by Jasper Gilley
In the movie Good Will Hunting, there’s a great moment where the titular math genius describes his talent for math to Beethoven or Mozart’s at the piano:
Will Hunting: I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably can’t hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can’t play the piano.
Skylar: But you can do my [organic chemistry] paper in under an hour.
Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that…I could always just play.
As a pianist myself, I know Will’s analogy to be true. Spending a lot of time at the piano, I began to see the piano less as what it literally is, but more as what it stands for – music.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to music or organic chemistry. Take literacy, for example. An illiterate person will see a word for what it literally is: dark smudges on a page or screen, and nothing more. But when you (I’m presuming you’re literate if you’re reading this) see the word mountain, you see a mountain, not dark smudges (though the dark smudges are the vector through which you picture a mountain.) The illiterate person might actually be said to see the word more literally, as might Will Hunting in the case of a piano.
Ever since the Enlightenment, Western society has valued literal observations as a natural companion to the pursuit of science and reason. The Enlightenment-era philosophy of empiricism, for instance, holds that scientific progress is the direct result of our observations of the universe, implying that accurate and literal observations are of paramount importance. Yet clearly, literal observations can also be a symptom of ignorance. An inaccurate perception of reality, it seems, can be more enlightened!
That being said, any enlightened misobservation will always be the result of countless hours of practicing – nobody is born literate, or able to play the piano. And of course, for every enlightened misobservation, there are a thousand unenlightened misobservations. Yet the very existence of enlightened such instances makes a powerful statement as to how one becomes enlightened in the first place: it is through the repeated and continual pursuit of an objective, to the point that things associated with that objective begin to lose any meaning that they had prior to the process of enlightenment.
When seeking enlightenment through the scientific method, literal-ness may indeed be beneficial, but when enlightenment would come from elsewhere, it may not be so. We would do well to consider the implications.