BEYOND CONCEPTS
by Nik List
ABSTRACT
As humans, we live in a dreamworld of concepts. Concepts allow us to communicate about the world and discuss ideas. But concepts aren’t reality, in the same way a map isn’t the territory, and a menu isn’t the meal. Complications arise when we conflate the symbol with its object.
INTRO
LANGUAGE
Being alive is perceiving the world around us. This is what all beings do — humans, animals, plants. Our perceptions convert raw data into experiences.
Humans take it one step further. The experience of being alive, in itself, is all-encompassing and ineffable. In order to chat, gossip, and make speeches, we need language: a system of frames, concepts, and words. Language chops Life into arbitrary units so that we can label it, discuss it, think about it, and attempt to inject meaning into it.
This additional layer of mental framing is superfluous: the world doesn’t need frames to exist, and beings don’t require labels to live. Language merely organizes the data we take in through our sense perceptions. ‘My child’, ‘our country’, ‘last week’… these abstract concepts remain devoid of any existence in the physical world.
“Language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication”, says Julian Jaynes. Language teachers often remind their students that learning a new language is more than a set of rules: it’s a new way of perceiving the world. Language provides the concepts through which we frame, and thus experience, reality.
CONCEPTS
Concepts are neither immutable, nor universal. Their arbitrary nature becomes obvious when we compare the concepts we hold with those of other cultures, other species, and other eras. There have always been infinite ways of perceiving, labelling, and framing the sensory data drawn from the physical world.
Problems arise when we discard the fictional nature of concepts and conflate them with reality. Geographical fictions such as ‘cities’ and ‘countries’ can be used to distinguish sports teams, but also to wage wars and disseminate entire populations.
When concepts become dysfunctional or obsolete, it behooves us to reevaluate them — and drop them if necessary. The concept of gender has recently undergone this process. Why stop there? Our daily lives are full of pervasive assumptions that merit the same overhaul.
This piece unpacks 5 concepts that lie at the heart of our daily experiences: place, time, ownership, self, and merit. According to mystic Dionysius the Areopagite, one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts. Some call it the Void. A ‘pure heart’ is one without concepts.
CONCEPT 1: THE CONCEPT OF PLACE
Once upon a time, our ancestors traced a wavy line in the sand. This squiggle symbolized the separation between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. Offspring on both sides of the line were taught to recognize ‘Us’ and differentiate themselves from ‘Them’: ‘our’ language, ‘our’ history, ‘our’ values, ‘our’ people. ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ would feed the distinction by competing in games. When that wasn’t enough, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ waged wars. ‘Us’ would occasionally subsume ‘Them’ (or vice versa). A new line would then be traced in the sand, a new flag would be fashioned, and the whole conditioning would restart.
Who is ‘Us’ and who is ‘Them’? Do we define ourselves as Westerners? Europeans? Catalans? Barcelonians? My mother claimed she wasn’t ‘American’, but ‘Californian’. West Coast was ‘Us’, East Coast was ‘Them’. She later specified that she was from ‘North California’, not ‘Southern California’. San Francisco was ‘Us’, Los Angeles was ‘Them’. When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs invaded her beloved haven, she gave up. When does the slicing and dicing stop?
Geographical concepts such as country, region, and culture are useful to distinguish sports teams — the blue team, the red team. But they also lead to wars, exterminations and concentration camps. What distinguishes lines on Google maps, and those on a Monopoly game board? How seriously do we take this game to be? Can one root for an Olympic team without getting caught up in nationalistic pride? A birthplace is a fluke; lines are random; a language amounts to signs and sounds; a tradition is just a bad habit; culture and history are merely stories we craft as we go along. What pride can be taken from such accidents and artifacts?
Dalai Lama — “It’s no longer appropriate to think only of ‘my country’. We must educate the young in the ways to achieve genuine world peace, taking the entire world, the whole of humanity, into account on a global level.”
CONCEPT 2: THE CONCEPT OF TIME
Time exists. We can schedule holidays, look at pictures taken years ago, and see the effect of time on our bodies. This is what Eckhart Tolle calls ‘Clock time’: a practical notion of time. The meeting is at 5:00. The party is scheduled on October 3rd. Etc.
Psychological time, on the other hand, is a conditioning. Past and future are merely labels that we apply to certain thoughts. Past and future have no tangible existence outside of the mind. Worry, regret, anxiety, and stress are byproducts of psychological time. Stuck in a psychological past, caught up in an imagined future.
Life greatly improves as we learn to balance these 2 aspects. Squirrels stash nuts in preparation for the winter. Birds craft nests for their future fledgelings. Yet neither squirrels nor birds brood about what happened yesterday or fret about what might happen tomorrow. They live only in the present moment. Breaking out of psychological time requires continually stepping out of the thoughtstream and bringing our attention back to the only reality there is: the present moment.
