Finding Insight in the Bramble Bush

-- By KrishnaSutaria - 14 Apr 2010

The Bramble Bush

On the first day of class, we discussed the need to grapple different disciplines of knowledge simultaneously in order to form a consilient understanding of any legal problem. Eben hypothesized that creative thinking and ideas are generated through this challenging process, and embracing it would make us better lawyers who saw past the immediacy of the black letter law and thought deeper in time.

Despite my best efforts, I was struggling to apply those concepts to law school. I understood all the little bits and pieces of information as they flew at me, but the beast itself, the Law, was always out of my grasp. And how could I have comprehended it? As I discovered two days ago, I was deep in the thicket with both my eyes scratched out, and lacked both the sight, and insight to know what was happening to me.

Poetry for the Blinded

K. N. Llewellyn's chapter titled "And Law School Offers What?" from his book The Bramble Bush fell into my lap during a lunch event and changed that. Llewellyn opens his piece with a poem:

"There was a man in our town

And he was wond'rous wise;

He jumped into a bramble bush

And scratched out both his eyes.

And when he saw his eyes were out,

With all his might and main

He jumped into another bush

And scratched them in again!"

This odd verse left me with insight that had eluded me for too long. In some sense the bush was about law school, and in another, it was about how to approach the lifelong study of law. On a deeper level, the bush was life itself. Until this realization I was playing around with the inputs and plugging them into formulae expecting certain outputs, and every time the process failed me. Our legal system continued to make little sense and there was no help in sight. But how could I have known without Llewellyn that I was supposed to jump out first? The method to the madness, was that the method was the madness, and the madness in turn spawned the method. "No cure for law but more law," as Llewellyn put so beautifully.

I understand now that I have to scratch my eyes back in again.

"Rinse. Repeat."

Where Am I going?

The point of this long story is two-fold: First, this "Aha!" moment reaffirmed the importance of insight in any kind of significant change, personal or otherwise, and second, it revealed the lack of conversations about insight in our discussions about consilient thinking. And just why should consilient thinking accommodate something as amorphous as human insight?

Insight

The second part of this essay seeks to answers that question with this proposition: we are reaching a point in our evolution as a species where our technological capabilities are far outpacing their utility and relevance to us. We have answers to questions today that we have not even asked. Sharpening our skills of insight offers a solution to that predicament.

Attempt at a Definition

But first, what is insight, and how is it distinct from other processes we address in our class? Insight is the moment when the reality of the internal world aligns with that of the external, and in that fleeting space and limited time, the idea is truly born, real choices are made, and truth is seen. It is the gap preceded by biology and intra-psychic activity, informed by sociological, historical, economic and cultural influences, and followed by significant consequences, both real and legal. It is the moment of choice, when Meursault shoots the Arab, or when the Ladakhi says, "chi choen?"; It is the moment when the trickster crafts the first fishnet, and when Newton, rubbing his head, declares, "F = ma!";

Insight and Science

The increasing importance of the need for human insight in the future cannot be overstated. We have created computers that can analyze complex sets of data in nature and produce the formulae for us. The Eureka system, for example, has been able to take data about the thousands of simultaneous biochemical changes taking place within a single-cell organism, and churned out two equations which predict accurately what will happen within that cell. Unfortunately, as the Radiolab show leads us to believe, we have no use for these knowledge or tools without the insight needed to synthesize the equations, the inputs, and the outputs to explain just why those reactions occur the way they do. We can, as we do, have the entire human genome at our disposal, but without the right question, without an understanding of the relationship between the raw science and the real world, we lack any application for the knowledge. Douglass Adams had it right - knowing that the equation to "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is 6 X 7 = 42 is useless without the insight to interpret its meaning and significance.

Insight and the Law

Theories about the external and internal worlds have come far in closing the space between the thought and action and devising a workable, if not perfect system of understanding natural phenomena, including human behavior. However, but much work remains to be done about in that spooky place where synthesis happens, where connections between otherwise unrelated phenomena are made, and where insight occurs. If the need for insight is as real as the scientists at the cutting edge of technological innovation would have us believe, at the very least, we must begin the conversation about it in non-mystical, non-magical terms.

If insight is a moment of true nuclear randomness, I admit I have wasted everyone's time. The input is set, and the output is too, and we just have to wait for the right time and place for insight to strike. However, if insight can be better understood, and decoded like any other phenomena, then part of the craft of lawyering should be geared towards altering the variables in our lives to replicate these moments of profound clarity and inspiration. A truly consilient theory of the world would benefit greatly from understanding the mechanisms of insight.

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