On Foolish Consistency

Day 31

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...” - Emerson in Self-Reliance

This quote is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his speech Self-Reliance. It is followed by an admonishment to not be worried about consistency in your speech and opinions; That when you speak your mind, you should be willing also to change it. I have of course read Self-Reliance, but I actually ran across this quote in a book on rain which I was reading yesterday. Thus, I didn't immediately recall where the quote came from, and I decided to think about the quote by its lonesome self, divorced from the speech in which it was originally based. By taking the quote out of context and considering it from a different point of view, I intent to achieve two things. If the quote is a gem, then we can imagine that the gem can be either part of a larger gem, the speech, or exist as a gem by itself. Thus, we can take apart the bits and pieces, the letters and forms, of a things and look at them separately. This gem of a quote by itself is not exactly the same as the gem of the quote in relation to the original speech, but neither is it completely divorced from the speech. If we are investigating a certain thing, then there are many ways to investigate it, just as there are many ways to understand it. I said that the quote was followed, in the original speech, by an admonition to not worry overmuch about the consistency of your opinions – this is of course an interpretation. There are others way we could read and understand the words following the original quote to be about . Is any of them correct or incorrect? It is not clear. One of the major issues regarding speech is how we should interpret the speech, and how we should understand what is being said – Are we to understand a sentence in context, or are we to understand the sentence as an individual?

I suspect that these are actually the same activity. If a sentence is a gem in the word, and the gem is always effected by the world and vise-versa, then no gem stands alone. Each gem always exists in a world, always exists in relation to many things and to us. It appears very difficult to consider a thing outside of any context whatsoever. This of course suggests the doctrine of relativism, of the qualities and meaning of a gem or a sentence depending on what sort of world the gem is existing in, and being interpreted and understood in. Ironically enough, I feel that an investigation of some of the possible meanings of this sentence might reveal something interesting about this. There are three major parts of the sentence to consider. The first is 'foolish consistency', the second is 'hobgoblin', and the third is 'little minds'.

A foolish consistency has two major parts to it: foolish consistency, and consistency. Lets go backwards here – What is it to be consistent? As I considered it yesterday while reading the quote, I imagined that there were two major concerns over consistency. The first is consistency within a world, and the second is consistency between worlds. Because worlds are logical fields, consistency within a world is that a gem be the same, or have the same meaning and relation to things, wherever it is in the logical field. In short that something like 1+1 = 2 always holds within a logical system, and that 1, +, =, and 2, also always hold within the system, as well as other major parts of mathematics. I use mathematics as an example, but its not the only one. To be consistent is to always understand something to be a certain way in the world, and not to be a different way, based on different parts of the world. In short, it is to have a single logical system for things which are in the same world, or to have a continuous field without flaws or holes. If a field is inconsistent, then it might be the case in that system that 1+1=2, and sometimes 1+1=3. This is of course not an impossible system to have, but its is an inconsistent one.

Inconsistencies can also exist between systems, worlds, and logical fields. If a gem is consistent between two worlds, then that means that the gem has the same form and relations in both of the worlds. In short, if the gem is a sentence like our quote, that the meaning of the sentence is the same in both worlds. This consistency across worlds might be necessary for communication between minds, or at least a certain level of consistency. If you are unable to talk with somebody, unable to communicate with them, then we can say that we live in different worlds. Have you ever observed a conversation where a sentence is said by somebody, and the person on the other end of the conversation knows what all the words mean, but is unable to understand the point of the sentence? This is called being unable to communicate, being unable to get the point across. If you are speaking different languages then there is a clear reason why this could happen. Yet if you are speaking the same language – remember that I said every wood in the conversation was understood, it only that the gist of the sentence was unable to be communicated – then why can this sort of miscommunication happen? I picture it as being a problem of consistency across worlds. Since a gem can be made up of other gems, and we understand all the words in the sentence, it seems clear that the gems of the words themselves, the meaning of the particular words in the mutually spoken language between two peoples, are consistent. It is only when the words are put together in a sentence that we have a gem – the gem of the sentence – that is not consistent across the two worlds. So how is a gem created that is constructed of consistent parts, but results in an inconsistent outcome? How is it that translation feels when information is attempting to cross between two logical fields? I think this happens because of a difference between the two gems which are not part of the constructions of the gems from parts, but rather has to do with differences between the entire world in which the gems stand.

