Tag: understanding

World Limits

I’ve been thinking about the limits of my world, specifically as it relates to my ability to understand it. Much of the time, I operate as if I have access to capital-T Truth, that I have some connection with facts about the world. It’s easy to fall into this kind of thinking – when I can predict and explain events, it gives me feedback that I know things about the world in a meaningful sense.

But I also know that this confidence in my knowledge is not as strong as I assume it to be. I have to remind myself to adjudicate the claims I encounter, or to remind myself of the difference between history and the past. It’s also good to listen to others who have learned about issues from multiple vantage points (see this amazing conversation on the Tim Ferriss podcast with Noah Feldman, and his experiences with constitution building in the Middle East).

Generally speaking, all of our experience in life has presented us with a mostly successful set of interactions with the world, but those interactions are subjective and limited. Taking the long view of world events, learning new languages, and empathy provide the Archimedean point beyond ourselves to attempt to stand on some point of objectivity (if this is even possible).

As Wittgenstein says, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This shouldn’t be literally taken to mean language (though I’m assuming that’s what Wittgenstein meant), but we should apply this to our understanding vis a vis experience. The limits of my world are constrained by the limits of my experience and the mental framework I use to make sense of it. If I want to seek to expand my worldview, it’s important to both prune out the dead branches of knowledge while cultivating new seeds of wisdom.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Increasing Vocabulary To Understand Experience

On a recent episode of the podcast Owls at Dawn, one of the cohosts shared the tragic news of a loss in the family due to suicide. He discusses some of his family history and his relationship with faith as he takes time to publicly process some of his grief. It’s a haunting and sad episode. I appreciate that he shared his grief and I hope he and his family can recover from the loss.

One section of his thoughts veered into an idea that I wanted to capture here. He discusses the feeling one has coming out of a crisis of faith (in the context of the episode, it was largely about religion, but this could equally apply to a crisis of identity as well). When one feels themselves breaking away from faith, it sounds as if it creates a vacuum of epistemic knowledge about how one engages with or defines oneself against the world. Austin, the host, notes that if you lack a kind of vocabulary to apply meaning and labels to your worldview, it can create a kind of despair because of the anxiety that comes with not knowing how to relate to ones feelings.

This reminds me of those lists you see floating around the internet of words to describe feelings in other languages that don’t have analogues in the English language. I always enjoy reading these lists and seeing if I can recall a time I’ve felt the emotion being described. I feel a sense of excitement when I discover a label to apply to how I feel, but more importantly than that, it gives me an epistemic awareness of the feeling so I can identify and name it in the future if it happens again.

What happened to Austin’s family member was tragic, and I don’t know if having a vocabulary to describe the emotions he was feeling would have helped bring him comfort. I think there is a lesson to be learned here about the importance of increasing one’s own vocabulary of the lived-experiences of others so that you can either a.) have a greater sense of empathy to the inner lives of people different from yourself, or b.) be more sensitive to your own emotional states to help you make sense of the world.

By naming the feeling, you can come to understand it. And by understanding it, you can work towards addressing, integrating it, or enriching your identity and sense of self.

Austin, I’m sorry for your loss.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan