Is it possible to ‘think outside the box’? Can we really think outside the given environment, or in any of the tropes we’re given by motivational speakers everywhere? “The more you try to move out in understanding space, the more you’re driven back inside,” is Mark Kingwell’s reply. While we try to investigate the world around us, we are inevitably pushed back towards the limited space of our own consciousness.
“Crossing the Threshold: Towards a Philosophy of the Interior” is the title of this year’s Larkin-Stuart Lecture series, a prestigious speech established by St. Thomas’s Church and Trinity College in honour of two men of the fold, Canon Stuart and Gerald Larkin. Dr. Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at U of T, a fellow of Trinity College, and senior fellow of Massey College, is a well-known author and media personality. He joins an impressive group of U of T alumni who have given the talks in past years, including literary theorist Northrop Frye, theologian Bernard Lonergan, physicist John Polanyi, and last year, filmmaker Atom Egoyan. The lectures will be delivered Tuesday and Wednesday evening at the George Ignatieff Theatre.
Kingwell is giving the talks on a subject that has long puzzled him: the process by which we negotiate the world around us, whether that takes a form that is spatial, temporal, social, or political. The Tuesday lecture, called “The Thought of Limits”, will be completed on Wednesday with “The Limits of Thought”. Those titles are not just clever reversals of each other-they actually refer to the way thinking and limiting are co-dependent words. The lectures will attempt to bring understanding of what happens when we try to leave the confines of our own minds and divide the world up along organizational lines: time and space, subject and object, inside and outside.
Not that we could ever imagine living any other way. Kingwell emphasizes that drawing boundaries is a hard fact of our experience, and that without limits, thinking would be an impossible activity. Neither term could be understood apart from the other, and his talks are therefore a kind of effort to deconstruct ordered pairs and how they affect us. When we draw boundaries in the world, it’s also a reflection of the inside/outside threshold of the mind.
If this all sounds a bit confusing, Kingwell uses an analogy that we can all understand, comparing the way we think to a multi-sport facility which has the painted lines used for different games all overlapping each other. When we play one game, we mentally block out the other lines and elevate one way of dividing the field.
Problems arise with this model when we try to think of limitation itself. The door of a room separates the inside from the outside, though it itself is both and neither of those things. Kingwell illustrates this by quoting author Don DeLillo’s phrase that “the skin of a building is both inside and outside and neither inside nor outside.” The threshold itself takes on a sort of in-between space when we try to conceptualize it.
A similar difficulty is expressed by the fact that a geometrical line is zero degrees thick, having endless extension but no width-something theoretically perfect, but non-existent. The same impossibility goes for a circle, another shape we use to structure things, which Kingwell points out is a line turned back on itself.
Kingwell links geometry to ideas of personal control or destiny, in the sense that we use lines as metaphors for our life-paths. Conversely, he starts with his own experiences when he writes philosophy, using individual consciousness as an entry point into an analysis of boundaries (he likens this strategy, which he’ll follow in his lectures, to phenomenology, which sees consciousness as the essential aspect of knowledge).
“I realized that [all these concepts] were folding into this larger project that I’ve been trying to work on about the nature of consciousness in an urban setting, which I’ve been trying to write for a couple of years now,” explains Kingwell.
Larger project? Is this a lamentation about writing from someone who’s published seven books in less than a decade? Kingwell says half-seriously of his recent book of memoirs, Catch and Release, which just came out last month: “The little book on fishing that I just published was just kind of an avoidance ritual: ‘Oh, I could work on this because it’s not the thing that I’m actually trying to work on.’ Classic procrastinator strategy. It’s been a while since I sat down and built a real book from the ground up.”
Well, you could hardly fault him for his strategy, as his larger study is tentatively called Inside Out, and will incorporate in one volume many of the topics that Kingwell has taught and written about over the years: justice, citizenship, consciousness, happiness, architecture, design. There, as in the Larkin-Stuart lectures, Kingwell will examine the way the structures of everyday existence-the very structures that allow us to be conscious-are taken for granted. This week’s lectures will very likely offer us a glimpse of what more there is to come from this very prolific philosopher.
The Larkin-Stuart lectures take place Nov. 25 and 26 at the George Ignatieff Theatre at 8 p.m. Tickets are free, but must be reserved by contacting Trinity College at (416) 978-2651 or [email protected], as seating is limited.
