Essays

Duck Season or Rabbit Season: Ethically It's Both

Jan Zwicky’s The Experience of Meaning, describes an ontology in which gestalt and calculative thinking are two aspects that make up how we view, process, and interact with our world. Zwicky believes that we are currently living in an imbalance where calculative thinking has largely overtaken gestalt in the minds of people, thus creating an overall imbalance in society which is deemed a technocracy. The lack of resonance between gestalt and calculative thinking makes living ethically extremely hard and confusing. Zwicky believes that there are ways to achieve resonance through understanding how to live in an ambiguous world.

Why is the technocracy a problem? Why is it hard and confusing to live ethically under a purely calculative regime? First, we need to address what a technocracy is, beyond just an imbalance. Zwicky describes it as, “… an alliance between capitalism and mechanistic technology” (Zwicky, Preface). The technocracy has arisen slowly throughout history as we have tried to pin down certain aspects of life. “From the intellectual standpoint that dominates technocratic culture, Gestalt theory appears to be a pointless, if not laughable enterprise because it has been unable to specify machine-programmable formulæ that govern insight.” (Zwicky, Preface). By trying to split the world into neat portions that can be explained and put back together to give a greater picture, we’ve taken away the place for gestalt. Any method that doesn’t use the calculative approach of analyzing the parts, can’t be trusted in the technocracy. Furthermore, viewing the larger picture and gaining understanding is a task that gestalt is suited for. As Zwicky says, “It is clear that the technocratic paradigm of good thinking is not wholly wrong: witness the stellar achievements of calculative reasoning in technological applications.” (Zwicky, p.145). We can see the need for calculative thinking in all sorts of places. For example, in a predator prey scenario, the calculative mind can keep you alert and safe. The calculative mind is also useful for tasks that require analysis. “Because explicit criteria can rarely be provided to defend our discernment of subtle gestural meaning, in technocratic culture such discernment is often dismissed.” (Zwicky, p.128). The problem is that the technocracy makes gestalt almost impossible to be seen.

Zwicky brings up Herakleitos’ back stretch connection (Zwicky, p.47). She is referring to this quote by Herakleitos, “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as in the cases of the bow and the lyre.” (Herakleitos, Fragment 117). Zwicky brings this up to show the resonant tension a poem can embody. This resonant tension of a lyre can be the tension needed between gestalt and calculative. To picture what the technocracy is doing to the lyre would be akin to strings attached firmly to one end and loosely at the other. The firmly attached side is the calculative end, and the loosely attached side is the gestalt end. The technocracy is making the calculative side attempt to pull on its side of the strings taut, to attempt to produce music. Since the gestalt side is so loosely attached, eventually one day the strings will come free. In our current day, I believe that the gestalt side is still attached even if ever so loosely, but that doesn’t mean you’re producing good music in the technocracy. Picture a loosely strung lyre; the music produced from the lyre in the technocracy can still be considered music-ish because it has a slight connection to gestalt but lacks the tautness of resonance. What will happen when the gestalt side gives out and the strings become free, only attached to the calculative side? There will be no gestalt comprehension and thus not much music can be produced. Sure, the calculative side will make the sounds it can, but it will also be attempting to make music that it can’t make without resonance. This is similar to playing piano with one hand when two are needed for a piece of music. Perhaps playing piano with one hand can sound similar. Maybe you can even find a way to make it sound almost like the original by playing cheat notes, but alas, it is not the correct music.

In describing correct music, we delve into if there is such a thing as ‘correct’. In Zwicky’s ‘What Is Lyric Philosophy?’, she is prompted with the question of what is truth, to which Zwicky responds that truth is like an asymptotic limit (Zwicky, WILP, p.18). You can never reach the truth, but moving towards that asymptote is the goal. Stopping anywhere on the way to approaching that limit is to deny the ambiguity of the world and say that you know all. What does that say about playing the correct music? While we don’t have perfect, correct, music, we have pretty great music. That pretty great music could only be played on an in-tune lyre or with full access to the piano. By playing the loose-stringed lyre or one-handed piano, we are cutting off an aspect of the world that is integral to playing the full range of music the instrument has to offer.

Ethics is about how we should act in the world. The technocracy cuts off portions of the world. How are we supposed to know how to act when aspects of the world are shut away from us? The technocratic world wants to make you think that those aspects can be seen through the calculative lens. As discussed above, while you can play a piano well with one hand, you aren’t playing the piece correctly. This leads to skewed views of ethics. The person who is living in harmony with gestalt and calculative cannot know the right thing to do because of the ambiguity of the world, but they do have experience in the world because they aren’t cutting parts off. This leads to easier, more reliable ethical decision making. “We habitually experience certain emotions in certain situations, they often become aspects of our gestalt of those situations. This creates an epistemologically complex situation in which truth can be obscured. Or illuminated.” (Zwicky, p.124). The technocracy creates habitually trained reactions which obscures the wider view of the world. In a hypothetical example, where we know the answer to an ethical dilemma. The harmonious person is more likely to have the experience needed to find the right answer or get close to it. That doesn’t mean the technocratic person is wrong all the time, but they are just drawing from a smaller pool of experience.

