Time

In his series of books on the subject, Dr. Gary Chapman describes five "love languages": quality time, words of affirmation, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Each of us has a need to feel loved, relates Chapman, but sometimes the love language we are most responsive to (the same language we are most inclined to express our love in) is not the love language most meaningful to those we love. As a result, we may miss out on expressions of love we aren't normally tuned in to, while at the same time wondering why all the love we give goes unappreciated.

Of the five, the language of quality time can perhaps be the most challenging to understand--especially for those who are predisposed to one of the other four. ("After all," says the person for whom acts of service are most resonant, "I invest so much time in taking care of everything, what more do they want?") Likewise, buying (or better yet, making) a gift for another--when done with the thoughtfulness of love--takes time.

Words of affirmation, at first, may seem less time-bound. How long does it take to say something nice? Yet, anyone who has ever had a business leadership course or developed their public speaking skills knows that affirmation is most meaningful when it captures how the recipient's contribution was experienced by others. Rather than lauding one with superlative adjectives, speaking of something the person did, and how you felt as you experienced it, goes much further. Conveying such anecdotes take a little while. Doing the preparatory soul searching to really capture that value, can take much longer.

At the risk of privileging the last of the five, one might suggest that physical touch is the most ancient and fundamental of the love language. Evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, for instance, argues that reciprocal grooming--the mode of physical touch most characteristic of life for our primate cousins--is the mechanism by which early hominids tended to social bonds, resolved conflict, and maintained group cohesion. Grooming (physical touch), however, just like the other love languages, takes time.

Indeed, Dunbar argues that the time it takes to engage in grooming places a constraint on the size of social groups. At some point, a group could be so large that the amount of time it would take any given individual to engage in reciprocal grooming with each member of that group--so as to keep social bonds strong--would become prohibitive. No time would be left for other activities, like finding food or getting sleep. This, Dunbar tells us, is the purpose of spoken language: with it we are able to "groom" multiple individuals at once, and so share our lives with more people than we could do otherwise.

Some social bonds, however, are deeper than others, and while hanging out with a group of friends and chatting is important, so too is talking intimately with one person with whom we share a meaningful connection. It is at these times, however, that language can take the most time of all. This can be a positive experience, where we lose all track of time, so engrossed we are in the words of the other. At other times, however, the words exchanged aren't nearly so positive, and we find that hours have passed in an attempt to simply communicate.

Meanwhile, we still need to find food, get sleep, attend to the daily activities of living. Time is rarely found, but often lost. Love, sometimes, can seem much the same. The challenge is loving with the time we have.

A Distinction and a Difference

In the course of examining options for graduate study, I have found myself sometimes surprised, often troubled, occasionally even gobstruck, by some of the assertions made by researchers in and advocates of my field of interest: evolutionary psychology.

Admittedly, insofar as the specialty that most draws my attention is held, by some, to be one well deserving of disrepute, criticisms of the broad claims of the intellectual enterprise are easily encountered. Clashes of personality, no doubt, have contributed somewhat to this, but so too, I suspect, has the rather revolutionary rhetoric of some authors: predicting, unselfconsciously, the demise of the old regime in favor of the new.

Yet, there is something deeper here. Between the argumentum ad hominem and assertions of methodological progressivism, there is, I believe, a serious science struggling to disentangle itself from the shadow of social Darwinism, on the one hand, and popular coverage of sophomoric research topics, on the other. At the heart of this challenge, I would argue, is the logical fallacy of low redefinition, coupled with a tendency toward behavioral atomism.

In future posts, I shall explore these and other issues, as I endeavor to articulate a phenomenological account of a dynamic, situated, embodied model of the evolution of human being.

Ignorance

Among the many books in my library, there resides a text entitled The Encyclopedia of Ignorance. Promising “everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown”, this narrow volume celebrates the horizons of knowledge: the more we know, the more we discover we don't know. A book about science, it teaches a lesson about life.

Horizons have a wonderful power. Imagine being as the center of a sphere, the reach of experience (being in the world) as the radius of that sphere. The surface of the sphere: that is the horizon. All that encounters being is ready to hand, just within reach. What lies beyond, is not simply unknown, but the unknown unknown, a virtual space uncoupled with the being that is here.

The horizon, however, now that's something else entirely. At the surface of the sphere, all possibilities rest. The area in which the virtual and the actual meet, the horizon is where all that we hold as known discloses all that we may hold as unknown.

Take up new knowing, extend one's reach, extend the sphere, and watch as the horizon recedes: the area of ignorance stretches with the elasticity of a soap bubble, blown slowly... slowly... tenderly outward. With each addition to that equipment we call knowledge, the surface area of ignorance multiplies.

To expand one's horizons is to celebrate the growth of one's ignorance. Stretch out your limbs, reach to the furthest point around you. Just at the very edge of your fingertips... those oh so sensitive organs of touch. Do you feel it? That iridescent, insubstantial horizon?