Arthur Zajonc on Erôs and Insight

We asked Professor of Physics Arthur Zajonc to elaborate on the ideas he explores with Joel Upton.

Let’s begin with how I became interested in this subject matter at all, which goes all the way back to when I was a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was studying physics in the late ’60s early ’70s, and I had gotten pretty deep into undergraduate physics. Quantum mechanics, things like that, were being taught and I was studying them, but while I was studying them I also frankly felt a kind of longing to go to a larger and deeper perspective, into which these rather dry materials could be situated. So in a certain sense, the energy and enthusiasm that had brought me into physics—which was filled with the youthful idealism of the great scientists of the past, like Einstein and Heisenberg and the like—that flagged. It wasn’t until I started reading much more broadly—in the history of the philosophy of science, the relationship between science and the humanities—that I gained a new excitement and energy for physics itself. I’d say ever since that time, I’ve worked at that crossover. On the one hand I’ve done experiments that are completely conventional: quantum-mechanics kinds of experiments. But I’ve often sought out, even in the physics I do, those kinds of experiments and theoretical considerations that bear directly on problems that have a philosophical or historical or ethical implication. So, for example, in the ’80s I became interested in experiments that had to do with the foundations of quantum mechanics. The paradoxes that we encounter in quantum mechanics are often shoved to the side, surprisingly (it’s the very thing the public is interested in), but in conventional circles of quantum mechanics—let’s say physicists; quantum physicists—those things are considered too philosophical, somehow not germane to the day-to-day work at hand. But I wanted to bring that into my own life and research with a kind of focus and intensity. So in the early 1980s I started researching in that area and writing papers, working with colleagues abroad, and became something of an authority in that area, in the relationship between science—quantum mechanics, in particular—and its philosophical implications. That was a special joy.

Amherst has been a wonderful place for that, because it’s a liberal arts institution with a commitment to not only a research specialization, but to the broad intellectual inquiry that faculty and students undertake together, especially in the years when the Introduction to Liberal Studies courses were offered. There was ample opportunity for interdisciplinary work at the college and into this manner of teaching. I’ve continued that ever since. The courses I’ve taught with Joel Upton, both the one that we’ve recently taught, titled Erôs and Insight, and also previous ones that we’ve taught, in particular The Imagined Human in a Technological Age, have been a great source of intellectual and educational satisfaction for me. To work with him, but also to work with students, where we bring these diverse disciplines together, has been a kind of fulfillment of that early longing to round out my work, both as a teacher and as a researcher, by situating that scientific work within a much larger context.

For me it was a way of giving meaning or purpose, a kind of foundation, to what could otherwise be a remote and academic and dry subject. How does quantum mechanics bear on the very notion of knowing? How is it we know the world? How do we understand our own interaction with that world? What are the fundamental constituents of that world? How is the world composed in its own nature? We tend to think of it in a very fragmented and piecemeal sort of way, and quantum mechanics provides a forceful rationale, a very powerful rationale, for seeing the world more connected and holistically.  And to do so in a way that is not just a romantic longing, but which is required by the data and by the theory itself. So it’s a very specific and clear treatment of those complex kinds of questions. If we take modern physics seriously, and by that I mean take it in this larger context, it has wonderful and very deep implications. That’s been a satisfaction for me: to teach with colleagues in the humanities and to work at the foundation problems in my science.

Out of that has come a couple of different ventures. One is the course Erôs and Insight. Another is a book, called Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. That book embodies some of the things that have been taught in these interdisciplinary courses, and which were taught, in part at least, in Erôs and Insight. One of the themes that for me was a hallmark of that book and which I’ve worked at over a long time, has to do with “How is it that we articulate our world? How is it that we come to understand, see, to give meaning, and let’s say conscious understanding, for the world around us?” That just sounds like a vague kind of philosophical question, but by using a specific example—I use the example of light—I think one can exemplify how it is that peoples and cultures and individuals make sense of the world.