How does Zwicky suggest we live harmoniously with gestalt and calculative to live ethically? Each chapter in The Experience of Meaning can be interpreted to correlate to a virtue. These virtues can be a key to achieving resonance between gestalt and calculative thinking. The virtues are courage, temperance, compassion, wisdom, justice, and contemplative practice. To know and understand all of these is what could lead to resonance. Strengthening our virtues is like tuning the lyre. Some aspects of the world can get away with just using calculative and fool us into thinking it is the whole truth. The virtues are not as easily fakeable. It is because you cannot fake the virtues that there is a noticeable lack of virtue in the technocracy, and as such it is increasingly hard to navigate an ambiguous world. The cultivation of virtue is required for ethics because, “Ambiguity is the worlds condition…” (Simic, p.155). While there may be maxims we can generally apply, real ethical knowledge comes from living in the world and learning it wholistically. To be virtuous is to learn about the whole world uninhibited by limitations. The gestalt mind must be cultivated if we want to live ethically. We must be aware that the calculative mind is useful to us. “The relation between calculative thought and gestalt insight are complex. While calculative thought rarely precipitates gestalt insight directly, it can lead us to look in the right direction, or to look with unusually sustained attention. Or to expect the unexpected.” (Zwicky, p.141). The calculative mind is not good at seeing why doing something for the sake of itself is useful. The calculative mind wants to keep you alive. To see the world for what it has to offer, to play the lyre to its full potential, we must achieve resonance. Can virtue be the key to achieving that resonance? Virtue is learning, living, and understanding the wholistic world. Reading philosophy for example is something that can be involved in cultivating virtue. The calculative mind is helpful for reading, yet merely reading philosophy without engaging and connecting with it is not enough; gestalt insight is needed for that.

Zwicky speaks of spiritual insight in the chapter, ‘Inscape of Being’. “In many cultures, it’s taken for granted that there are important connections among poetry, philosophy, and what might be called spiritual insight.” (Zwicky, p.147). Spiritual insight can be viewed as the virtue of contemplative practice. To contemplatively practice is to put in the work and discover the experience of meaning for yourself. To contemplatively practice is to cultivate virtue. A way of doing that is to accept spiritual insight.

“I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (Wittgenstein, p.141). As not a very religious man myself, I read the inscape of being and felt that there was truth in what Zwicky was saying about using spiritual insight to help view the world. When discussing the now-globalized descendent of European enlightenment, Zwicky says, “That culture is also a culture in which skepticism about anything that might be termed ‘spiritual insight’ runs high.” (Zwicky, p.147). To accept spiritual insight is to accept the potential of the world. To accept that the world is ambiguous and that we must continue to live in it and learn about it, we must know that we cannot know. Spiritual insight is not religious insight, but instead it is just allowing you to get away from dogmatic thought. Perhaps a religious insight could be your spiritual insight, but it doesn’t have to be.

Despite Zwicky’s advice of spiritual insight, I don’t believe she would confine achieving resonance via cultivating virtue to one way. “The increasing speed, and with it the increasing brevity, of electronic communications exacerbates the situation. It erodes not only our capacity to perceive the nuance on which robust gestalt comprehension depends, it erodes our capacity for procedural rigour, which is the prime virtue of linguistic intelligence. Is there a way to restore coordination and balance? I do not know” (Zwicky p.106-107). Throughout the entire book, she brings up many ways to cultivate gestalt comprehension to at least tune the lyre, if not play it almost perfectly. The book moreover is Zwicky’s account of how we can achieve resonance. It is by no means wholly comprehensive but it’s an entry point. The book hopes that some of the notions pointed at will unlock a gestalt understanding that will start your journey. “The experience of meaning is the experience of resonant relationship. The deeper and more complex the resonance, the more powerful the experience of meaning. When a mode of representation curtails resonance, it curtails the experience of meaning.” (Zwicky p.135). Realizing what the experience of meaning is and thus beginning the journey to resonance, will allow you to live ethically. Like the asymptotic limit, you will never live perfectly, but by resonating the gestalt and calculative mind through living virtuously, you can keep climbing that function to infinity.

Works Cited

• Zwicky, Jan. The Experience of Meaning. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.


• Zwicky, Jan. What is Lyric Philosophy?. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.


• Herakleitos. The Fragments. Translated by William Harris, Middlebury College, 2022.