We also have foolish consistency. This suggests that there is a time for consistency and a time to ignore consistency. It seems clear that consistency is sometimes useful – communication relies upon it, as well as daily life. We need consistency to build systems and logical fields which are stable. However, we can also be too consistent at times. For example, we may have an understanding of the world which is outdated, which demands that we understand the world in a certain way – and this can clearly lead to a fragile world, one which is unable to accept certain changes. At some point did you realize that your child has managed to grow up, or that you probably were never going to go on that trip to Mt Rushmore? Did you at some point have to change your mind about the way things were or what you were going to do? This is called being flexible. Too much flexibility of mind leads to a world which is inconsistent and never stays the same – If you are willing to stretch your mind too much and too often, then you can end up without any bones to stand on. If you never stretch at all, then as soon as you need to run your muscles will fail you. A foolish consistency is the opposite of a wise consistency; You need to know when to fold em, and when to hold em in the game of life. This is part of what the study of philosophy is about, the search for wisdom. Worlds aren't just about expansion of knowledge, but also about what to do with that knowledge – knowledge of knowledge if you will.

Continue on to 'hobgoblin' – what is that? A nasty and brutish creature. Something small and mean, which despises those around it. A hobgoblin is, in short, not a nice or a noble creature. A foolish consistency often leads to a person becoming a hobgoblin, to a person that is unable to accept the world around them. I have spoken before of a fragile mind or a person on the path of retaliation – this is the sort of end that you have if you keep to a foolish consistency. You grow to hate the world because it has changed so much. Again, what we want here is a wise consistency, to sometimes be consistent and sometimes not. To take things with a grain of salt and think about them careful before decide to change our minds. To sometimes change our minds fast when we need to in order to better react to circumstances, or to take our time about changing the way we understand our life and environment when we are too emotional to deal with it wisely. To be multi-emotional, so that we are not swamped with the one-dimensional emotional view of hatred which the hobgoblin holds, which is another kind of ultra-consistency.

So what then is a small mind? The smallest mind possible is a single-dimensional mind with one world which is very rigid, and one logical field which is super consistent and limited. A larger mind is able to understand more things, as well as being able to change. What this all requires is a mind which has many emotions and is thus able to understand a single thing in different ways, as well as a mind which has the capability of understanding other peoples points of view. This is to have a world in which other people exist, and to be a logical field such that different types of logical fields can exist in it. I spoke earlier about tensions with logical field,about stresses within world structures and how the shifting strata of a world allows for change and the flow of energy within a world. Since these stresses happen naturaly and almost inevitably as the world changes around us through inner-shifting of gem-relations and outer-originating changes of sensations and circumstances, a healthy world is one which is able to deal with these stresses without falling apart. A healthy world thus has the same characteristics of a large mind. So, a small mind is probably unhealthy.

What a large mind, or a complex world, or a flexible logical field, all allow for the possibility of a relative sort of world, one where a thing or a gem can be understood in different ways. What this allows for is the possibility of communication. If I say a sentence where all the words are understood but the sense of the sentence gets doesn't get across, then what is the first thing we try to do? We try to re-state the sentence. We try to say the same thing in a different way, using different words or in a different path. There are many ways to say the same thing – to communicate in words, with a picture, an emote, or through our actions. Of course these things cannot be the same, for each of them is a different gem. We cannot communicate, because we are in different worlds. Yet we do so anyway. One way in which this might be possible is is we are able to bend our minds just a little and understand something in a different way. We can reach out and try to understand – and this capability is just as if we had tried to pass information between two logical fields. It turns out that this activity is something that we do naturally in a large mind, which already contains many fields like this and areas where activity between them has already been worked out. In short, if you understand that a relative and subjective understanding of a piece of information, or a gem in the world, or in an area of a logical field, can possibly be, then you are already on your way to understanding how to communicate to someone who is not like you.

I'm not going into the mechanics of how this happen right now, because my understanding of it isn't clear, but also because I suspect that it would be a long and large endeavor. I don't want to argue for the truth of relativism here for reality, or for truth. I think that goes to far to show definitely right now. However, I am not talking about relativism in reality, but rather in the world, and I think that considering the possibility of it might be important for an understanding of how communication is possible. Thus, if a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then a wise inconsistency is hopefully the hob of a large mind. As to how we can teach that, I'm not entirely sure if there is an exact method. If I stated rules we should definitively follow, then I fear we would eventually become a sort of small mind. Thus, I only say what I have before – that the best of philosophy is advice.