continually surprised by low engagement on Substack with its much-touted "millions of readers..."
this is a very worthy effort, appreciate the amount of time it must have taken to write this.
Reality is and always will be the allegory of the three blind men and the elephant... a variation of Plato's cave, I prefer the elephant allegory because it so effortlessly demonstrates how all of us are accurately grasping our own small corner of experience in ways we don't even understand... that's the crux of the matter. understanding is a form of misapprehension. We're usually wrong about mostly everything. how do we make that easier by randomly ringfencing the aspects of reality that someone else had determined to be "off limits" from inquiry? if you dig deeper you discover their imperatives to shut you up are compelled by more complex motives... etc....
a society that is determined to not even try to understand itself has no future.
Thank you Jeffrey for a well-sourced discussion of the use of language in one of its most hermeneutic contexts. For me, it is Ricoeur's 'The Conflict of Interpretations' that remains the most salient collection of thoughts on this wider topic. My role as a thinker includes asking questions no one wants to ask, saying things no one wants to hear, and making more clear ideas and experiences that in fact everyone understands either tacitly or semi-consciously. These and 'corrupting youth', of course!
continually surprised by low engagement on Substack with its much-touted "millions of readers..."
this is a very worthy effort, appreciate the amount of time it must have taken to write this.
Reality is and always will be the allegory of the three blind men and the elephant... a variation of Plato's cave, I prefer the elephant allegory because it so effortlessly demonstrates how all of us are accurately grasping our own small corner of experience in ways we don't even understand... that's the crux of the matter. understanding is a form of misapprehension. We're usually wrong about mostly everything. how do we make that easier by randomly ringfencing the aspects of reality that someone else had determined to be "off limits" from inquiry? if you dig deeper you discover their imperatives to shut you up are compelled by more complex motives... etc....
a society that is determined to not even try to understand itself has no future.
Thank you Jeffrey for a well-sourced discussion of the use of language in one of its most hermeneutic contexts. For me, it is Ricoeur's 'The Conflict of Interpretations' that remains the most salient collection of thoughts on this wider topic. My role as a thinker includes asking questions no one wants to ask, saying things no one wants to hear, and making more clear ideas and experiences that in fact everyone understands either tacitly or semi-consciously. These and 'corrupting youth', of course!