Ep. 38 – What Is It?

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Alan Watts podcast. I'm your host, Mark Watts, and today we've got some more treats for you from the archives. These are some recordings that have not ever been. Including a talk. 1962 or 63, entitled What Is It? These are recent discoveries from the Blastdell Institute. I'm sure recently Noticed the proliferation of AI copies of my father's.

And my response to this has been to dig into the archives and find recordings that we have never heard before. A few appreciate this work and want to support it. please visit us at allenwatts.org and contribute to our archival and ongoing production efforts. as the last consultant in psychology for the fiscal year of nineteen sixty two or sixty-three is about to appear before you today.

And he is very well known in the The generic field is philosophy, but he's more well known for his writings in Zen Buddhism. although he is not a Zen Buddhist. Um doctor Alan Watts is a difficult person to classify. Perhaps the best thing to say is that uh he is an experimental philosopher And you can judge what he is best by listening to what he has to say. His topic is what is it? Doctor Watts.

There are four absolutely important questions which philosophers worry about. And these are the basic questions about the world. The first one is who started it? The second is are we going to make it? The third is where are we going to put it? And the fourth is who's going to clean up. There is also one other question. It isn't as fundamental as this one uh th as those four. It isn't as important as those four. But it's asked a great deal more often and debated a great deal more hotly.

And that is the question, what is it?

And about this, there are two schools of thought. And they fight each other endlessly through all the domains of life. It isn't only in philosophy that they fight each other, it's in family life and especially in marriage, in matters of personal taste. Uh and these two parties have created a great deal of trouble in the history of the world because they're both wrong. Uh I'm going to call the people of the first party the people who are all for structure.

Now, when you l look at the word structure, you can see at once that it's a prickly word. It has a l that in the middle of it, and the the C T together makes it sound rather hard, and indeed something a little bit like a porcupine. Because people who are all for structure uh are rather disagreeable, precise, disciplinarian sort of people. They're very authoritative. And you find them a great deal in the teaching profession, in the academic world, and also among engineers.

Because they're people who like things to be definite and clear and bony and hard. And they don't want any wishy washy vagueness and uh they're always trying to uh demonstrate how much backbone they have. Now on the other side of the people uh who are all for structure, the are the people who are all for goo. And there are various kinds of goo. There's good goo like a banana split and bad goo like people who pick their noses.

And uh but go is the opposite of structure. The goo is uh slimy, gelatinous, uh vague in its outlines, but uh definitely it's got some sort of vitality to it, because it's the sort of primeval slime out of which everything came in the beginning of time. And therefore there are a lot of people who are all for goo as distinct from structure. Now I would give some examples of this sort of argument.

Uh, when we uh inquire into the nature of the physical world, and uh we want to know what material is. Here we get a sharp division between the structure people and the goo people. Because the structure people want to say that the world is basically discontinuous. That is to say, it is a series of impulses, or perhaps uh structure people on the whole prefer particles.

It is a collection of particles, but there's nothing joining them, see? There's a kind of a put put pot putt affair going on in the heart of the universe, but nothing holds it together, if you see what I mean. There are no strings between these individual puts. And that you get a kind of quantum theory, uh, out of that. And uh on the other hand, people say, well that's absurd, because you can't have a world

Which is just a lot of bits that aren't held together in some way. Because you wouldn't get anything unless things were held together. So there must be, underneath these individual putt potts, something that that makes it all stick, sort of fundamental gum of the whole thing. And we think therefore the fundamental gum, what holds everything together, is more important, it's more real. And so that is goo.

And then again, uh there are the people who say, no, um the the the structure of the world is physical. It is basically physical reality, and that's something we can measure and count and be definite about. And so when the physicist analyzes what we call material, he stops asking the question, what is the stuff of which the world is made? Because he begins to realize that in his opinion, there isn't any stuff at all. There is only structure.

In other words, when you ask what is such a thing made of, and you analyse it, what are you going to say? You can't say it's made of some kind of gabloche, uh which is uh pretty vague, because the person scratches his head and says, Yeah, but what is that gabloche? I want to know more about it. So you have to answer and say, Well, I tell you, when we look at this gabloche carefully, we find that it has so much this in it, so much that and so much the other.

And these things are arranged in a certain order. They go round each other in a certain order, or they pop in a certain order, or they wiggle in a certain order, and then you see you're talking about structure. Because you're talking about form, you're talking about shape, you're talking about something definite that you can measure. And so the physicist always turns up with a structured description of what the world is.

But then, on the other hand, opposite the physicists, there are the spiritual people. And they feel that when the world is basically reduced to structure, something very valuable is lost. They say this is reducing the world to a lot of bare bones. And b to be alive, bones need some flesh. They say it's all very well just to talk about structure.

and the shape and the form of the world. But when you go deeply into structure, what holds it together? What is the structure? See, if you describe to me a V-shaped object, which is a structure, I'm going to ask you, what's it what's it made of? And don't keep answering me back with structure because I'm not happy about it. I want to get down to some fundamental goo.