For me, one of the ways of doing that with students has been to provide them with—you could say exposing them to—cultures other than their own, physiologically different kinds of humans and other species. For example, how is it that other animals or especially other human beings see the world visually? I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you go back to the very earliest cultures, like the Egyptian cultures, for which we have written records, there’s a wonderful passage from the Turin Papyrus, which say, “I open mine eye and it is day; I close mine eye and it is night.” This is the god Ra speaking, and conveniently there happens to be a scribe there taking down his words. So we have Ra the sun god’s own dictation on this matter, that when the sun god opens his eye it is day and when he closes his eye it is night. What that means is that if we consider ourselves in the mindset of the ancient Egyptians, the sun was actually an organ of sight of their great god Ra. And when you stood out in the sunlight and you came out of your temple, tomb or whatever it was, and you went into the sunlight, you were actually standing in the sight of God. So light was, for them, the sight of the divine. So if you can transpose yourself into that imagination—to that picture of a universe, in which light, which surrounds you and bathes you, is not a stream of photons or electromagnetic rays, but the moral attention to which you are subjected at the hands of the highest god in your pantheon—it might make you a little self-conscious. But that’s what it meant to the ancient Egyptian to think about the day, to think about the light of day. It wasn’t a mechanical picture, it wasn’t a material entity; it was a moral and spiritual agency into which they were placed. And it had a powerful and deep effect, I imagine, on their consciousness to know that during the day they were under the vision of their god.

In the ancient Greek period, you have those solar eyes—because it’s not just one; you have during the day the sun, and at night you can say you have the other eye of the cosmos, the moon, so there are these two lights: one that governs the day, the other governs the night. Also all the stars were considered to be the eyes of God glancing down. So the cosmos was constantly watching. But the focus is very much more on the human being and human beings seeing. Sight was thought to take place not as a passive reception, but actually as an active engagement, where the sight of my eye—the ocular fire, as it was thought of, in the eye—streamed out into the world around one. Through a kind of touch, through a streaming of invisible radiation from the eye I touch the world. Then there’s a bridge, as Plato describes it, that connects the world outside to my own soul and over that come the impressions. So one has a picture of the cosmos as not only luminous, but it’s a moral and spiritual agency that illuminates the world. Then, with the ancient Greeks there’s a kind of activity which is a human activity of its own moral and spiritual character: our attention, which we give to the world. That attention streams out into the world and touches the world and we then make contact with it.

So the emphasis in that ancient period is entirely on a kind of moral and spiritual imagination, that activity and agency and so forth, that fills out the world. I try to encourage students to take these things seriously; not some kind of cute story they hear about the past, but actually to ask if there is some aspect of themselves where they know they’re being attentive?” I know as a teacher when they’re being nonattentive or when they’re being attentive. What is that feeling? Because that’s what the Greeks were playing off of. They were thinking of attending and looking and gazing off into the distance, reaching to see something, or disattending, relaxing. So that whole principle of human attention, or what nowadays in phenomenology goes under the name of “intentionality,” which, in some ways, is the light of intelligence, what I call the light of intelligence in the book. The light of mind. Not the physical light of the world, but the light, if you will, of the mind, which we bring into cognition. So that’s one whole segment.

Then if one considers light in a more modern way—and that takes place basically through the Arab cultures and into the early Middle Ages—by the 12th and 13th century these views of the Greeks and Egyptians and so on have really passed and the new science is starting to dawn, which sees the world in a much more mechanical and mathematical modality. One can trace that out very beautifully.

One develops a whole other side to the nature of light, a side to the nature of light that is, you might say, much more according to our contemporary scientific orientation. To see the world in terms of mechanical and other kinds of mathematical models. So whether one is speaking about Galileo or Sir Isaac Newton or Christian Huyghens or any of these figures, they begin to analyze and view the world through those pictures and imaginations, those ways of seeing. And they do so with great brilliance and with success, each one mapping out and adequately covering a particular domain of phenomena. So there’s one set of phenomena which Newton was able to account for. Another, the wave and particle theories of light are able to account for. Then quantum mechanics and electromagnetic theory come in, electromagnetic theory in the 19th century and quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20th century. Each of them develops a new imagination of light, electromagnetic in one case and an elusive model in the case of quantum mechanics, a very difficult model to picture at all in the case of our most modern theory, quantum electrodynamics. 

