How our Mind Hinders Itself

The mind at its most active is not always the mind at its most effective. I have known men of great subtlety who could never complete anything — who, in the very act of examining a problem, discovered so many aspects of it that they were left motionless, unable to take the first step because they could see too clearly all the ways in which the first step might be wrong. Their intelligence was genuine. Their paralysis was also genuine. The one produced the other.

There is a kind of thinking that consumes itself. It turns upon every decision and every action and finds in each the seeds of a hundred objections. It is too honest to pretend that any course is without difficulty, too scrupulous to proceed without being certain, and — since certainty never comes — it does not proceed at all. In such a mind, wisdom and helplessness become indistinguishable. The same faculty that could have illuminated the path is instead being used to count the stones that might cause a fall.

“Our mind, in seeking out the difficulties, the perplexities, and the contradictions that beset it, falls by this means into confusion and disorder, and becomes incapable of resolving anything.”

The simple man is not troubled in this way. He knows what he wants, and he goes toward it, and he does not stop to enquire whether wanting it is philosophically defensible. We laugh at his simplicity. But he has built his house, married his wife, harvested his field, and is at peace, while the philosopher is still constructing his theory of shelter, of marriage, of agriculture. Simplicity of purpose is not stupidity — it is a different orientation of intelligence, one pointed outward at the world rather than inward at the machinery of its own working.

I have tried to learn something from this. When I find myself turning a question over for the tenth time, finding new difficulties where I found them before, adding complications to complications, I now attempt to notice that I am no longer thinking about the question but about my thinking about the question. At that remove, nothing useful can happen. The remedy is not to think less but to think differently — to use the mind as an instrument upon the world, not as a mirror aimed at itself.