The best moment of my life occurred in 1991. I was reading a play by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Dido, Queen of Carthage was printed in 1594 and probably performed first some three or four years earlier. During this time Shakey was just starting out, with the Henry VI plays. Anyway, as I was reading a scene with Dido, a maidservant and Cupid, disguised as Aeneas’s young son Ascanius, I was reminded of a scene in The Winter’s Tale… Hermione, the Queen, is talking with a nanny and her little son Mamillius. I knew The Winter’s Tale was first performed in 1610-11 so it was likely that Shakespeare had seen the Marlowe play - and I could feel its influence. It wasn’t what was happening, it was a matter of emotional atmosphere… a certain feminine intimacy. It was as though I were seeing a slightly different painting yet in precisely the same tones, the same hues chosen from all the millions of colours of a palette. Anyway, I turned over a page in Dido and read:
Who would not undergo all kind of toil
To be well stor’d with such a winter’s tale?
Act 3, scene iii
I remember the sense, so clearly, of my mind sort of expanding – as though I were at one with Shakespeare, in some way. As though I had transcended my own mulish intellect to, briefly, inhabit his rarified consciousness.
This happened not because I'm smart but because I had spent weeks getting into Shakespeare's mind and way of thinking by reading and rereading his plays and poems, by deeply considering what mattered most to him, by traveling some of his mental maps, like a wayfarer guided by the compass of his texts.
I feared, for a while, that, in the somewhat hysterical weeks before exams, I had imagined this synchronicity. So I went through the Marlowe play a few years ago to find that quotation and check that this memory was real. The line wasn’t where I remembered, though it wasn't far off. I thought the words were spoken by Dido, but it was Aeneas. But I hadn't made it up. This was enough evidence to convince me that though my memory wasn't exact, it was close enough. The discovery had really happened. And yet, here is the magic, the worth of that transcendent moment still invigorates me. There's a physical energy and excitement in the experience.
I've had other somewhat similar experiences. For example, when ideas that came from two different sources, one from reading something years earlier, the other that I have just come across, connect in my mind into a novel and richer concept than either of the parent ideas. When that happens, and it happens more the more I read and think over what I have read, I feel like nuclear fusion is happening in my brain. Another example is when I am in conversation with someone who shares my interests and they shed light on something that I hadn't considered or when I realise that they have the same intuition about life and are just as excited about it. It's even happened when I feel myself overcoming a cognitive bias, and have to admit that some long-held and cherished intuition is actually wrong. Someone else's perspective has a stronger claim to validity. On those occasions, the feeling of neural reconfiguring is accompanied by a certain nausea. It's hard to change course. Hard to let go of our beliefs.
Ideas affect our brains and our brains affect our bodies. Ideas change us, modifying our habitual patterns of thought and impacting our reactions and behaviour. Thinking differently can make us act differently.
There was a theory, the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which suggested that natives of different languages think differently. It was discredited, I think because people have the potential to transcend thought limitations within their own languages. So, if your native tongue doesn't have a word for Schadenfreude, that doesn't mean you can never understand Schadenfreude. Fair enough. But subsequently it's been redeemed in a weaker variant as it does seem there is a certain truth in the initial hypothesis. For example, native Russian and Greek speakers have separate words for light and dark blue - so when they see hues dispersed across a rainbow spectrum, they see eight colours while English speakers see only seven.
Arthur Schopenhauer makes this case strongly. He says that when learning a foreign language we have to create in our minds new conceptual frameworks. We learn not just new words, but new ideas. He goes on that this leads us to think differently in different languages, and that every new language demands a modification of thinking. It is ‘a direct means of mental culture, since it corrects and perfects our views through the striking number of the aspects and nuances of concepts.’ This taken from his essay 'On Language and Words', which I think (hope) is free to access.
Now, I'm no polyglot, but I don't think that language learning is the only means to broadening the range of one's concepts. Reading - reading that you embrace and consider, think about and mull over - can serve a similar purpose. Of particular use is reading good novels with rich characters. There is research strongly suggesting that such literature helps readers to develop empathy. If you understand the background, the social norms, the beliefs and life experiences of a character, you can start to see why it was consistent for them to behave in a way that you yourself never would. Empathy is not about thinking, 'Yes, I'd do that.' It's about thinking, 'Yes, I can understand why they would do that.' The former is just displacing one's own ego into a different situation; the latter is transcending one's ego.
This is why Franz Boas, the anthropologist, said that empathy was essential to understanding others. You have to be able to think like them, not just think like you would in their position. I'm not advocating moral relativism, mind, just the willingness to understand. Because, as Michael Ignatieff, the writer and former politician who studies Human Rights, explains, one cannot assist or influence others if they don't 'buy-in' to our framework. We need to bridge the divides between minds and that means extending our frames of reference to accommodate the world view of others.
As my dad, likes to say, 'You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.' Wait... that's not right... And, to be fair, even the original wouldn't be right. I should say, you change minds in a more effective fashion by using understanding and persuasion rather than hammer and truncheon.
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