The fading influence of impressionism

A general theme I’ve been thinking about recently is how different people think and perceive the world. There is an archetype of a thinker: an individual mired in systematic logical reasoning, perhaps sitting on an armchair. A picture almost certainly borrowed from seeing too many similarly postured portraits of famous European thinkers in suits from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I used to naively think of thought as a spectrum along which there are more and less “sophisticated” thinkers but I’ve increasingly come to believe there are fundamental differences in the temperaments and approaches we take to perceive and understand the world. When discussing even reading lists with others, I notice how my list and that of others like me would converge around a set of non-fiction books focused on imparting theoretical frameworks and models of the world. Alternatively, there is a camp of readers focused on fiction and novels. While I used to attribute this only to areas of interest, I now feel that this is a symptom of a deeper difference in outlook.

I’ve come to think these reading lists diverge because we embody different styles of thinking and implicitly maybe even different epistemologies. As I was trying to unearth what I really meant by this, I stumbled upon this subreddit which captures the distinction I’m trying to draw. The post describes two kinds of thinkers: Impressionistic and lexical. Here’s the key excerpt:

I think their definitions are anchoring around the specific role of language and words here too much but still gets at something significant. To narrow the scope and make the distinction clearer, I think there are impressionistic and lexical thinkers who employ language differently and this may help explain the theoretical model-literary fiction divide.

Lexical thinkers are those who focus on the systematic and structured acquisition of knowledge and sense making. They tend to prefer thinking through topics using formalisms with fixed rules to construct larger pictures of the whole from fine parts. This also correlates with step-by-step linear style of logical reasoning but is not a core feature. Lexicality is best embodied by fields like analytic philosophy and mathematics which aim to sequence and describe in terms of fundamental primitives like objects. They construct their theories bottom-up using these primitives and the relationships between primitives. They’re likely to use language in this way too, seeing words or phrases like objects to manipulate.

Impressionists on the other hand use more loaded, “top-heavy” thought devices to interpret the world and to convey their ideas. They prefer to rely on intuition, observation and deal in events, metaphors, observations, and archetypes. They take a more narrative framing of things. They may not always veer towards maximal abstraction the way lexicalists like to. They subscribe to a version of Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory: that just because something is unseen or unstated does not mean it doesn’t exist. To borrow a computing metaphor, impressionists “deep learn” their understandings: they absorb and recognize patterns that carry embedded signals about how things work. This is in sharp contrast to the lexicalist who dislikes ambiguous parts in the description of any whole and tend to be skeptical of knowledge that cannot be easily categorized and described at every level.

I used to lionize the idea of systematic logical reasoning. To me, it represented the height of cognition. The forms of study that best encapsulated this in my head were math, statistics, and philosophy. But as I grow older, I’m increasingly impressed with perceptiveness and the uncanny ability to find surprising connections. Mathematicians and scientists will likely point out that their fields require a lot of creativity and I fully acknowledge this. In fact, the history of science is laden with stories of the power of imagination in leading to the discovery of foundational theories. Einstein famously imagined himself riding a bicycle at the speed of light which was an influential thought experiment in developing his theory of relativity. I’m not attempting to draw a hard boundary between humanities and sciences here but rather to the distinct underlying styles of thought that best represent each discipline’s core. This distinction is also different from Kahneman’s famous System 1 (intuitive bursts) and System 2 (deliberate reasoning) categorization of thinking that Rushabh explored in his piece on historical probability. The distinction I’m drawing to draw here is more about two different styles of inquiry. They are both System 2 but my hunch is that impressionists take advantage of System 1 better which results in a different body of work.

I see the distinction more as a methodological difference, akin to how the humanities and sciences differ in the tools and approaches they take to investigating phenomena. Impressionism relies on something amounting to “taste”. It is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it understanding that can be recognized but not defined. In some ways, it is like machine learning which predicts well but does not provide theory about how a prediction task works. Using taste as a first filter, the impressionist uses narrative-driven concepting to make sense of a whole. For instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity upended classical physics by showing how time isn’t the same everywhere and is affected by speed and gravity. Yet, the best depiction of the relativity of time for humans might have come from Virginia Woolf. In her landmark novel Mrs Dalloway, she explores how time is not experienced as an objective concept of periodic intervals but as a non-linear flow connecting past, present, future. This may hold the key to understanding modern networked media’s impact on us. Despite various economic theories attempting to explain American culture, we perhaps learn more about it from watching Seinfeld and reading Tocqueville’s magnum opus Democracy in America which recorded his observations of the character of America in the nineteenth century. These are both classic impressionistic works that impart the core of their subject.

It is still true that impressionism was the primary style of thought throughout history. This is the mode that almost all classical writers operated in. But it then gave way to lexicalism over time as study and research became a dedicated profession of its own. I would speculate that this is mostly due to the rigors of the modern scientific method, the specialization of knowledge, and the bureaucratization of research. While early modern scientists often did independent research using their own ad hoc methods, scaling knowledge production made us develop more systematic approaches to research which could be replicated, verified, and easily taught. Relying on something as uncertain as taste would be a bad proxy to center research foundations upon and the inability to communicate this subjectivity would further complicate matters. How do we know if a piece of work is correct if it isn’t procedurally verifiable? This led to the development of methods of falsification. We created more iterative, paradigmatic approaches to advance our understanding. Impressionism is a lot less amenable to this and has fallen out of favor as a result.

So why bother with it at all? Because there is vastly more that we perceive and understand about the world than we can directly model. This dark matter pervades life. Impressionism is a way of noticing this and trying to surface it to the psyche and eventually to the collective consciousness. These are often observations at the edge of our understanding: where no canonical theories explain something. The work of impressionists illuminates the possibility space and makes us aware of what exists. They may not always be able to explain its workings in a structured manner but they can point to its existence. If this sounds like art, it’s because it often is. Literature is impressionism delivered through language. As is good film, theater, and other artistic disciplines. Through rich, detailed characters who seem like real people and evocative settings which can seem like a slice of life, we get to explore the latent spaces in the machinery of the world. They invite us to ponder what else exists and offer glimpses of it.

The tradeoff here is like preferring a blurry image to a high resolution line. My blurry image may look more like a sunset and yours like a smiley face. We each have an image but we have no good way of achieving consensus. Instead, the lexicalist sets out to render the image in high resolution and make her way through its contours with great deliberation. Once the work is done, at least in theory, there will be no confusion. The synthesis of the two modes is clearly the goal but I’ve found that it’s rare to actually see this in practice. The lexical thinker’s insistence on formalism and categorization strike the impressionist as limiting and narrow. The impressionist’s creative leaps of faith in turn strike the lexical thinker as ungrounded. This clash of modes is difficult to bypass.

My favorite writers now are people who I think are primarily impressionistic thinkers: they use intuition, observation and imagination as starting points for new strands of thought. They then theorize: chasing down those strands to a logical conclusion drawing from various sources and using an arsenal of thought devices to ram home an authentic and non-reductive understanding of things. Nassim Taleb’s works combine a survey of the world, from everyday incidents in contemporary New York to historical events in the Mediterranean, with a deep understanding of statistics to create a new philosophy of uncertainty. Venkatesh Rao observes the zeitgeist, looking for new memes and moods indicative of wider shifts and uses them as starting points to investigate technological and cultural phenomena. They both make their intuitions legible to the world by attempting to lay down expositions and constructing theories around them rather than by rejecting impressions as a valid source of inquiry. Steven Johnson’s book on innovation which was referenced in Rushabh’s piece on technological progress asks the same question: “where do good ideas come from?” If we knew, we’d manufacture it! We systematized thinking because that makes it robust and protects us from unfounded beliefs. But progress works in mysterious ways and being open to these mysteries may be a key attitude that we’ve lost in our march towards epistemic closure.

Using statistics to empirically confirm things and falsification to verify is essential to capturing universal truths. Impressionism cannot serve as a substitute for these approaches. I’m glad we find ourselves in a world that has uncovered important truths we can rely on. These systematic bodies of understanding are great and necessary but not sufficient. But our insistence on only learning from objectivity limits us. This is what novels, travel journals, and sometimes social media can uniquely do for us. Let us cultivate a sensitivity to the world so we don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.