'While all men have a reason... not all men can give a reason.'

In a line, John Henry Newman captures the nub of the whole issue not just in faith, but psychoanalysis and indeed life itself. (Though I suppose 'all men' might just be being obstinate...)

'A revival of the art of deep thought,' has been called for by Michael Gove, the UK schools secretary. What might he mean? Various commentators have ventured a view - 'slow thought', as opposed to the instant google answer; specialisation, grasping all there is to know about this or that.

But I haven't read of the art of interpretation, which I imagine would have been part of the skill for most who might count as a deep thinker in the past. It seeks not just facts but connections, not just the immediate surface but the elusive breadth. It requires self-knowledge too as understanding yourself, your life and times, are part of the process. And it demands that Socratic skill, the framing of deeper questions, as opposed to the rushing to answers. Bring back hermeneutics...

A friend just sent me this quote, of Rilke, that seems particularly helpful.

'Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.'

Ivan Illich is someone I must read more of. A sort of freelance philosopher, who believed thinking was as closely connected to hospitality as it was to study, he was a great inverter of ideas.

We hear politicians talk about responsibility, and yet for Illich, the western sense of being responsible for others and the world is a kind of guilt/power-fantasy combo - guilt at how we've exploited others and the world, and power-fantasy that we can do anything about it anyway. The supreme expression of this might be the Blairite doctrine of preventative wars, war being the supreme expression of state power.

Or there's freedom - freedom of choice. For Illich, our problem is not having enough choice but having too much choice. Today our freedom is found in giving up some of this excessive choice, in renunciation, and discovering that we can do without. Therein lies a rediscovery not just of freedom but gift too.

Then there's the bureaucratization of needs, treating human beings as legal entities with a right to certain needs fulfillment. The problem with the formalization of needs fulfillment is that it risks being dehumanizing, treating people as statistics and measuring needs delivery via targets. What's lost is real human contact, the empathic moment when you risk being moved by another's needs, so that you can offer them friendship as well as deliver a service.

He was also very wary of insurance, once commenting that 'I cannot let anybody insure the material or the spiritual future for me. I know I live in a world where the greater our ideals are, the greater the insurance companies will become.' The point is that when we try to satisfy all our ideals by buying insurance - from mortgages to pensions - we lose the possibility that they may be fulfilled in ways that are unexpected to us, that lie ahead of us in the future. Which is what Illich meant when he also said 'I believe that the future is in the hands of God.'

He believed we live in an age in which politics is in decline, pervaded by a sense of vacuity because political visions no longer inspire faith, because they no longer touch our humanity. The left's promise of social amelioration feels exhausted by the law of diminishing returns; the right's promise of a new society sounds empty because it simultaneously promises self-sufficiency. We're tried to deliver civic affection for our fellows via the exercise of power and the development of policy, and it's failing. But that should not be a cause for panic. Instead, it's a time in which the true value of things can re-emerge - human sympathy and freely-given love.

I'm still digesting Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, a book I heartily recommend if you enjoy some for the common themes of my blog. And thought I'd try a little analysis of this picture by Renaissance artist Domenico Ghirlandaio, An Old Man and His Grandson, by way of exploring some of McGilchrist's themes for myself.

I notice three things.

First, the sense of perspective through the window, not only in space, conveyed by the mountain, but also in time, conveyed by the winding road. For McGilchrist, this joint sensibility is characteristic of the full flourishing particularly of the right hemisphere in the art of the period. He describes a kind of movement, right to left to right. The right hemisphere first, as it were, picking up the whole of time and expansiveness of place the image shows; the left hemisphere then analysing the features of the image; and then handing back those specifics to the right in order to produce the synthesis that the picture offers: the powerful sense of two real individuals standing in relation to the world and in 'lived time'.

Both hemispheres are required for this - the right's capacity to see the whole, the left's to discern the specifics. Bring the two aspects together, and the picture pulls at your imagination to see two human beings standing at a particular moment in relation to the broader context of cultural history. That's the genius of Renaissance art's perspective, in space and time.

A second feature that also incorporates this three-way dynamic is the sense of empathy the picture produces, which is one both of identification with the man and his grandson, but also a sense of distance from them. We view them knowing we're not them, but we view them sympathetically. The distance between us and them is appropriate to allow them to be themselves, and to allow us to be with them too.

You can see the role the right hemisphere plays in this by the fact that the grandson rests against the old man's left arm - thereby ensuring that the right hemisphere dominates in the act of seeing, the right being the side capable of emotional engagement. Hence, babies tend to be held in left arms too. The old man's right arm (left hemisphere) serves to steady the son, a more precise act. But again, both are necessary for the two to meet in the way they do. Togetherness and distance.

The mood with which they meet is notable too, it being one of melancholy. Melancholy is not just sadness, rather it's the feeling that arises from being wise about a situation. So the two seem conscious of their mortality, the old man looking on the new son, the new son wanting to be with the old man through his life, implicitly knowing he can't. For McGilchrist, melancholy is characteristic of right hemisphere dominance because it is conscious of the mystery of beginnings and endings, of not being in control of sources and causes.

Conversely, positive thinking, or a certain kind of depression, might be moods precipitated by left hemisphere dominance. These two opposite feelings arise because the left hemisphere controls its world, but it controls only that world it carries within it, as a representation - an inner world that is therefore separated from the real world. Whilst the illusion of control remains in tact, positive thinking is possible. When the illusion of control goes, depression breaks out, as the left hemisphere on its own has little capacity to cope with the real world - the wisdom that only a dialectic with the right hemisphere can bring.

