I Know This Much Is True

A couple of days ago, I commented on a piece in the Times about some new brain research based on Solomon Asch's social conformity studies.  The new study's results seemed to trouble the researchers because,

If other people's views can actually affect how someone perceives the external world, then truth itself is called into question.

There is no way out of this problem, Dr. Ariely said.

I'm sure Dr. Ariely wasn't quoted completely, nor fully thinking through the implications of his comment.  Because one of the principles of living in a civil society is our belief that, "other people's view can actually affect how [we perceive] the external world."

Doc Searls points to a great example of this principle today in citing David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon College in Ohio.  Wallace's is a towering intellect.  If you doubt that, try reading Infinite Jest. 

In his address, Wallace uses the old saw that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach one how to think rather than to fill one's head with facts.  But this is not someone who should be counted on for conventional perspectives.  For him, "learning how to think" doesn't mean mastering a process, a way of analyzing information.  Wallace takes off on a slightly different vector: the purpose of learning how to think is to learn how to think about what we experience every day. 

He points out that because our point of view is always with us, we come to see it as the unquestionable source of reality.  In fact, we rarely even recognize that we have (or better, are) a "point of view."  As Wallace says, like fish unaware of water.  Instead we believe that the things we experience (in all of their "attractive," "repulsive," obviousness) are simply given, real, in themselves, true. 

But Wallace calls on the Kenyon graduates to use their thinking to call these givens into question.

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable.  But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.  It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true.  The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try   to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.  You get to decide what to worship.

I'll leave it to you to read the whole speech to learn what that last word means for Wallace.

My point here is this simple truth: each of us constructs our own reality by "deciding" how we're going to see the world.  This is "truth as lived-reality" rather than "truth as objectified conformity to an in-itself world."  And the fact is, I can choose to view that lived-reality in different ways.  And, in so doing, change it.  This, in its most radical sense, is the meaning of freedom.

We all know this to be true: my attitude affects my world.  Not just my idea of the world; the world.

When I'm frustrated the world is filled with barriers.  When I'm thankful the world is filled with gifts.

And, just like the subjects in Asch's experiment, sometimes those changes come about as a result of the opinions of others.  Other people influence me, "invite" me to see the world differently. 

While the sinister possibilities of that reality might frighten us, the elevating ones are demonstrated in David Foster Wallace's Ohio remarks.

Comments

[Michael]

Came across this commentary from Harold Bloom on Shakespeare and it builds on your post: In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation...

Sounds like the "freedom" you and Wallace are talking about to me.

[Simon Bulenganija]

Most realizations in life come in times of either destined encounters or that of favourable states of a trainquil mind to understand that what we normally call "know or don't know" are all under one roof of "all knowing".

When you are ignorant of something you would obviously tell yourself "I don't know" or "I know" when you have tha knowledge or exposure of it.Between these two situations, there is one aspect that is common and universal; that the one with the knowlege or exposure knows he knows it, while that who is ignorant knows he doesn't know. Therefore both share one thing, one,eternal knowing.

Please contact me for more sharing regarding this.
Simon.