Read Online The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Shimon Edelman - Free Book Online
Authors: Shimon Edelman
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with images of the earth, the heavens, and everything in between—the moon, the sun, and the stars; cities (one at peace and one at war with its neighbors), fields, vineyards, pastures, animals, and people. Curiously, the world carved on the shield did not appear to be frozen in time: night and day followed each other, and animals and people went about their business, cattle and sheep grazing, lions hunting, dogs running about and barking, youths dancing with maidens, men making war, and women cooking.
As a sight to behold, the Shield of Achilles had different effects on different people. Achilles’ own retainers, the Myrmidons, cowered and would not look at the god-wrought armor, yet two of the defenders of Troy, Aeneas and Hector, who dared face the wrath of Achilles on the battlefield, were unfazed by the glamour of his shield. What was it that determined a person’s response? To anyone looking at the shield, the entire world and its ways would have been revealed in an instant by the craft of Hephaestos. The terrible experience of having the weight of the world thrust upon one’s shoulders would leave undaunted only the wisest, who have the intellectual courage and mental strength to bear it, and the stupidest, who lack the ability to discern the nature and extent of the burden. 2
The story of the Shield of Achilles reaches a conclusion of sorts in Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . After Achilles is killed by an arrow that strikes him in the heel, an assembly of Greek chiefs tries to decide who should inherit the divine armor that he no longer needs. Only two contenders emerge: Ajax Telamon, the strongest and fiercest among the Greeks now that the great Achilles is gone, and crafty Ulysses, the protégé of Pallas Athena, the war-like goddess of wisdom. Knowing better than to try to outdo Homer, the father of all war correspondents, by describing an actual fight, Ovid imagines Ajax and Ulysses sparring over the spoils with words, not swords. The rhetorical duel that ensues is a testament to the mastery of brain over brawn, expressed in no equivocal terms. In the speech that wins him the armor, Ulysses notes, first, that his exploits and merits in the war that ended with the ruin of Troy exceed those of Ajax, and second, that the Shield of Achilles would be wasted on Ajax:
For that dull soul to stare with stupid eyes,
On the learn’d unintelligible prize!
What are to him the sculptures of the shield,
Heav’n’s planets, Earth, and Ocean’s watry field?
The Pleiads, Hyads; less, and greater Bear,
Undipp’d in seas; Orion’s angry star;
Two diff’ring cities, grav’d on either hand;
Would he wear arms he cannot understand? 3
Those of us who root for Ulysses in this dispute (perhaps because our own livelihood derives from brains rather than brawn) will be happy to learn that Ovid’s conceit—the assumed relationship between an all-encompassing representation of the world and wisdom—has solid support from cognitive science.
We now know that the burdensome knowledge of what the world is made of and how it works is wisdom, in a computationally concrete sense. Insights that are continually distilled from one’s accumulating history of experiencing the world, one episode at a time, keep adding to the burden of knowledge, yet knowledge that leads to understanding definitely has its payoffs. The ability to sustain the process of learning the world is both a precondition for practical wisdom and its happy consequence: insight breeds insight, and wisdom reveals knowledge to be rewarding, while making its burden feel lighter and the bearer happier. The cognitive faculty that makes all this possible is memory.
Remembrance of Things Past and Future
Memory imparts to a mind a kind of sophistication that can never be attained merely by being very good at real-time “war room” data processing. The mind’s war room is busy at all times with the pressing need of deciding what to do next. The
As a sight to behold, the Shield of Achilles had different effects on different people. Achilles’ own retainers, the Myrmidons, cowered and would not look at the god-wrought armor, yet two of the defenders of Troy, Aeneas and Hector, who dared face the wrath of Achilles on the battlefield, were unfazed by the glamour of his shield. What was it that determined a person’s response? To anyone looking at the shield, the entire world and its ways would have been revealed in an instant by the craft of Hephaestos. The terrible experience of having the weight of the world thrust upon one’s shoulders would leave undaunted only the wisest, who have the intellectual courage and mental strength to bear it, and the stupidest, who lack the ability to discern the nature and extent of the burden. 2
The story of the Shield of Achilles reaches a conclusion of sorts in Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . After Achilles is killed by an arrow that strikes him in the heel, an assembly of Greek chiefs tries to decide who should inherit the divine armor that he no longer needs. Only two contenders emerge: Ajax Telamon, the strongest and fiercest among the Greeks now that the great Achilles is gone, and crafty Ulysses, the protégé of Pallas Athena, the war-like goddess of wisdom. Knowing better than to try to outdo Homer, the father of all war correspondents, by describing an actual fight, Ovid imagines Ajax and Ulysses sparring over the spoils with words, not swords. The rhetorical duel that ensues is a testament to the mastery of brain over brawn, expressed in no equivocal terms. In the speech that wins him the armor, Ulysses notes, first, that his exploits and merits in the war that ended with the ruin of Troy exceed those of Ajax, and second, that the Shield of Achilles would be wasted on Ajax:
For that dull soul to stare with stupid eyes,
On the learn’d unintelligible prize!
What are to him the sculptures of the shield,
Heav’n’s planets, Earth, and Ocean’s watry field?
The Pleiads, Hyads; less, and greater Bear,
Undipp’d in seas; Orion’s angry star;
Two diff’ring cities, grav’d on either hand;
Would he wear arms he cannot understand? 3
Those of us who root for Ulysses in this dispute (perhaps because our own livelihood derives from brains rather than brawn) will be happy to learn that Ovid’s conceit—the assumed relationship between an all-encompassing representation of the world and wisdom—has solid support from cognitive science.
We now know that the burdensome knowledge of what the world is made of and how it works is wisdom, in a computationally concrete sense. Insights that are continually distilled from one’s accumulating history of experiencing the world, one episode at a time, keep adding to the burden of knowledge, yet knowledge that leads to understanding definitely has its payoffs. The ability to sustain the process of learning the world is both a precondition for practical wisdom and its happy consequence: insight breeds insight, and wisdom reveals knowledge to be rewarding, while making its burden feel lighter and the bearer happier. The cognitive faculty that makes all this possible is memory.
Remembrance of Things Past and Future
Memory imparts to a mind a kind of sophistication that can never be attained merely by being very good at real-time “war room” data processing. The mind’s war room is busy at all times with the pressing need of deciding what to do next. The
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