On "On Looking Into the Abyss"

In the last posting, “What’s Missing?”, we discussed the fact that we, as humans, know so little about creation. We are limited, not only by our computing ability, our ability to collect, process, store, use, and feedback information, but also by our inability to even know what questions to ask to better understand the world. This condition is the basis for many of our anxieties about life and meaning and is also the foundation for how we attempt to resolve these feelings. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, referencing Stanley Cavell, the basic situation humans find themselves in, is that they must go through life with ‘no guarantees.’

One response to this condition has been the body of literature that emphasis the emptiness or meaningless of life where people feel separated, alone, alienated. Gertrude Himmelfarb discusses this view of life in her essay “On Looking into the Abyss,” a reflection on Lionel Trilling’s essay, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature.” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994.) Whereas Trilling, in his teaching, was attempting to get his students to “look into the Abyss” and through formal, precise, and serious academic discourse “vitiate the works” and “bring about precisely the opposite of their intended effect,” Himmelfarb observes a new approach to this literature. She sees individuals that not only find the Abyss ‘interesting’ and ‘exciting’ but rather than being turned off by their professors, now follow this attraction into the Abyss, ‘dutifully and gladly’.

Himmelfarb goes on to argue that to many ‘intellectuals’ of the last half of the 20th century, the ‘look into the Abyss’ became a word game, something that people could ‘play around with.’ Their approach was a game that could be played in the classroom or the office or in journal articles or in books and it could lead to tenure or recognition or fame and a pleasant life style. Did it matter to them what the teaching resulted in? Seemingly not. Richard Rorty, for example, argued that if someone did not like the conclusions they were getting from a particular world view they should just change the assumptions that supported this world view until they got a world view that produced the results they wanted. Did it matter whether or not the new world view could help the individual make good decisions or solve difficult problems? Apparently not, for Rorty doesn’t consider the use of the world views in actual decision making or problem solving. It seems that all that matters is for one to have the right or correct conclusions.

A telling example of this approach is presented in David Mamet’s play, “Oleana”. There are two characters in this play, a professor who, we find out, is up for tenure and one of his students. The professor is ‘post modern’ in the sense that he promotes the idea that there is no truth. The student, very much in awe of the professor, is the first of her family to go to college and, to her and her family, getting a college education is the pathway to being successful in the modern world.

Standing in the path of the student is ‘the Abyss’. The professor has put this in front of her; she is intrigued by it and is succumbing to it. The meeting between the professor and his student is in his office and she has come to him because she is conflicted. And, here in the first act, the professor is in the dominant party in the discussion and he sticks to the ‘party line.’

In the second act, the roles are reversed. The world view of the student has collapsed after the meeting with the professor and, in an attempt to grasp onto something, she joined a group that promised her ideological certainty, ‘guarantees’. She has paid back the professor who had destroyed her vision; she made sure that he did not get tenure. We had seen as the first act progressed, that the professor acted as if there were some ‘real truth’ in the world outside his office. His wife, tenure, his house and car were all very important to him. They represented ‘truth’ in the sense that he acted as if his decisions about these mattered. Here we see that outside of his office the professor did have a world view in which some things are more important than others: Some world views are better than others!

A second example is the true story that was first a book, but was then turned into the movie “Into the Wild”. This story is about a young college student who becomes fascinated by the abyss and the unfairness of the world. He arrives at this position using the same literature that Lionel Trilling presented to his students. The student is drawn into a destructive search for separation as a result of his alienation from family and society. He must get away and go ‘into the wild’. Along his journey from college to the Alaskan wild, we see him engaging with people, we see him use his gifts, we see him help others, yet ‘the Abyss’ draws him on. The end…he dies alone in the wilderness.

In these two works we see different responses to the ‘lack of guarantees’. At one extreme, a young student defaults into a group that eliminates her uncertainty. It is a group that presents to her ‘ends’ that she can subscribe to and then gives her the ‘fundamentals’ of an approach to achieve those ends. As she destroys the career of the professor that led her to her disillusionment she cannot be argued with, she can exhibit no sympathy. She is a true believer. At the other end of the spectrum, a young student seeks nothingness…nihilism. To him, there is just a void. The pull of the abyss is strong and he finds it and experiences it, even in spite of his obvious ability to make friends, help people, and act morally.

What is the issue here? To me, the issue is one of how we deal with the fact that in every situation we face we must face it with only incomplete information. Every world view, every model or schema we use to solve problems with is tentative and fallible. There is no certainty to life! There are no guarantees!

So, the first choice, as represented by the student in David Mamet’s play, is not a realistic option. World views, models, religions, or political movements that promise certainty must be strongly enforced and controlled in order to eliminate all possible sources of contradiction. The second choice, nihilism, as represented by the behavior of the student in the book and movie “Into the Wild”, is either partially or totally self-destructive of the individual. The consequence of such behavior is waste.

Human beings are problem solvers; it is the part of their nature that distinguishes them from all other species. To be a problem solver, an individual must use the incomplete information available to her/him to build or borrow models or schema which can be used to make predictions about future outcomes that result from the decisions they make. This is important because people make decisions based on predictions about what outcomes might be expected from given actions. But, there are no guarantees in any of the models or schema that are used: all decision making is done under uncertainty. The bottom line is that we must learn to live with this deficiency…we cannot control for it.

Furthermore, order in the world is not obvious it must be looked for. Models and schema can only be constructed by identifying ‘regularities’ that exist within the world. It is always easy to say that there is no order in the world. It is always easy to say that things are meaningless. And, the bigger the picture we work with, say all creation, the easier it is to despair that there is no order. But, fruitful problem solving deals with ‘smaller’ problems…problems that can be managed. It is then through the cumulative effect of constructing more and more models that a ‘macro’ picture of the world can be constructed. We have faith that there is order because we work with models that help us to make better decisions or solve more difficult problems. Still, since all models are tentative and fallible it is easy to find fault with them: any model can be dismissed as ‘wrong’, especially in the most complex situations, those pertaining to human beings and relationships between human beings. Here the models tend to take the form of stories and narratives, incorporating myth, analogical reasoning and metaphors. We must realize, however, that some models are better than others and we can’t just default to ‘looking into the Abyss’ if we want to live as full and meaningful lives as we can. This conclusion will lead us into many more future discussions.