Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 5.1

Here she made an end and was for turning the course of her speaking to the handling and explaining of other subjects.

Then I said: “Your encouragement is right and most worthy in truth of your name and weight. But I am learning by experience what you just now said of Providence; that the question is bound up in others. I would ask you whether you think that Chance exists at all, and what you think it is?”

Then she answered: “I am eager to fulfil my promised debt, and to show you the path by which you may seek your home. But these things, though all-expedient for knowledge, are none the less rather apart from our path, and we must be careful lest you become wearied by our turnings aside, and so be not strong enough to complete the straight journey.”

“Have no fear at all of this,” I said. “It will be restful to know these things in which I have so great a pleasure; and when every view of your reasoning has stood firm with unshaken credit, so let there be no doubt of what shall follow.”

—from Book 5, Prose 1

I too have a tendency to get sidetracked, to become distracted by the trees at the expense of the forest, to jump down every intriguing rabbit hole I stumble across.

Part of that comes from spending too much time in academia, where the details are what offer the greatest appearance of authority, but it also comes from a very immediate human temptation. I am prone to focusing in on one thing, that one thing only that puzzles me the most, to the point where an attention to a single aspect blots out the context of the whole.

It is something like that nagging feeling I can get when I enter a beautifully furnished room, but that lone crooked picture keeps me from appreciating any of it.

So it is with good reason that Lady Philosophy worries about Boethius getting diverted from the path he has been trying to follow. I think of how many times I became obsessed with the precise meaning of a Latin word, and before I knew it, I had lost track of the sentence, and the entire passage along with it.

Perhaps she also sees the danger of making something more difficult that it has to be. Sometimes the solution is not found in looking more narrowly, but in understanding how the parts work together. The irony is that I wouldn’t even be having the problem to begin with, if I had only bothered to place it within the context of what lies around it.

Boethius here asks a tangential question, certainly an important one, yet one that I can’t help but think has somehow been answered, at least indirectly, by everything that came before.

What have we already learned about the way the Universe works, about how Providence acts, about how human freedom exists within such design, as opposed to being in conflict with it? Would Boethius still be asking the question if he had put two and two together for himself?

Yet he interrupts to ask it in any event, as I would surely have done as well. It can hover over everything else, that uncertainty as to whether anything is really certain at all.

Is there really such a thing as chance, or luck, or randomness? If there is, won’t that topple what sense of order we have, and if there isn’t, won’t that reduce the whole world to a pre-programmed machine?

I have learned about whole philosophies built on the absolute rejection of contingency, and I have seen entire systems of thought that require it to make anything work at all. I have never been satisfied with either extreme, since each will end up denying a basic fact of my experience. The lower causes will suffer at the expense of the higher causes, or the higher causes will suffer at the expense of the lower causes.

Is this really a rabbit hole where I want to stick my head? I suspect I will have to, since I find the problem so puzzling. At the same time, let me not forget what is outside that hole, and let me not be surprised if following the hole leads me right back to where I started.

Written in 1/2016