The Wood Trees Problem

So.You know when your mind is worring over a big problem, or slogging though a task that seems to have no end? You are faced with the wood-trees problem. When you're at the foot of a mountain you can't see the top of, or when you're buried in three different books or ten different web pages and trying to pull them all together into some unified thing - a story, a structure, something with an outline and a form, something that makes sense? This is the wood;-trees problem. Or when you've been trying for so long to make something work, whether a business, a relationship, your own life, that you can't even remember why it is you wanted this in the first place, and you lose the meaning you thought you started out with? This is the wood-trees problem. Or when you try so hard to pin down one little fact, just so there's one thing you can be sure of among the fog of uncertainty, and you go to such extremes to find this thing, or overcome this obstacle, or win over this person, that you end up compromising everything you ever believed in or hoped to achieve? This is also the wood-trees problem. Or when you try to describe something, and you start to make so many comparisons or use such extended metaphors that they make your original premise seem ludicrous and pointless? This too (careful) is the wood-trees problem.

I noticed it perhaps a year ago, when I was engaged (for reasons I definitely will not go into, as that is one tree best not barked up) in the day-to-day dealing with philosophy and philosophers. It seemed to me that all of these ferociously intelligent, sharp and driven men and women all had valid points - they were all right as far as it goes - but that they had become so focused on the minutiae of their areas of study (or, alternatively, so lazily ready to gesture vaguely at vast tracts of knowledge in order to dismiss or generalise about them) that they had no chance of ever seeing past their own particular tree, the bee in their particular bonnet, so see the bigger picture. The bigger picture. Even the phrase suggests Wittgenstein and his crazy, laughable, absolutely commonsense view that a picture was a representation of the world and that elements in the picture (or words in the language, to mock gently at his horrendously extended metaphor) correspond to things 'out there' in the world. That there is a bigger picture no one would argue (well, some would, but people will argue with anything - that is after all rather the point of philosophy) but it seems to me that between vast systems of metaphysics and claims about reality, down to what a single word means, there are gulfs, seas, deserts, and other vast sounding but ultimately meaningless geographical terms.

So Philosophy first alerted me to the wood-trees problem. But it seems to me that it crops up in every field of human endeavour. From a woman who stays in a relationship with a man who abuses or treads her down, because she cannot imagine the fabric of her life being any other way than how it is, to a scientist who becomes so obsessed with cracking one minute but intractable problem that he loses sight of what he set out to try and do, or the writer who crosses out half of her masterpiece just because it conflicts with one particular line that she loves but which isn't even very good in the first place.

"And crawling, upon the planet's face

Some insects, called the human race.

Lost in time, lost in space...

And meaning"

But it is not like we are blind. We can see what is around us, we can reason (insert your own definition of reasoning here), and speculate, and theorise, test our theories and discard them if they are wrong, or choose to hold to them as metaphors or beliefs. We can describe, catalogue, argue, resolve and act. The whole potentially-illusory arc of human history has seen us haul ourselves up from the dirt, stop crawling and walk, then run, ride, drive, fly, exert ourselves through mechanical and then electronic phantasmagoria. And yet we are still our bodies, and our minds in a single substance (some may quibble, but any kind of pragmatic approach has to admit that we cannot know if the mind can exist without the body, and so from our admittedly limited perspective it may as well not). All that we do we do with our own bodies and words. We love, and have our hearts broken, feel pain, sweat and laugh and fuck and shit and die through our body-minds. All that we experience comes to us through the gates of the senses, and passes into the twisting, fossil tunnels of our synapses, inherited through the numberless ages from our forefathers and mothers.

No one (OK I'm really asking for it here) would deny that there is a human condition, that we have abilities, limits, blind spots... But no one perhaps would claim to have successfuly defined what it is. Not least because definition (As one of our many intellectual vices, see list above) necessarily requires exclusion, and the focusing in on one particular part or set of characterstics, to the exclusion of others. Where again you find the wood-trees problem. You may be able to isolate a single tree, but only at the cost of blinding yourself to the forest stretching out beyond it.

This is just something I have noticed, and I thought perhaps I should bring it to your attention. You may well disagree. In which case, good day.
I said good day.