CONCEPT 3: OWNERSHIP
There is a relationship between ourselves and various objects. But in ultimate reality, the nature of that relationship does not at all involve ownership.
Owning something is an agreed convention deriving from a certain concept about things. Whereas the relationship is much more involved in proximity to an object. The true relationship between myself and a chair cannot be one of ownership. It can be in the fact that I can sit on it. The chair is there, it’s real. But ‘my chair’ is a concept, a thought-construct devoid of any tangible reality.
We conflate objects with concepts, and we do the same with humans. The woman is real. ‘My wife’, on the other hand, is a concept. Possessive pronouns and expressions such as ‘stealing one’s girlfriend’ or ‘standing by your man’ fuel this illusion of ownership. These thought-constructs keep us very bound to a certain behaviour. But language is only words, i.e. symbols and sounds. Confusing the map with the territory, conflating a person with a concept, constitutes a recipe for misery.
When I was in Senegal, I spent time with a tribe organized into 3 groups: children, adults, and elderly. The youngsters were raised indiscriminately as a group by the adults. No one laid claim to a child in particular. In fact, nobody really knew which child ‘belonged’ to whom. Adults all played a role in rearing the group of children. The elderly provided council for the community.
CONCEPT 4: SELF
Who are you? In a social context, one might answer that question by giving a name, a title, or a filiation to someone else. In the privacy of our own minds, we identify with our bodies, our jobs, our past experiences, our personalities, etc. That’s who we think we are.
Are you really your body? If you lost all four limbs, would that make you less of who you are? Are you your job? What will you identify with once you retire? Are you your personality? Is that personality the same as 10, 20, or 30 years ago? We’re the offspring of our parents, but that’s only one small aspect of who we are, ultimately.
The self is a concept — a story associated with a name, a body, a situation, a personality. All of which are in perpetual change.
When screenwriters imagine characters, they start by naming it. Naming brings a character to life. Similarly, parents immediately assign a name to their newborns at birth. Pets, children, cities, plants, hurricanes, we name and label everything.
Names are just symbols. By naming, we’re attempting to extricate and pin down a pattern, thereby isolating it from the universal flow of which it is an integral part.
Ocean waves arise, collide, and subside. If we considered waves in the same way we treat humans, we would name each wave as it emerged, mark its birthdate as ‘the beginning of its story’, log the vicissitudes of its journey as an alternation of ‘happy events’ and ‘sad events’, and then finally mourn its disappearance as it dissolved back into the ocean.
CONCEPT 5: MERIT
“You deserve to be happy” is a sentence we often hear. Albeit, a strange thing to say. How does one merit happiness? How much unhappiness must one endure in order to deserve happiness? How does merit square with happiness’ equation?
Our societies are deemed to be meritocratic. We see ourselves as the masters of our destinies and tell children and students that success stems from talent and hard work. Such pat logic sounds comforting. But merit carries a nasty assumption. Meritocracies stipulate implicitly that one gets what he/she deserves. As Alain de Botton puts it — “if you really believe in a society where those at the top deserve to get there, that has to mean that those at the bottom deserve to be there, too. Meritocracies make poverty seem, not just unpleasant, but also deserved.”
Merit — along with related concepts of fairness, fortune and justice — stem from a judgment that pits what is against a mind-made model of how things should be.
As we narrate our lives, we label events as ‘fortunate’ or ‘unfortunate’, ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’, ‘deserved’ or not. But a judgment is just a perspective, one among others. What’s perceived as misfortune by one might be grace to another. In the greater scheme of things, judgments cease to operate.
A farmer had a horse. One day the horse ran away. The farmer’s neighbor came up to him and said “Oh, that’s terrible.” The farmer shrugged and answered, “You never know.” The next day the horse came back, leading two other wild horses. The neighbor gushed “That’s so wonderful!”. The farmer answered, “You never know.” A few days later the farmer’s son was training one of the wild horses, fell off and broke his leg. The neighbor came around to commiserate “That’s terrible!”. The farmer simply answered, “You never know.” The following week the army came through, enlisting all the young men to go to war. But they didn’t take the son because of his broken leg. The neighbor rejoiced “That’s wonderful!”. The farmer looked at him and answered, “You never know”.
And on it goes.
CONCLUSION: THE WORLD OF ILLUSIONS
We spend our lives engulfed in symbols and illusions. Concepts are just words. They’re convenient, they help us communicate. But they can also wreak havoc if we take them for real.
Stepping out of concepts requires exiting one’s own mind and seeing the world as it truly is. To quote Alan Watts “It’s important to go out of your mind at least once a day to come to your senses. Because a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, and lives in a world of illusions.”
Only when we exit the mind can we experience the present moment — the one and only ineffable reality there is. Words and stories become superfluous. Like the ocean, it’s all one. We can discriminate between waves, have fun naming crests, label troughs, currents, and coasts. But it’s all just one perfect ocean. Waves never make any mistakes.
Credit to Joseph Goldstein for the conference that inspired this post