Constraints on Synthesis: Insights from a Dream
Constraints that Enable
As I have reflected on the process of synthesizing, I’ve come to recognize various constraints:
the knowledge base of the synthesizer;
the synthesizer’s capacity and inclination to acquire new information;
a project in whose pursuit synthesizing plays a significant role;
the availability of critics who are reliable and candid; the motivation, need, pressures to complete the synthesis and move on to the next assignment.
Of course, constraints can also offer opportunities. Composer Igor Stravinsky famously wrote:
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
(Stravinsky, 1970)
Recently, I’ve been pondering what enables (or thwarts) effective synthesizing. For the most part, I am skeptical of accounts that attribute crucial insights to dreams, hallucinations, psychedelic trips, and the like. At the most, “Chance favors the preferred mind.” Breakthroughs occur chiefly—perhaps only—for an individual who has been pondering issues for a long time and just needs a final nudge, a key image or concept that provides a crucial link or yields a pivotal insight.
That point confessed, the other night I had a strange dream. As I was awakening, I succeeded in connecting some dots that had recently been floating around in my cortex in a seemingly disorganized fashion. I’ve been pondering how certain individuals become masterful synthesizers. Clearly, as noted, they need to have lots of information at their cerebral fingertips as well as a mission to put that information together into some kind of viable coherent form.
Having read a favorable review, I decided to read a book by literary critic Adam Kirsch called Come and Hear. It’s an account of Talmud study and studies: an examination of the vast collection of arguments put forth over the centuries by rabbinical masters and students who are trying to ascertain the correct meaning of lines in the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), or in earlier commentaries on that text.
My dream
I am walking around a set of offices in which different members of the Supreme Court are seated and presumably at work. I realize that I want to speak to retiring Justice Stephen Breyer about how he reaches a decision and writes an opinion. I’m a bit shy about interrupting him, but I seek the permission of my friend, Federal District Court Justice Mark Wolf (conveniently seated in the hallway), whether it’s OK to interrupt Justice Breyer. He says “Of course, just walk into his chambers.” I proceed to do just that; Justice Breyer agrees. In anticipation of our conversation, I take a brief anticipatory walk, and then wake up.
(Background: I know Justice Breyer slightly, for both personal and professional reasons. Recently, I was supposed to attend a small off-the-record dinner with the Justice on the eve of his retirement. In preparing for the dinner, I spoke to Judge Wolf who suggested an interesting question that I might pose. Unfortunately, because of illness, I missed the dinner, and never got to pose the question).
The Connection and the Insights
No doubt the connection between US Supreme Court Justices, on the one hand, and arguing Rabbis, on the other, has often been made. But what dawned on me is that in both cases, the disputants or judges are constrained by an original written document (the source) as well as by discussions and interpretations of that source (constraints and options). Contemporary Supreme Court Justices are supposed to base their decisions on the articles (and amendments) that constitute the US Constitution—as interpreted and modified over many decades by previous decisions, as well as by the supporting arguments that are invoked. Contemporary rabbinical scholars and students are supposed to base their conclusions on the edicts set forth in the Torah (especially, the book of Leviticus); but they need to take into account and argue (for or against) previous discussions and arguments raised over the centuries by credible rabbinical commentators.
Response to Skeptics
Of course, one could maintain that I’m describing what happens in every legal system, in every religious system, across time and across culture. Perhaps that’s what happened in the Trobriand Islands, whose unwritten legal system was studied a century ago by noted anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
But I’m not ready to concede that my point is widely recognized or that it is trivial. I suspect that even well-worked-out philosophical systems—such as those wrought by Plato/Aristotle in ancient Greece, or in China by their rough contemporaries, Confucius/Mencius—are not identical or even close cousins to the affinity I’m sensing between the US Constitutional and Jewish Talmudic traditions. Only in the latter two traditions are all arguments, positions, and decisions weighed against a stated written original source and then moderated and modulated in terms of centuries of informed discussion and debate among individuals empowered to render decisions that affect human behavior.
A possible complicating factor is the advent and ultimate hegemony of Christianity. Clearly the Christian tradition (especially Protestantism, though the current US Supreme Court has mostly Catholics on it) had its influence on the Constitution and its interpreters (the first Jewish Justice only joined the court in 1916). To my knowledge, Christianity does not play an important explicit role in the Talmud. But the disputants are clearly aware of, and responding to, other religions; and once we move to Roman times, the specter of Christ and Christianity is never far away. And of course, even though there is nothing directly akin to the Talmud and to Talmud study, Biblical exegesis is alive and well across Christendom.
If you have an informed or disputative frame of mind, you may well invoke the case of Britain, which lacks a written constitution. Arguably that’s because England and Scotland have not gone through the kind of painful destruction of the Temple that the Jewish people experienced two millennia ago; or the armed insurrection that American settlers launched over three centuries ago. Somehow, Britain has managed to ‘muddle through’—but most of the nations that have emerged since the US War for Independence follow the American precedent in one way or another (Colley, 2021).
As a cognitive psychologist, I have reflected on the kind of mental exercises involved in rabbinical disputes about the meaning embedded in the Torah, and judicial disputes about the meaning of the Constitution—both overlain by centuries of debate among informed (and often self-confident and self-righteous) judges. Living in such an environment (or in its shadow), or attending Talmudic or law schools, doubtless influences young people: what they think about, how they think about it, how they state positions, debate them, reach final conclusions—and then move on to the next issue or revisit a previous one. Perhaps these processes provide insights into how synthesizing of high quality is nurtured—and is then brought to bear on whatever enigmatic issue comes up next.
Here’s a striking finding from a psychological study: Students who had studied the Talmud but had not studied geometry formally actually performed better on geometric reasoning tests than matched peers who had studied geometry (Dembo, Levin & Siegler, 1997)! Perhaps there are additional, unexpected cognitive awards for this kind of wrestling with original texts and following closely the subsequent debates and discussions.
References
Colley, L. (2021). The gun, the ship, and the pen. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company.
Dembo, Y., Levin, I., & Siegler, R. (1997). A comparison of the geometric reasoning of students attending Israeli ultraorthodox and mainstream schools. Developmental Psychology, 33(1), 92-103. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.33.1.92
Stravinsky, I. (1970). Poetics of music in the form of six lessons (p. 65). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.