My picture here is that one circles the nature of light. The picture I have is that there is this phenomenon about which none of us can debate. There is light. And yet its true nature—what is it—has been remarkably elusive. I often start such discussions by saying, Do we ever see light? You and I are in this room; the room is filled with light. If we were seeing light we wouldn’t see each other; it would be in the way. It’s a little bit like if we had a wall between us. We would see the wall but we wouldn’t see each other. We have light between us right now but we do see each other. In fact, if there were no light between us it would be dark and we would see nothing. So we see by virtue of light, but light in itself is, in some sense, invisible. If you try to describe what it looks like, that’s always a trick. You say “I’m always seeing light,” and I say, “Well, describe what it looks like to me.” Well, everything that one describes is something—a chair, a table, the blackboard, chalk dust, whatever it is, even the sun; you look at it and it’s a bright disk of a certain color. So from that standpoint we never see light. I invited Rusty Schweikart, the astronaut, the visit Amherst at one point and I had him over for dinner. I couldn’t resist asking him the question, “Rusty, when you’re outside a spacecraft [he was one of the first ones to go on a walk outside his space capsule] you’re basked in light at least a hundred times more intense than the light we have on the earth. It’s just powerfully dense around you. So what does it look like? What is it like out there?” And he said, “Well, if you can turn yourself away from the earth, which is sublime and huge, and away from the spacecraft and look out into just space, it’s black; it’s just pitch-black dark, except for the little bright stars that are peopling the sky.” In other words, you can be in a situation which is absolutely dense with light, but if there’s nothing out there off of which light is going to reflect or is going to be captured by, it’s dark. So that leaves a lot of room for theorizing, for imagining, for speculating, for coming to know light in its different guises, its different aspects.

So my picture is one where the human being, through time, has moved around and asked of light different kinds of questions. This is an idea that C.S. Lewis has: Nature only gives answers to the questions we pose. I think that’s a really important realization. If we aren’t bold enough in our questions, to have enough scope and imagination to ask large questions or complex questions or difficult or unusual questions, then we’ll get a very conventional set of answers that have been given to people like us for along time. So I think the real genius is the people who see things new, the people who pose those striking and unusual questions. Then nature responds. And so light also. What this means is not that there is some kind of cultural relativism where any view of light obtains—that’s not true, and that, I think, is a mistake—but rather that there are many aspects to any single thing in our world. And the questions we pose then determine the kinds of responses that are given. And as we circle around we enrich our understanding of that which we are studying. So by studying the ancient understanding of light I have enriched my understanding of the nature of light—through this spiritual and moral imagination, which isn’t the usual view of things that you get from quantum physics. By the same token, by doing the quantum theory of light, including all the theories concerning entanglement and nonlocality, I’ve enriched the understanding of light beyond what, say, classical science was able to get. So one moves around. Just the way I think of my children. They have physical attributes, they have psychological attributes, they have friends and ways in which they interact. Each one of those provides a window into who they are, and so also with the natural world.

I think of each thing we meet as providing that kind of multifaceted mystery. How is it we can open it up, door by door, window by window, question by question? We need to be flexible, learning to step out of our imagination and reimagine ourselves. That was that other course that Upton and I taught, on reimagining the human. It was very much around this principle of learning to know how trapped you are in your own imagination, your own picture, your own expectations by moving to other cultures, other times, seeing the world in different ways, then returning to your own place in this world, realizing that the habits of seeing are laid down in ways which you can take charge of and reshape. That, in some ways, connects us back to Erôs and Insight, because that course was very much where the content, while interesting, was not the main point. It was not about learning a lot of new material. We very consciously kept paring back and throwing out and just focusing on essential texts and essential works of art, essential scientific concepts. Because the idea of the course was really to awaken students to the possibility of, first of all, becoming self-conscious, self-aware—that is to say aware of those habits of seeing, habits of being in the world; in a certain sense taking responsibility for those and then realizing that there are ways of transforming themselves, that they could come to new questions and new insights.

The second part of the course, after taking up the theme of insight specifically, and what it means to know in this sense we just described—in the rich and multifaceted way of knowing—was to connect it to a theme that is, I think, not frequently enough spoken about at Amherst, namely the theme of love. So you could say it was a course on the relationship between love and knowledge. What kind of knowledge is it that is separated from love, that has nothing whatsoever to do with that, where, for the sake of detachment and objectivity, we disconnect ourselves from our world? We have very little in the way of participation in it or compassion within it. We may have a certain kind of instrumental knowledge about it, but that knowledge comes at the hand of a distancing. Rather we pose the question, “Is it possible to come to knowing which is at the same time intimate and close and loving? What kind of knowing is that? What is its relationship to true art, to true science? How do erôs and insight relate, one to the other?”

One of the examples I like to give is drawn out of perception and psychology of perception. Most students don’t realize that they’re habituated to seeing the world in particular ways, so visual illusions are a wonderful demonstration. You are presented with something that you glance at and you take it to be something very clear. It might be a set of spirals, and you look at those spirals and you can instantly see, with absolute conviction that you have a set of concentric spirals. Then you have them put their finger on the diagram and move their finger around and they realize as they’re moving it that this is a circle, not a spiral. It’s not changing its radius at all, and yet they can’t see what’s going wrong. Or distance judgments or a whole variety of figure-ground relationships. In addition to just being fun to do, they throw you back; you become self-conscious in just the way we’ve been talking about. You become self-conscious of what it means to know the world or see the world.

