Tag: ignorance

Reflections on Aphorisms #61

Short post tonight because it’s basically my bed time and I didn’t sleep super well last night (thanks, eye deciding to spontaneously malfunction).

Writer’s note: It was going to be a short post, but then I decided to do an aphorism from Nietzsche. It is not a short post. I am so tired right now.

Aphorism 97

Arrogance in persons of merit affronts us more than arrogance in those without merit: merit itself is an affront.

Nietzsche

Interpretation

I think that one of the things that helps to understand Nietzsche here is the question of what arrogance is.

Arrogance isn’t necessarily the same as insolence. It’s when one takes what one currently has and is more akin to pride with a lack of consideration of others.

People without merit who have traits of arrogance may often be written off as merely insolent, but at the very least they are unlikely to wield the sort of power that makes arrogance more toxic.

I think that if this case were reversed, Nietzsche might change his tune.

Take Christ’s parable of the forgiven debt for an example.

23 “Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the accounting, one who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him. 25 But because he could not repay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and his children and everything that he possessed, and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you everything.’ 27 And his master’s heart was moved with compassion and he released him and forgave him [canceling] the debt. 28 But that same slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began choking him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe!’ 29 So his fellow slave fell on his knees and begged him earnestly, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you.’ 30 But he was unwilling and he went and had him thrown in prison until he paid back the debt. 31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and they went and reported to their master [with clarity and in detail] everything that had taken place. 32 Then his master called him and said to him, ‘You wicked and contemptible slave, I forgave all that [great] debt of yours because you begged me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave [who owed you little by comparison], as I had mercy on you?’…

Matthew 18:23-33 Scripture quotations taken from the Amplified Bible.

In this case we see that one without merit (a debtor who had his loan forgiven) showing arrogance is incredibly distasteful.

Of course, even in this scenario there’s a benefit of a power structure, and one could argue that the unforgiving slave had earned merit in the sense that lacking debt made him superior to the slave who had not been forgiven, but I don’t think that this is any sort of merit (the parable focuses on slaves, and not aristocrats, for a reason). At least, it wouldn’t be merit in the sense Nietzsche would consider it, as he generally considers merit either in the terms of social success or in the form of moral virtue.

I think it’s safe to say that in the context of this statement, Nietzsche refers to the idea of merit as social success. After all, arrogance runs cross-purposes to virtue.

In this case, I’d generally have to disagree with Nietzsche. I’ve always found that those who are arrogant without any good cause to be get under my skin more.

One example of this is when I have students who insist that their capabilities are greater than they really are. Now, there’s a few particular reasons why this is a really painful experience for teachers.

First, if you have a benevolent interest in helping people, it hurts to have to disabuse them of notions of grandeur. This is an example of the distinction between the “nice” thing to do and the “kind” thing to do, and it’s always a painful line to walk.

One of the issues here is that arrogance is posturing. Whether it stems from confidence, ignorance, or insecurity, it looks the same on its surface.

Obviously, you need different approaches for each of these cases. Those who are arrogant due to over-confidence need to be given a realistic perspective, as do those who are ignorant of their needs, but the method for doing so differs.

It’s dangerous to confront the arrogant because you don’t know what part of the psyche feeds into that arrogance. Sometimes it’s really obvious (we’re social creatures who want to look good, so we won’t admit weakness in public; some people overcompensate), and you’re able to talk to the person and express the inner thoughts that they’re not comfortable to say themselves.

The first time I went to a student and told them “You know, I don’t think you’re really comfortable with this” I found it to be a tremendous experience. It was a relief for both of us. I was able to help the student, who had been a little disruptive in class, move toward a less embarrassing course of action for them by working with them to give them positive opportunities to prove their potential and capabilities to their peers, and I was able to start really helping this kid with what they really needed.

Sometimes this is a repressed need and people click to it, and sometimes they don’t. Both over-confident and insecure arrogance actually function in much the same way, and I think this ties into notion of psychological complexes.

Ignorance is always difficult, at least for me, to deal with because you have to confront a need that people don’t feel.

This is often a place where you can crush someone if you do it wrong. You want to make sure that you help people improve, rather than just tearing them down. I’m not good at it, although I hope I will be someday.

Speaking as a recipient of this, it can be incredibly traumatic if handled in a way that brings destruction. If the stakes are high, disabusing someone of their ignorance can be as destructive as leaving them to fail on their own.

It requires a spirit of nurturing, not one of destruction, and it’s important to remember when dealing with the ignorantly arrogant that they never mean to cause harm.

One could argue that there’s an exceptional sting to arrogance in the life of someone who is otherwise virtuous, if we wish to interpret Nietzsche’s statement that way.

I don’t think that this necessarily makes sense. Even though a vice tends to be exacerbated in its obvious manifestations by the presence of virtues in other areas (i.e. someone who is generally virtuous shows flaws more than someone dissolute, because nobody expects much of the dissolute), a flawed saint is generally more tolerable than a monster who lacks pretension.

