Of Two Minds

To my eye this touches on the split between the literal mind and the ironic mind.

New York City Soho Black and white buildings

New York City, 2015

A curious line in a John Jay Chapman essay prompted me to pause:

If the expounders could reduce Plato’s meaning to a statement, Plato would be dead.

If everyone has the privilege of two deaths—the first corporal, causing decomposition; the second memorial, causing obscurity—Plato has yet to experience that latter death. Chapman died in 1933, yet this essay wasn’t discovered until decades later, long after he, unfortunately, began to experience that second death.

To my eye the essay touches on the split between what might be called the literal mind and the ironic mind. To my eye this is also the split where nearly all of our troubles begin. The expounders—to use Chapman’s label—are those who demand a world of order and efficiency and always rush toward what they consider the point. The demand is for Plato in shortened form, the abridged philosophy for life, a summary of the whole. Exposition is waste. What’s extraneous is waste. Nothing is needed but the point. Forget the subtleties and the embellishments and anything having to do with sensation and give me the facts: if you need ten words, I’ll give you five.

Plato, in Chapman’s view, resists this simplification and that’s why he hasn’t undergone that second death. On its own this is a fitting irony—Plato is only remembered because he resists the literalist demand for synopsis. What the literalists overlook is that Plato is fundamentally a dramatist before he’s a philosopher. To understand this is to understand that drama can’t be reduced to its climax—what happens on the stage in act five is contingent upon what came before.

[Plato is] primarily an entertainer, a great impresario and setter of scenes, and stager of romances great and small where fact and fiction, religion and fancy, custom and myth are blended by imaginative treatment…

This is the shove that the ironic mind gives to the literal mind—to the person who forever wants the answer and who demands, well, to drain the life from life. Plato can’t be expounded because all the dry bits and contradictions and slow parts and confounding sections are necessary to decipher the whole—distilling Plato into a few words is to not understand Plato.

He has had wit enough and vision enough to elude [the expounders]. His work is a province of romantic fiction, and his legitimate influence has been upon the romantic fiction and poetry of the world…His age handed him his vehicle—to wit, imaginary conversation. Is there anything in the world that evaporates more quickly and naturally than conversation?

And in a lively conversation you can see how the literal mind strips away what’s most worthwhile about life—it ignores nuance and emotion and demands the message straight. Can you get to the point? What’s the takeaway? Put it in just a few words. But this is to corral life into a predetermined route, even though a good conversation is always ephemeral, messy, unrestrained, it emerges whenever a subject is jettisoned or overlooked or dismissed, when there are reversals, spontaneity, when what’s discovered or unveiled or even created isn’t what’s predicted.

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It is only the ironic mind that recognizes that a sailboat tacks on an oblique heading and doesn’t thrust on a straight line. And by paying sufficient attention you very quickly reach the conclusion that the point is almost never aligned with finish lines or accomplishments—a conclusion that can never be reached by the literal mind.

Unfortunately, in contemporary use, irony is typically used to describe mere sarcasm, it is considered closer to mockery or sneering or provocation. To be labeled ironic somehow means that you’re full of snide comments, or that you’re somehow clever. It doesn’t imply a talent for spotting contrasts. Nor does it imply a knack for discovering the hidden connections in life. There’s no sense of comfort in contradiction. There’s no sense of playfulness, wit, or paradox.

Of course the literal mind is never that far away. You see it at work whenever you meet an unsmiling border guard. Or whenever you accidentally check the wrong box on a bureaucratic form. It is the voice that answers the phone when you call the doctor or the bank or the phone company. It is the expressionless police officer and the teacher who despises children and the warden who knows that all the inmates must be guilty. It is the politician who delivers a prescreened joke with a wooden and stilted and even slightly confused voice to a silent room. It is our most inhuman tendency, it is the totalitarian instinct, it is a flat detachment—a focus on the rules and the text when what matters isn’t on the page.

Yet, thankfully, we can contest that literal mind, regardless of our mood, regardless of the circumstances. There’s no reason to distill and shorten and hurry—especially when it comes to Plato, especially when it comes to drama. The point isn’t to reach the point faster. And at least the divide will always be obvious—all that we loathe about the world takes one side, and all that we adore goes the opposite way: it is the ironic mind that cherishes ambiguity and emotion and the unforeseen, that spots the tragic aspect of comedy and the comedic aspect of tragedy, that adds a little mischief, that understands that the point is never reached by hitting a target.

A coda: There’s no online link to Chapman’s essay, but, if you are interested, here are the John Jay Chapman papers at Harvard. You can also read a longer discussion about Chapman in Gore Vidal’s 1995 Oxford Amnesty Lecture. Of course that lecture isn’t online either, but it is included in Vidal’s rather prematurely titled collection The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000.