But at any given time, more of the doors are closed than open. Given this situation, you can only take a mostly heedless, random path through the house, going through whatever doors are open to you, directed by the fate of the swinging doors. Sometimes you can force open a door that you want to go through (often without any reason other than that you feel that you should go through it), but more often than not the closed doors are firmly shut to you, unless they open on their own. And waiting patiently by a door never guarantees that it will open. The house seems to have a mind of its own, but its pattern you cannot understand. If this house were smaller, you would eventually come to know its layout and boundaries, but this house is so big that you don’t even know how far it extends—it may be infinite—and you very rarely find yourself in a place that you have been before. Even if you do, it may have been so long ago that you don’t remember it. So what do you do? There are only two things you can do—continue proceeding through the restless doors on your journey of exploration and discovery, hoping against hope that someday the structure of this house might somehow come clear to you or that you might find a way out before dying (which may be the only way out). Or you can simply sit down on the floor in the spot where you are, saying, “It’s hopeless, I’ll never figure this place out, and besides, this spot is perfectly pleasant and has everything I need for a contented life, so I am just going to stay right here.” Which do you choose?
[9/13/11: I just thought of a third option, which seems to be somewhere between the two options presented above. You can allow yourself to range a little bit but not go beyond certain boundaries. This way you will get to know at least a certain area of the house very well, even if you can never know the whole house. Perhaps this can be thought of in T. S. Eliot’s terms, “The way out is the way in.” (Actually, I don’t think he actually said this; what he did say in “The Dry Salvages” was “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.” And he attributes this to Krishna in the poem.) You cannot know the whole, but by getting to know one part or area very well, by digging down in one spot as far as you can, perhaps you can get a sense of the whole. Of course, in the house metaphor, this option assumes that the structure of the whole remains constant, that the walls and doors do not shift and warp, so that each door or passage always leads to the same place and each room remains the same every time you enter it. If the house is constantly in flux, then this option would be impossible, or would amount to virtually the same thing as option 2 (sitting down in one place). If the flux of the house has some discernible pattern, then this option might still be viable (one can figure out the patterns of the house). An example of patterned flux might be some kind of progressive evolution, or simply a regular sequence of events. But if the flux is completely random and unpredictable (or predictable, but with such minute complexity that it becomes virtually unpredictable—as is the case if one tries to predict, say, macroeconomic events or even phenomena of one individual mind using atomic physics), then this option is futile.]
Where one man sees the Closing of the American Mind, another sees the Opening. Which is it, an opening or a closing? Perhaps both. Every opening is also a closing, and vice versa. You cannot open your mind to one idea without simultaneously closing it to another. [Or can you?] This has scary implications for our freedom of choice, for people are constantly planting ideas in our minds that close us off from the complementary ideas. This also has scary implications for the goodness of learning, for it means that all learning is also unlearning, in a way. Every time you “learn” something, you are changed by it, and you can never step back into the same river again. And so our lives flow on, chaotically and heedlessly, with doors invitingly swinging open and abruptly slamming shut all the time, constant revolving doors whirring into infinity! Trapdoors may open up beneath us at any given moment, or hinges above us may squeak and a monster fall through from the attic onto our heads! [I had been reading Nietzsche, can’t you tell?]
Imagine an enormous—really an infinite—house full of doors of all sorts, regular doors and trapdoors above and below and sliding doors disguised as panels in the walls and hidden revolving doors. You are dropped into the middle of this house by yourself, without any map or any idea where you are or how you got there. So you do the only thing you can and begin to proceed through the house. But in this house, all the doors are constantly opening and closing of their own volition (or at least seemingly of their own volition). Every time one door in the house opens, another closes, and vice versa, so that there are always the same number of doors open and closed. But at any given time, more of the doors are closed than open. Given this situation, you can only take a mostly heedless, random path through the house, going through whatever doors are open to you, directed by the fate of the swinging doors. Sometimes you can force open a door that you want to go through (often without any reason other than that you feel that you should go through it), but more often than not the closed doors are firmly shut to you, unless they open on their own. And waiting patiently by a door never guarantees that it will open. The house seems to have a mind of its own, but its pattern you cannot understand. If this house were smaller, you would eventually come to know its layout and boundaries, but this house is so big that you don’t even know how far it extends—it may be infinite—and you very rarely find yourself in a place that you have been before. Even if you do, it may have been so long ago that you don’t remember it. So what do you do? There are only two things you can do—continue proceeding through the restless doors on your journey of exploration and discovery, hoping against hope that someday the structure of this house might somehow come clear to you or that you might find a way out before dying (which may be the only way out). Or you can simply sit down on the floor in the spot where you are, saying, “It’s hopeless, I’ll never figure this place out, and besides, this spot is perfectly pleasant and has everything I need for a contented life, so I am just going to stay right here.” Which do you choose?
[9/13/11: I just thought of a third option, which seems to be somewhere between the two options presented above. You can allow yourself to range a little bit but not go beyond certain boundaries. This way you will get to know at least a certain area of the house very well, even if you can never know the whole house. Perhaps this can be thought of in T. S. Eliot’s terms, “The way out is the way in.” (Actually, I don’t think he actually said this; what he did say in “The Dry Salvages” was “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.” And he attributes this to Krishna in the poem.) You cannot know the whole, but by getting to know one part or area very well, by digging down in one spot as far as you can, perhaps you can get a sense of the whole. Of course, in the house metaphor, this option assumes that the structure of the whole remains constant, that the walls and doors do not shift and warp, so that each door or passage always leads to the same place and each room remains the same every time you enter it. If the house is constantly in flux, then this option would be impossible, or would amount to virtually the same thing as option 2 (sitting down in one place). If the flux of the house has some discernible pattern, then this option might still be viable (one can figure out the patterns of the house). An example of patterned flux might be some kind of progressive evolution, or simply a regular sequence of events. But if the flux is completely random and unpredictable (or predictable, but with such minute complexity that it becomes virtually unpredictable—as is the case if one tries to predict, say, macroeconomic events or even phenomena of one individual mind using atomic physics), then this option is futile.]
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