Wit and Judgment

I’ve been reading Lawrence Weschler’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, in which he puts images unexpectedly side by side: a photograph of an ironworker at the World Trade Center next to Rodin’s Adam, George de La Tour’s Newborn Child next to Matisse’s Study of a Woman and Hannah Wilke’s Self Portrait. There’s something indisputably wonder-ful about all these surprises: this aha feeling that hits when we look at Velasquez next to Jeffrey Barbee and see similarities that we’ve never thought about before.

It makes me think about the distinction John Locke makes between wit and judgment:

Men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and is therefore so acceptable to all people.’

The eighteenth century is supposed to be the great century of wit, but it’s also a century that suspected wit : Addison distinguishes true wit from false wit in Spectator 62, and Johnson disapproves of the metaphysicals’ propensity of yoking disparate ideas together with violence. To compare love to a compass, as Donne did, was to pull together two things that Johnson thought should stay separated.

A lot of academic work goes into judgment: learning how to distinguish ideas one from the other. But a lot of wonder, by contrast, comes in seeing the connections that others have overlooked. It’s the reason that interdisciplinary work is often the most exciting, because there a writer is making connections that are “agreeable to the fancy.” I wonder if it’s also the reason that academic specialization can kill wonder: because we get better and better and making distinctions (it’s not uncommon, after all, to be “misled by similitude”), and worse at making unexpected connections. But the whole nature of metaphor is making connections. I’d love to read Weschler’s book as an introduction to poetic metaphor.