Here it’s a simple automatic response; there’s no sort of long cogitation going on, it’s just the way you see. But it’s also a wonderful kind of lead-in, a metaphor for a deeper need to be self-conscious. To realize that our eyes and our whole cognitive apparatus over many thousands of years have been built up in such a way and biologically structured in such a way that you will see spirals where you should be seeing circles or you judge two things to be of inappropriate size. If we know the underlying mechanisms of vision and the neuroscience of it, we can give reasonable accounts as to why the human mind was structured in that way.

We see that we have been shaped by our external physical world to see the world in particular ways. We can also learn from those who are congenitally blind—that is they were born blind—and then given back sight that it’s something extraordinary, this gift of sight. After around three years old, it’s impossible ever to learn to see adequately again. Many books and papers and research projects have tried to give sight back to children on the edge of two or three years old, and it’s not really possible. Same thing with animal studies. So you realize that there’s a kind of plasticity and malleability to the early child that allows them to take this raw material—I’d say the raw stimuli—of the sense world that floods into the eyes, the retina, the optic nerve, and create a coherent universe out of that.

This is the light of the mind meeting the light of the world. And where these two lights meet, the one that the Greeks were really interested in and the one that we tend to be more interested in, at that interface you actually create a world. You take either of them away, take away the light of the world or the light of the mind, and it’s darkness. It’s incoherent nonsense if you take away the light of the mind—James’ “buzzing, blooming confusion,” as he called it—or if you take away the outer light, there’s an outer darkness. So there’s a kind of magic that takes place at that interface, that dance between the inner and the outer. We educators, we play with that interface. We reshape and resculpt that interface. We not only provide new information, new content, but we actually create with our students. If they collaborate in this project, we have the possibility of creating new capacities, new organs or perception.

You say, “Well, how do you do that?” In many ways, it’s how the eye itself was created, how the visual system was created: by constant exposure to a set of external experiences, such as when an artist creates. I’ll use Cézanne as an example, Cézanne’s painting, Mont Sainte-Victoire. He painted this mountain again and again and again, and his son asks him why is he doing this. “Why are you painting this again and again?” And he says, “I could stay for months on end, painting only this same mountain again and again and again, because the eye starts out eccentric to nature and I must make it concentric to her. And by looking and working I will succeed in that.” So that in addition to creating something on the canvas, my picture of him is that he’s actually creating something in himself. It’s like while he’s painting with the stroke of his hand and choosing that color, he’s also taking his hands to his own psyche and he’s recrafting who he is as a being, at that interface. And if he’s successful, then at just the right moment there will come that new insight, there will come something fresh that he has never, ever seen before and perhaps no one has ever seen, because no one has ever recreated themselves in that way.

So he’s become aware, to begin with, that he is already a sculpted figure who meets the world. It’s not that we come with a kind of blank slate; we come fully articulated through our childhood and early adulthood. We come to Amherst smart as the Dickens, but unconscious of what we bring. So part of it is waking people up, waking these students up. That first text we have them read the very first day was “On the Morning” by Henry David Thoreau: “Have I ever met a man who was truly awake? How could I look him in his face?” What is Thoreau talking about? What kind of wakefulness is this? The wakefulness, he describes it, to the poetic or divine life, not just mechanical labors or intellectual exertions. We want to wake these kids up to that poetic and divine life, and that means they have to take charge of that interface, bring themselves into that same state of active reshaping of themselves that Cézanne and any great figure of the past has done.

Then they realize that this metaphor of visual illusion is kind of a prison. They have to see this object that way. That’s in their biology. But they don’t have to, in this larger sense, see the world the way they’re seeing it as 18 year olds. They get to take charge of that. By studying texts, by working on themselves, they get to transform who they are. Goethe has this wonderful line: “Every object well contemplated creates an organ for its perception.” This contemplative engagement, which we also call a contemplative way of knowing, is very much part of that course. This dialogue is one of intimacy. You can see where the “love” piece comes in. This dialogue isn’t one at a distance, where you don’t have to change who you are. It’s where you have to become vulnerable. That’s where the possibility lies. As Hölderlin says, “Where danger is, there also the saving power.” Expose yourself to the danger of transformation, the danger of change. It’s what you do always when you love some thing or someone: You make yourself vulnerable, you become pliable and plastic. Now, in that softened state, with clear attention, with that delicate intimacy, then comes the possibility for transformation. And I think of education primarily as transformation, not merely as a transmittal of information, which is important, of course, but not the core or the axis of education.

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