A third feature is the way the picture conveys the generations. These are not just two of a species related by their shared genes, a reading that requires first the categorisation of each into their biological part (elder male, younger male) and then a generalisation (the generations pass their genes on.) Rather the picture is of two distinct individuals whom we see in living relationship, together forming a family whole - though not losing their individuality in the process.

McGilchrist's contention is that we live in an age which is losing sight of these kind of balances, this right-left-right capacity. Instead the left is dominating, so we document our world not live in it; become confused about the self because of an inability to achieve appropriate distance; and prefer generalisations rather than wholes, provoking crises of meaning.

A revelation only finally came at the end on Morrissey's Desert Island Disks, I thought. For most of the programme he toyed with Kirsty, playing the part of prophet to the teenaged mind and narcissistic pop star in equal measure - with his relentless 'celebration' of difference, separateness, isolation.

Then came his luxury, a bed, because 'I like to be hidden and I like to sink. And I think we all love to go to bed, and we love to go to sleep.'

There was another moment of borrowed wisdom - 'It's the brother of death' - before the revelation: 'It means we can just switch our brains off when we go to bed and forget about ourselves, hopefully.' Clearly, he doesn't just switch off and forget about himself. Hence the need to be hopeful he one day might. But I thought that was true: insomnia as a form of egoism. And I speak as one who often fails to sleep.

A modern day Socrates. Where are they? You catch sight of one every so often. The test is a philosophy of life that puts uncertainty centre stage, so that wisdom comes to be defined as understanding the limits of human knowledge.

George Soros's lectures this week are suggesting he is a strong candidate. In the latest, he writes this: 'We are capable of acquiring knowledge, but we can never have enough knowledge to allow us to base all our decisions on knowledge. It follows that if a piece of knowledge has proved useful we are liable to over-exploit it and extend it to areas where it no longer applies, so that it becomes a fallacy.'

The working out of this insight feels Socratic too. Soros understands that whilst we aspire to objective knowledge of reality, what he calls the cognitive function, we can also often change reality voluntaristically, what he calls the manipulative function. I suspect that the witty story of Socrates realising that he was wise because he alone in ancient Athens didn't believe his own rhetoric - unlike the politicians and the poets - implies a similar distinction. Truth, with a capital 'T', we search for. Truths, with a lower case and in the plural, we live by.

Soros is committed to Karl Popper's idea of the open society, one in which the freedom of the individual, particularly in speech, is paramount: it underpins the democratic mechanism that saves us from the excesses of power, which in large part stem from a government's inability to recognise its limits and its desire to manipulate reality.

Socrates's relationship to democracy was ambivalent, of course: he had more experience of it as a mob than as a free collective. And yet I think he and (contra Popper) Plato valued a not dissimilar principle, best displayed in their commitment to open conversation. Socrates's face-to-face conversations, as represented by Plato, had three characteristics. They hoped that the truth will out. They ever were conscious of the rhetorical manipulations at play. And third, they kept faith with the process of conversation even when actual conversations routinely ended inconclusively, as they did - though only, thereby, reaffirming the persistent and profound nature of human limitation.

The question of whether it's better to be a generalist or a specialist is in the air. Claire Fox has been championing the value of useless knowledge - expertise in some matter for the sake of the life of the mind, not any direct application. Bryan Appleyard and Robert Rowland Smith are in favour of generalists, Bryan on the grounds that it makes a good journalist, Robert on the grounds that it makes for new ways of knowing. Then, Roman Krznaric was advocating generalism at The Bigger Picture, against the notion of the division of labour in the workplace, for the specialism of the pin factory would make zombies of us all. But then Andrew Sullivan, via Malcom Gladwell, believes that journalism is less smart for being generalist because it can't penetrate the walls of expertise of which the modern world is made.

My feeling is that we need generalists, to join the dots, to ensure that the experts keep their feet on the ground. John Maynard Keynes thought that a good economist would be a generalist because that might make them 'more than an economist', and don't we need that now.

And yet, I suspect that it's good to have been a specialist in one thing at some point in your life too. That'd be the wider value I think I gained from doing a PhD. The qualification forced me to seek out probably everything there is to find out about Plato's Lysis, and attempt to conjure up more, which delivered a certain, rarefied kind of intellectual pleasure - one that you might say is narrow but deep. But it's the very taste for the depths that process nurtured which has been of wider value. It leaves you with a desire for what matters, a delight in the crux. It's that sense the good generalist can then so advantageously apply.

(Image: Wisdom, mural by Robert Lewis Reid)

Secrets and symbols sell, as demonstrated by the publication today of Dan Brown's latest, and the biggest book run in history, or some such. Then there's that strange bestseller The Secret, which you often see stacked near philosophy shelves in bookshops - not far from the tomes of irate rationalists decrying the mumbo-jumbo. I love the way bookshops make bedfellows of opponents. Yesterday I saw Richard Dawkins spine to spine with Karen Armstrong. Incidentally, I think the secret of The Secret is you yourself, which at least has the merit of being something real.

Secrets feature in contexts other than global conspiracy and self-help. There's the alchemy that drove science for centuries. Even today, the universe is perceived as withholding its secrets from our study: what else is the multiverse? In the New Testament, there's the messianic secret, a scholar's phrase rather than one of Jesus. The idea is that who Jesus was is not entirely obvious, and many get it wrong. You find secrets in Plato too. In the Seventh Letter, Plato (presumably) argues that only a few truly benefit from his philosophy, for only they have the right character and capability for it. Others hear it and are either full of disdain or, conversely, pride.

If you're looking for an excellent novel featuring Plato's esotericism, and would buy National Enquirer before Dan Brown, try The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza.

(Image: Hermes Trismegistus)

... since Salley Vickers has a great take on these messengers.