And so the spiritual person will say, No, the basically behind the material physical world there is the spirit. And we refuse to define the spirit. The spirit is infinite. The spirit has no form. Uh, it has no shape, and therefore it comes, doesn't it, under the category of primordial goo. Now that's one form of the argument, but let's see it in another and very familiar way, when there's a typical argument between a man and a woman.

Generally speaking, I don't want to get myself into trouble, but generally speaking, men tend to go for structure and women for goo. Because in an argument between a man and a woman, the man will say, Now look here, it's perfectly clear what this is all about. It works like this, and it's like this, and it's like this, and nobody could argue about it. But the women will say, I'm sorry, but um there's something about it that I can't quite explain, because I'm not as clever as talking at you.

But I I know in my and I know in my intuition that the haven't quite quite can't quite catch and pinned down definitely is of course goo. The thing that's definitely pinned down is always There's a frightful fight goes on about this, and as you can see it at the highest end of philosophy... You can see it in an ordinary man and wife argument, and then finally you can see it in matters of taste. Are you the kind of person who likes to eat your donut straight or do you dunk it?

If you like to eat your donut straight, you tend to be a structure type. If you like to dunk it, you tend to be a goo type. And of course in human personality, uh as I I'm talking of types of of structure people and types of goo people, uh, we shall find, you see, that the scientist and the philosopher generally tend to be structure people, and poets and painters tend to be goopy.

And when uh a scientist, uh or a very practical type of person. See, we in in in the United States of America, uh we tend to be very highly structure characters. And uh We we we react very badly to go carrot. So the typical male of our Anglo-Saxon subculture tends to be a strongly structured personality.

And he says, now listen, I don't want all this philosophy and poet is a lot of long hair stuff. I want to be practical. You see, now that's a prickly word, too. Listen to it. Practical. It's like strapcha. And I want to be a I'm a practical man. All that stuff could go. And the poet, on the other hand, says, Look at that character. He's just a skeleton. He knows all the words and he's never heard the music. And he wants to get everything pinned down, and it's dead when it's pinned down.

Whereas we should get it up and get it alive again, in other words, get some essential juicy goo into it.

Now l let's pay a little attention to the values of both sides, you see, because both although they're both wrong. They're in a way both right. First of all, when we go back to the original debate, what is it? In other words, what is the nature of the physical world? It's plain why there is this argument. When you look at anything clearly and you've got your microscope well into focus, you see its outline. And then you say, I've got structure. But then there's something smaller than I can see.

And that in the microscope even, until I've changed the magnification. It looks fuzzy. Now all fuzzy and vague things come under the category of goo. But there always will be fuzzy and vague things because you cannot get yourself clearly focused on everything at once. When you are clearly focused on something near you, you're fuzzy on something far away. Near you is structure, far away is goo. Now we have never found in the world any pure structure.

Something that was structure and structure alone would be like an object that had a front but no back. Nor in the world have we ever found pure unadulterated goo. Because there always must be some structure to hold it up. You see, if it was pure goo, it just wouldn't be there. It'd fall down. However you tried to put it together, it wouldn't even be solid enough to be a gas.

Whereas if it were pure structure, it would also fall down, because the there would be nothing, as it were, it would have no body. But there really isn't such a thing. You find structure and goo always together because they're a conspiracy. They look like structure from some points of view, things do, they look like goo from other points of view.

But they go together in the same way as heads and feet grow together on the same sort of a body. And although you can cut a head off, it won't live. And you can cut the feet off and have them separately, but they won't live. They must go together. So it is with all the various points of view which have arguments about the relative value of structure and the relative value of goo, upon whatever level, you will always have to put them together.

And get a nice balance, like flesh and bones, and you will understand that life is a gooey structure, or if you want to put it the other way around, because of your personal predilections and taste, you can say life is structured goo.

But now uh the the question remains in a funny way, what is it? We still somehow want an answer. And it doesn't seem sufficient to say, from some points of view it's structure, and from other points of view it's goo. We're not really content with that. And to go back to physics for a moment. Uh light in some circumstances seems to be a series of wave impulses. For other purposes light appears to be a series of particles. Now this seems to be contradictory.

To our common sense it must be either wave or particle. But physicists aren't bothered by this at all. They say it's wavical. And sometimes it's convenient to look at it one way and sometimes convenient to look at it the other way. And so also when you look at a human being, you can look at him from two points of view. You can look at him from a goo point of view. That means a human being is one thing. He's all stuck together, and you can perfectly clearly see he's a unity.

But from a structure point of view, a human being can be analyzed and be shown to be just in a huge collection of molecules, which are in turn composed of their appropriate types of atoms. And between these little bits Are enormous spaces. In other words, the spaces between the atoms composing our bodies are quite as vast as the spaces between the planets in the solar system. relative to the size of the little bodies. And so you could say there really isn't such a thing as a human being at all.

