Before I continue, a brief disclaimer: Do not be estranged by my use of the word “soul”. I am not presupposing abstract “substances” in other-worldly realms. Originally, I was thinking to use the word “mind” instead of “soul”, but then my heart intervened. The word “mind” has been too much associated with thinking and less with feeling. Yet our feelings are as important in correct judgment as our thoughts. As Dylan Evans in his book Emotion: The Science of Sentiment reminds us, people who have had injured the emotional centers of their brains did not become more rational because their judgment was unaffected by their emotions but less rational: They could reason about all the different options when they tried to decide about something but they had a very hard time choosing between those options. Our mind is good at seeing all the options but only our heart can know which one is worth choosing. I only chose the word “soul” because it seems to entail both the intellectual and the affective part our judgment. For the mind is sharp, but without the heart, it has no finesse (alluding to Pascal’s “esprit de finesse“). To paraphrase Kant, the mind without the heart is empty but the heart without the mind is blind. The soul that balances those spheres is on its way to wisdom.

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Other people cannot see what is in our soul. But they can see what is in the physical world. That is the big advantage of correspondence, that other people can know one side of the equation (the world of things) and can test whether the other (our beliefs) is true even though they do not have direct access to it.

But what happens with right and wrong? Beauty and Ugliness? Now we all recognize that these things are not “things”. They do not have physical characteristics. Yet we can attribute them to physical things. We call some paintings beautiful. What is going on?

The truth is that we do not use just one way of getting to truth. In fact, we do not behave as if there are only things in this world. And I do not need some complex argument to prove this. We only need to direct our attention to something we are aware of every day and undeniably exists: desires.

Desires are not things. They do not have physical characteristics. Yet no one would claim they do not exist. Why not? Other people cannot see them. Other people cannot hear them, smell them, taste them. So why don’t they send them to the realm of non-existence like some decided to do with beauty and rightness? Because everybody feels them.

Yet in recognizing this, we just enriched our epistemology and metaphysics. For now we have a new way of knowing and something new to know. Correspondence isn’t that useful in detecting desire. If I were to tell you that Sara desired John, there would be no door that you could open that would reveal this to you – unless you opened the door of Sara’s heart, and that cannot be done with the senses. A hammer might break one’s heart but it will never reveal its secrets.

So how do you unlock the door to Sara’s heart? The one word answer is: interpretation.

We are not just slates that record impressions from the physical world. We feel. Our lives are a complex mosaic of feelings intertwined with impressions in myriad ways, and in trying to express this mosaic we invented a way: poetry.

Poetry exists because we are more than we can say. For those who first wrote it, it wasn’t a luxury, but a necessity. They did not choose to be poets, they felt differently, and language in its literal sense was too poor to express what they felt. So they broke the rules and combined words in uncustomary ways. Sometimes they were seen as liars, distorting reality with their words (see Plato). But other times their art revealed truths that resonated so deeply within the souls of men, that they were seen as messengers of the gods or people endowed with the ability to directly apprehend the truth (ironically, the latter position also belongs to Plato. See his dialogue Ion).

You do not verify a poem. You feel it. You interpret it.
To believe that an interpretation is true if it corresponds to the “meaning” of the poem is to carry over correspondence from the realm of things to that of the sentiments without being aware of the difference in context.

That does not mean that any interpretation is as good as any other.

It only means you need to use a different way to discern which interpretations are better and which are worse.

But let us go back to desire.

Where is it? If you were to ask that question, you immediately presuppose that it exists within space. But does it? If you open your heart will you find it there? No. You will just find muscle, blood, veins and arteries.

You see, when poetry becomes vernacular, we forget it started as metaphor. When somebody tells you: “Look within”. He does not mean that you should start dissecting your body so that you can look within it. He is using a metaphor to tell you to use not your eyesight, but your insight. But the “in” even though spatial in origin (in/out), does not refer to a spatial realm. What is going on?

We have just discovered a realm that undeniably exists but is unlike the realm of everyday things.

Yet I don’t recall being taught about it in school. When we did physics, I don’t recall the professor saying: “Oh yeah, and there’s this other realm that doesn’t exist in space and is not made out of atoms, it’s where your fears, desires and dreams live, but physics doesn’t cover that.”

Nobody told me of that place where dreams exist, yet every night I went there. And when on summer nights I lie on the wet sand looking at the stars above, the strongest telescope cannot capture my awe.

It seemed to me, that the stories of men, were not just made out of spears and blood, stars and winds. But of fears and desires. Love and hate. And yet in school we were taught more about the courses of projectiles, than those of our hearts.

There are more people who are trained to make a gun than there are people who ask why one should use it. Perhaps when we are taught a history of the realm of sentiments, we would be more inclined to direct our hearts towards the production of something more beneficial to our future.

To echo Flaubert, what we need is a Sentimental Education. Not to make us more sentimental (for sentimentality, as Haris Vlavianos a teacher of mine used to say, is the “failure of emotion”. An epidermal affectation not an effect of the stirrings of one’s soul), but to make us wiser. To connect thoughts with feelings and feelings with thoughts. To be moved by the right feelings while thinking the right thoughts and taking the right action. That is wisdom.

Fritz Lang, the director of the film “Metropolis”, was alarmed by the heartless rationality that seemed to be taking the upper hand in leading the direction of Western societies. His belief was that a world ruled by thought empty of emotion is bound to lead to a dehumanized society that was cruel and blind to its own immorality. Where men had become cogs in machines of their own making, alienated from one another.

Let us not forget the wisdom expressed in the film’s main message: The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.

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(part 4 of 4) Previous