What the Mind Must Not Leave Out

I. Reading Shakespeare back in

What can a mind learn from a play that it cannot learn by reducing the world to a collection of facts?

Darwin brought this question into the book without answering it. He could still observe, compare, and work. What he could no longer enjoy was poetry, music, and the Shakespeare he had once loved. His account of that loss does not tell us that science requires it. It tells us that a magnificent scientific life could leave it unexamined until the loss had become painful to name.

The quantum pioneers brought the instrument inside the question. Kuhn brought the training of the instrument into view. Now the book returns to something the instrument must not leave out: the experience of the person doing the looking.

William Shakespeare, the English playwright whose work spans the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, did not leave a system of scientific propositions for us to adopt. He left people in situations. Their words change what other people do; what other people do changes the meaning of their words. A conviction cannot remain a sentence on a page. It enters a relationship and acquires consequences.

Shakespeare did the same. He made himself the process, and his characters its manifestation. He did not only invent the modern stage character; he invented the language that character needed in order to exist.

That is how I read him beside Kuhn: not as a physicist born too early, or as an oracle who had already supplied our answers, but as a writer who made the activity of a mind visible from more than one position. The person speaking believes one thing. The person listening hears another. The audience sees something neither can yet see. We are not given a final perspective outside the play. We are made to move among them.

Literature can be rigorous in ways science cannot, and science can be rigorous in ways literature cannot. In both, it is the thinking that decides whether the work is rigorous or just another exercise in futility. A laboratory can fill with careless measurement, and a stage can fill with empty spectacle. Discipline does not belong to the form. It belongs to the mind at work inside it. Grief, love, resentment, loyalty, the effort to understand another person — these are not distractions added to a human life after the important thinking is finished. They are among the relationships through which the thinking is done.

II. The program is never free

Shakespeare, and every serious literary work, runs a program, whether in words, in pictures, or in sound. To the observer, that program seems to run for free. The audience sits safely in the dark while Lear goes mad and Hamlet stalls, and no one in the seats pays the price the characters pay. Running a tragedy in your own head may cost less than living one, but it is never free. A program in words is a program in the brain and body, and no brain or body does anything without spending energy.

The ledger is not small. The adult human brain runs on roughly twenty watts — less than a household light bulb, yet about a fifth of the body’s resting energy, spent by an organ that is a fiftieth of its weight. Physics adds a floor of its own. Rolf Landauer showed in 1961 that erasing a single bit of information must give off a minimum quantity of heat; no cleverness of design can bring that cost to nothing. Landauer’s bound is set for erasure, and a living brain spends many thousands of times more than any such minimum, so the principle is a reminder rather than a measurement of thought. But it says something this chapter needs: information is physical, and changing what a system holds is paid for in the universe’s own currency.

That safety in the dark is real, but it is also conditional. Each member of the audience can change their thinking in step with the characters, or reject what they have seen and leave unchanged. There is a catch. A doubt about whether your own thinking and life are valid does not disappear once it is planted. It lives on as what Richard Dawkins called a meme — an idea that copies itself from mind to mind — or as what Carl Jung called a shadow, carried in the conscious or the unconscious mind. I consider Jung an early psycho-neurologist: he mapped the mind’s hidden machinery — the shadow, the conscious and unconscious minds — with a galvanometer and a pneumograph, before the brain itself could be imaged. In that sense Shakespeare’s ghosts, and the characters they torment, are quite real. They are the doubts the audience carries out of the theatre.

The brain’s habit of rewiring itself through use — neuroplasticity — lets that observation be made loosely, not proven. What is rehearsed is strengthened; what is entertained leaves a trace. So literature offers a code for running an experiment, and the experiment has a thermodynamic cost either way, whether we accept its conclusion or refuse it. The hard science is still limited. My thinking is that there is a thermodynamic cost to each and every thought.

That cost is not one anyone can keep paying without asking what it leaves them able to carry afterwards. The reason I cannot watch Hamlet relates to my own experience of observing the painful reality of child abuse and of such trauma found everywhere across our society. I had to decide if I could continue to absorb the thermodynamic cost of running this kind of negativity, and decided against it. The audience in the dark is not exempt from the program it watches; it only gets to choose how much of it to run, and how much of the running it can afford.