There is a collection of particles, yes, but to say that this is a solid object called a person is pure abstraction. Uh it is, for example, when you see a flight of birds in migration, you can see that they're all separate birds. Even though they have a funny way of suddenly making a turn altogether as if they each bird got the idea at the same moment.

And that seems to make them a kind of unity. Now, if you see, if you get far enough away from a flight of birds and see it off in the distance, it will appear as a gray smudge. Something like a cloud. And therefore, because it's fuzzier, it will look more united. And you'll begin to decide that it's a thing. Not a lot of things. You see that runs all the way through. But so according to your point of view...

You've got a thing in front of you, which sticks together and has plenty of goo, or if you get terribly close to it, you see all the bits that it's made of, and you you can't find the total thing. We, for example, are living on a level of magnification where we all see each other quite clearly. and therefore regard each other as individual people. But if we got a long way away from ourselves and saw human beings behaving always only from a height of 20,000 feet.

we would begin to look upon them as constituting things of a different kind. Supposing, you know, you came from Mars, and you had a flying saucer, and you looked at the Earth. And uh you were asked what kind of creature lives there. Well, you would say it's a very strange creature lives on Earth. It's a spider like creature. but it doesn't move very It has intelligent-looking tentacles that reach out from one of these creatures to another.

Because they evade mountains in a certain way, and they handle water And uh at night when you can see more clearly what's happening, they glow. And they have little particles, which may be um bubbles of some kind, that flow along these tentacles, and you can see them at night. And they flow in a sort of intelligent order, and that's the kind of thing that lives on Earth. And they would be perfectly right from their point of view.

So you see, we may very well, it's perfectly probable, that we are members of an intelligent entity that is very much bigger than ourselves, and in turn Our uh solar system may be a member of some fantastically great organization that we can't make out at all because our eyes aren't big enough to look at it. And so on and so on. It could even get so complicated. Uh imagine this, I'm not saying this too seriously, but supposing there are, you see, big systems within

Uh I mean little systems within big systems that get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And in the other direction Smaller systems within big systems that get smaller and smaller and smaller indefinitely until in some kind of strange way the smallest one is the same as the biggest. So you've got a complete circle. Th this would be kind of delightful. But wherever you are in this circle, you appear to be in the middle.

There seems to be as big a world above you as there is a small world below you. That's because when a human being stands and looks around, he always appears to be in the middle of the world because he can see equally far in all directions, or hear equally far in all directions, so he seems to be in the middle.

Now though, when we see this, we still scratch our heads and say, Yes, but that's all very well, but what is it? There seems to be something you see that hasn't been answered. Now when you get up to a very fundamental question There's a sure rule, and that is to ask yourself, what kind of an answer am I expecting? What kind of answer would satisfy me? Marvelously enough, there are certain basic questions which when you think about them carefully, they don't get answered, they just evaporate.

Because you realize that you had asked the wrong question. To give a very celebrated example. People have tried for centuries. to trisect an angle with a ruler and compass. Find a way that will always work. Some angles can be trisected in this way, but not all angles. Mathematicians and geometers have have sought and sought for a way that would trisect all angles. Now there isn't such a way.

And it is proved that there isn't such a way. But the proof really consists in showing that the question itself was as meaningless as asking, is there a way to draw a square circle? And it obviously there isn't, because the question doesn't mean anything. So when we ask a fundamental question, such as what is it, we must also think, is this a meaningful question? And I have to decide on that by asking what sort of an answer would please me.

And so when I think very carefully, I want to ask, what is it? What is this universe? Basically. What is matter? What is energy? And I'm thinking very hard of what sort of an answer would please me. And I honestly can't think of one. The only answer that would really please mean. Wouldn't be an ordinary answer because it wouldn't be in words. Amen. But you see, this is a very difficult kind of answer to please people.

You know when a child asks a question, a child says, Um, Daddy, what makes the trees green? And he says, it's because of the chlorophyll. And the child says, oh. but may not ask anything anymore because it's got a name. You know, you go along and say, I never saw that bird before. What kind of a bird is it? And somebody says, It's a twin specked flycatcher. Oh Why are you satisfied? Who's that over there? Oh, that's Mr. Brown. Oh. What difference does it make?

A many, many answers are given to us in this way, which really are just that we got a noise. And we f feel uncomfortable unless we know what noise represents that thing. We don't really need to know. Often when a child says to me, What is it? What is that? I say, Look, that's it. That's what it is. Look at it. It's a terribly satisfactory answer, though. Because what it is, you see, is this See, that is this. That's the most profound thing I can say. That's the end of all philosophy.

It's this. And, you know, see? That's what it is. Been listening to Alan Watts, courtesy of the Alan Watts organization, and today's podcast was produced in conjunction with the Now network. Our theme music is by Zakir Hussein from Moment Records. It's the Rhythm Experience album. And if you want to learn more about Alan Watts and his works and his biography, please visit us at Allen Watts dot org on the website.