Questions or Answers: Take Your Pick

It seems to me that art is about asking questions. Science, on the other hand, is about chasing answers and then clinging to them. Science should be about asking questions, and many of us are programmed to believe it is, but not in its present incarnation. What’s more, we’ve been programmed to believe that science can provide watertight, objective answers, and that’s simply not true.

For a little while, I studied herbalism at the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism, where I learned more about a concept that Wood finds very important (having first read about it in one of his books). It has to do with language and how we handle knowledge, and according to Wood, it comes down to two different ways of interacting with the world. He says that the concept was explained to him by Robert Schmidt, a friend and lifelong student of Greek. According to Schmidt, phasis could be translated as “allowing the phenomena to speak for itself,” and Wood describes it like this:

Nature does not conclude anything, so no conclusions are possible using the “phasic method.” The narrative is the fact. The only way to expand upon the original statement is if it is used and recognized as an analogy to something else.

Wood also says that this language of Nature (the “Green Tongue”) is innately creative/poetic, is more likely to draw from intuition than from the rational mind, and leads to wisdom. It can be used to state an observation and to expand knowledge through inference, analogy, similarity, contrast, parallelism, signals, and word plays.

I had never heard of phasis (had you?), and I had never considered the possibility of interacting with the world in different ways, but why would I, when I was trained from childhood to accept only logical speech? Then again, I intuitively knew that there was something more, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to get people to understand me and to understand that facts and truth are not the same.

Logos is the contrast to phasis, and Wood explains it thus:

In its original sense logos referred to the “weaving together” of speech or thoughts “to reveal or conceal truth.” It also meant “to bring the mind to rest.” In other words, logos uses the weaving together of words or thoughts to bring about conclusions, and these in turn cause the mind to stop its search for a conclusion.

Logos comes from the rational mind and can easily be used to manipulate. With it, you can arrange language in different ways to bring about different ends. According to Wood, the early Romans concluded that the Greek language (with sentences largely constructed using the characteristics of logos), was designed for lying. And when you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense. What is rhetoric, after all, and why is it one of the pillars of a classical (Western) education? Are politicians known for their truthfulness or their ability to speak in a persuasive way: getting you to agree with them whether they are accurately stating facts or twisting them to make 2+2=5? Logos makes an argument, building up tension but then relaxing the mind (if the listener agrees) by providing an answer. It makes me stop working.

Here’s a timely (and mundane) example of phasis: “I saw an airplane leave a long, white trail in the blue sky, and clouds began spreading from the trail.” Okay. I told you what I experienced. What do you do with it? Does it make you ask questions? Here’s an example of logos: “It is impossible to manipulate the weather.” What do you do with that one: agree or try to argue?

Wood provided a more poetic example of phasis from Heraclitus (ca. 500 BC), who is credited with this: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Because it’s a declarative sentence, it seems, at first, that it’s logos, but the meaning is not straightforward. You need to stop and think about it. There is, however, a way of saying the same thing using logos: “The next time you step into a river you’ve stepped into previously, you will be different and the river will be different, because each changes with the passage of time.” Any clarification or further thought needed now?

I said that I hadn’t considered that there was more than one way of interacting with the world, but I should have added the adjective “consciously” before “considered,” because I had a professor in college who used to tell me just that. Bernard Schopen was known to say, “Literature leaves you with questions; fiction gives you all the answers.”

Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote, “Generally what is more important than getting water-tight answers is learning to ask the right questions,” understood that while questions leave your mind open to gathering new information and applying it to what you already know, answers close down your mind. After all, why would you keep searching if you think you’ve got something all figured out? What’s more, if you do stumble upon something that casts doubt on what you “know,” you’ll likely dismiss the new information rather than reassess the old.

Here’s one more interesting tidbit from Wood: only two speakers from the “Classical era” in the Western world spoke almost entirely using inference, contrast, and analogy (phasis). They were Jesus and Heraclitus.