Doubt: The Lost Virtue
“Doubt is the father of invention.”
- Galileo Galilei
Because of my firm belief in the power of limits, I am a big fan of that famous quote by Plato: “Necessity is the mother of invention”. But until this week I never knew that Galileo completed the family hundreds of years ago.
Despite the fact that I am a doubter by nature, I struggled at first to completely make the connection between doubt and inventiveness. Most of us have negative connotations with the concept of doubt. One dictionary, for example, offers up the definition “lacking in confidence”; this is how most of us understand the term. The positive, healthy side of doubt is severely underrepresented. The result, I believe, is that we attempt to eliminate negative doubt without understanding what to put it in its place. Replacing doubt with confidence alone does a severe disservice to our characters.
I did a quick Google search and found the following quotes. Reading them immediately turned on the figurative light bulb for me and resonated with many of my dance and life experiences, giving me a clearer understanding of the difference between healthy doubt and unhealthy doubt.
- “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” - André Gide
- “We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt enters.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.” - George Iles
- “To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.” - Oscar Wilde
Doubt is in fact a very healthy questioning of what we think we know. It is the challenging of assumptions, preconceptions, and closemindedness. So it should come as no surprise that doubt is so fundamental to creativity and invention. But upon further reflection I realized that even more important than doubt’s relationship to creativity is its relationship to connection.
The partners I enjoy least are those who assume you are enjoying their lead or follow, who assume the latest pattern they’ve just learned is the coolest thing ever (in every situation), who assume you will have the same motivation in the dance and the same response to the music that they do. Their confidence is admirable. Unfortunately, because they make these assumptions based on their preconceived notions, they stop listening. They stop listening to their partners to see how they are responding, they stop listening to the music to see what new secret it might have for them, and they stop evaluating how the skeleton of what they’ve been taught plays itself out in the flesh and blood of the moment, the music, and the partnership. In short, they don’t possess healthy doubt.
I think of confidence and doubt as another yin-yang pairing whose balance is essential in dance and in life. Confidence enables us to act with strength, resolve, and presence; doubt enables us to act with consideration, patience, and attentiveness. Perhaps more importantly, doubt keeps us in the moment. If confidence encourages us to plow ahead with courage, doubt reminds us to remain open, ready to receive and adjust as we welcome the lessons of the moment. Without healthy doubt, we close our minds to perceiving, understanding, and being personally affected by what is happening around and within us.
My theory is that dancers who are inconsiderate and dancers who lack that improvisational character in their dancing (the two may be separate or may overlap to a great extent) suffer from a lack of doubt. Doubt is severely underestimated in our culture, which would explain why Galileo’s quote doesn’t get much press. This is very unfortunate. Dance teachers would benefit from doubting well and from modeling that doubt to their students instead of pretending to know all the answers. Learners would benefit from doubting well and from discovering that questions and answers are to be found everywhere - not just in the minds and bodies of particular dance instructors - if they will only look and listen.
My goal – as a dancer and as a dance teacher – is to healthily doubt and be doubted.
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