III. What passes show

In Hamlet, a young prince has lost his father. His mother has married his father’s brother, who now occupies the throne. Before the Ghost enters Hamlet’s account of the death, the court already has an account of his grief. It is excessive. It should pass. Life must continue.

His mother asks why the death seems so particular to him. He answers: “ ‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ ” The distinction I take from him is between an experience and its outward signs, not a guarantee that everything Hamlet later believes will be true.

He names the signs: black clothes, sighs, tears, the appearance of dejection. They can all be performed. “But I have that within which passes show,” he says. What I take here is the insufficiency of the display; I do not take the inwardness as something another person can simply possess by looking harder.

The speech is not an argument against observing. It is an argument against mistaking what can be observed for everything that is present. A person can wear the signs without the grief, and can carry the grief without making its full extent visible. The relationship between the sign and the experience has to be examined. It cannot be settled by naming either one alone.

That matters to a book which began with Darwin naming what had happened within his own mind. From outside, the work remained magnificent. The loss had to be spoken by the person who lived it. Scientific achievement and a diminished happiness could occupy the same life. Neither cancelled the other.

And it matters to the sadness which runs beneath this testimony. To identify an emotion is not yet to understand its source. To say that someone is grieving is not to know what has been lost. The familiar explanation may be the very thing that prevents another question being asked.

Hamlet’s insistence does not close the question. It opens it. What does the description leave out, and what would it require of us to listen?

IV. When thinking makes it so

Later, speaking with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet calls Denmark a prison. They do not see it that way. He replies that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” What I keep is the force of thinking upon a person’s judgment and experience; what I refuse is the use of the sentence to make every judgment equally sound.

The line is spoken by a particular person in a particular predicament. It is not the playwright issuing a decree that nothing matters outside our opinions. Hamlet’s friends do not experience Denmark as he does. Their difference is real. It does not tell us, by itself, whose account understands the situation more fully.

Nothing but good or bad thinking makes it so.

That is my turn of the sentence. The quality of the thinking matters. It makes the judgment sound or unsound; it does not manufacture the thing being judged. A harm does not cease to be a harm because someone has found an agreeable way to describe it. A theory does not become true because it satisfies the person presenting it. Nor does an uncomfortable observation become false because it disrupts the arrangement in which we have learned to feel at home.

The question therefore moves from whether people think differently to what their different thinking carries. Which relationships have been included? Which have disappeared? What does the explanation allow the person to notice, and what does it permit the person to ignore?

Shakespeare lets the question continue beyond the clever sentence. Hamlet can recognize pretence and still make a disastrous judgment. He can interrogate what he has been told and still injure people whose experience he has not understood. The capacity to ask a brilliant question is not a permanent exemption from asking the next one.

Here the testimony returns to its own burden. Neither intelligence nor achievement finishes the person. The direction of the thinking must remain open to examination in the life it is being used to live.

V. The mirror is not the world

Hamlet does more than question a report. He arranges a play. Having heard the Ghost’s accusation against his uncle, he wants another occasion on which to examine it. He asks the actors to present a murder resembling the one described to him, and asks Horatio to watch the king.

In his instructions to the players, Hamlet describes the purpose of theatre as “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” What I take is the possibility of making a relationship newly visible; what I refuse is the idea that the mirror gives a complete or unarranged copy of the world.

The performance is selected, written, rehearsed, and watched. Hamlet is not outside it. He has helped determine what will be put before the king and what response will matter. The audience watching Hamlet can see the arrangement as well as the reaction it produces.

That is precisely why this scene belongs beside the scientific instrument rather than beneath it as a decorative illustration. It gives us the observer, the arrangement, the thing observed, and the interpretation together. It also leaves us able to ask whether the interpretation has outrun what the arrangement can show.

Theatre is not laboratory proof, and the scene is not a scientific experiment in disguise. Its work is to make the difficulty inhabitable. We can understand why Hamlet wants the answer. We can also see why wanting it cannot settle how much the answer carries. The need and the scrutiny have to be held at once.

And the Ghost works exactly as a planted doubt works. Whether or not it is honest, its accusation cannot be unheard. Hamlet stages the play because the doubt has already begun to cost him, and he means the king to pay in turn: to sit in the dark and find that the program on the stage is running in him. The king rises and calls for light. No one in that room leaves the theatre unchanged.

The play teaches neither unqualified trust in the observer nor resignation to the observer’s limitations. A second person watches. A response is examined. Yet the work of judgment remains. Horatio’s participation does not turn Hamlet into someone who cannot fail.

This is what the book needs from literature: not a seal of approval upon the method, but the human being still present inside its use.

VI. Too little care

Another Shakespearean tragedy puts the failure differently. In King Lear, an old king asks his daughters to declare how much they love him. He rewards the declarations that satisfy him and rejects the daughter who refuses to make the required display. He has arranged a question whose preferred answers conceal what he needs to understand.

By the time Lear stands exposed to a storm, the arrangement has failed. Without the protection that made other people’s exposure easy to overlook, he begins to consider people who have no house, no food, and no shelter from the weather.

“O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” he says. What I take is the admission that an experience can expose an omission in judgment; what I refuse is the notion that suffering is necessary, or by itself sufficient, to make a person wise.

The recognition is particular. Lear does not announce that the universe has become a different place. He names something his own position had allowed him to leave out. Other people were cold before he became cold. Their exposure was not created by his recognition of it.

That is the difference between the thing and the verdict again. A change in perception can be profound without creating what it perceives. The earlier account was incomplete. The neglected relationship was real.

Literature can bring us into contact with that omission without requiring us to repeat the whole catastrophe. It cannot guarantee that we will learn. It can give the question somewhere to land before the cost has become irreparable.

This returns us to Darwin without turning either man’s late recognition into a formula. The achievement and the omission must be seen together. The sadness is not an optional accompaniment to the thought. It is part of what the thought has to account for.

VII. The work that remains

The familiar escape would be to turn Shakespeare into the person in charge: the great writer who tells us what our humanity means. But that would retire the very work for which this chapter has returned to him. His characters disagree. Their words do not become interchangeable, and their suffering does not arrive as a single answer.

What the plays give us is a place where the account cannot be separated cleanly from the person giving it, or the consequences from the relationships in which they unfold. Language can reveal those relationships. It can also hide them. Feeling can direct attention toward what an explanation has omitted. It can also become a reason not to examine the explanation. Neither thought nor feeling is released from the work by being named.

The scientific method does not become more rigorous by excluding this part of its practitioner. Nor does literature become rigorous merely because it moves us. Each must be capable of returning us to what has actually been included or left out. Reading poetry back in is not a retreat from inquiry. It is a refusal to let inquiry shrink the human being until only one of our capacities is permitted to ask the question.

The earlier book remains the record of that asking. Its shapes, its comparisons, and its wrong turns cannot be tidied into a history in which the answer was known from the beginning. They belong here because the person writing them was also changing. A scaffold can make one relationship visible and still prove unable to carry the next. To recognize that is not to throw away the seeing it made possible. It is to continue.

Darwin, the quantum pioneers, Kuhn, and Shakespeare have not handed us a completed mind. They have made different omissions visible. What follows must show what happened when this particular mind tried to work with what they had opened.

None of this was free. Every reading, every rejected comparison, every scaffold set down was paid for in energy and in sadness, and the doubts each one planted are still being carried. The universe has a very profligate sort of accountant. The universe keeps that account whether or not we read it.

The universe allows for the freedom to choose. Understanding the price to be paid for our decisions — either way — might be taught from early in life by a society which values human flourishing.

We cannot reach or claim perfection. We can name a direction and examine the change against it: toward fuller attention to the relationships, toward judgments that can answer for what they leave out, toward a method that does not require us to become less human in order to use it.

What must the next change allow us to notice that the present way of thinking leaves out?