Of course, arrogance feeds off of self-superiority. Nietzsche could be pointing this out in this statement, since those who can legitimately consider themselves virtuous have been known on many occasions to abuse their privileges to rub it in.

Resolution

Forgive the debts others owe me, because I have been forgiven.

Don’t let a virtue distract from a vice.

Help others to become more aware of who they are to turn them into who they could be.

Reflections on Aphorisms #36

I got through a lot of miscellaneous writing, but nothing finished. I’m working on reflections on the Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, and reviews of a couple books, plus things for the Loreshaper Games blog.

I also went for a fairly long walk, and I don’t think I anticipated how long it would take because when I finally got home I’d burned through most of the time I had been planning on writing. Oops.

Aphorism 59

Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinte.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes

The other day I wrote something that a lot of people responded to when I said “I believe in the immensity of the unknown.”

A lot of people took that in a different light than I meant it.

I don’t necessarily mean that there’s a vastly interesting universe around us full of exciting and novel things that aren’t common knowledge (though that’s certainly true too), but rather that what we know can only be a infinitesimal amount of the knowable.

Taleb’s point about conscious ignorance ties into this: you understand how what you know works, but you will never know everything.

This gives a learning attitude.

One of the things you learn in education college (though many of the things you learn in an education college are useless, so perhaps it’s better to use the fact that I can verify this with anecdotes) is that it’s better for a pupil to perceive themselves as knowing some things, but not everything.

This creates humility (and a desire to learn more) but doesn’t create the discouraging effects of knowing nothing.

When philosophically minded people express uncertainty in their knowledge, they don’t mean that they have base ignorance.

Rather, we’re (and I include myself here cautiously) self-aware enough to know that what we know can be wrong.

It’s actually okay to be certain. Convictions are not bad.

However, our brains work on heuristics and abstract conceptions, not reality.

What works is associated with truth, whether or not it actually is true. If divine favor brings healing, then God must smile upon cleanly people who recover much better from getting sick and avoid infections for diseases.

Of course, we can’t necessarily rule this out, but we’ve come to the conclusion in the modern age that germs cause disease and forestall healing, so the link between cleanliness and good medical practice is a result of germs being kept away, rather than the cleanliness necessarily pleasing God.

As someone who’s mildly obsessive about cleanliness (the prospect of hand-shakes and high-fives fills me with dread), I like to think that proper hygiene earns God’s approval, but that’s beside the point.

Knowing that we can’t know things leaves them mysterious, and fills us with hope.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

This image stuck out to me among all of the images I was looking for. I was actually hoping to find an image of an aurora in the night sky, or else over-exposed stars that gave a cool vibe, but I find this image to be something that could illustrate this point.

We see through clouds (the apostle Paul’s “mirror darkly”), and only where those clouds do not exist can we see anything. Even then, we have limited sensory capabilities, and there may be things that we mistake for others (by mental or physical limitations) or things that we simply cannot grasp.

The movements of the unseen all around us are also difficult to track.

We like to make assumptions because we can’t see things, so we merely project ourselves into the void. For instance, we like to assume that every bad driver is a jerk, because when we drive poorly we’re probably being jerks (or at least that’s what I like to tell myself, since I prefer to think of myself as a pain in the butt rather than a bad driver).

What we can’t see is as much a defining factor in our lives, and as someone with religious conviction and a belief in free will (insomuch as there is no ordained course we must follow, though I also think that we generally respond to stimuli predictably and rarely exercise our will) I think that it’s in this unknown space that God lives.

As a youth, I often wanted to make everything knowable. I had formed working frameworks of everything, even if I had to make an assumption on partial evidence. To my credit, I was usually pretty quick to change in light of new information, but even so the lack of willingness to accept the value of conscious ignorance was crippling.

We can define four stages of knowledge:

  1. Not knowing something and lacking understanding of that. (Base ignorance)
  2. Not knowing something and having understanding of that. (Conscious ignorance)
  3. Knowing something and lacking understanding of that. (Practical knowledge)
  4. Knowing something and having understanding of that. (Deep understanding)

Conscious ignorance is the second stage of knowledge, and not particularly desirable in and of itself, but the great thing about it is that you can develop it simultaneously for everything which otherwise may be base ignorance.

The value of having conscious ignorance about the vast number of things which we cannot know (or cannot easily know, like mathematics for those of us who didn’t particularly care for the subject in school) is that it’s a great way to avoid the great harms that base ignorance can breed.

It also leads us to encounter the sublime. We know what we don’t know, and we know it when we see it. Lacking the self-awareness of one’s ignorance makes it difficult to see the wondrous and inscrutable.

Resolution

Peer into the clouds; there is a chance they may yield fruit.

Steer clear of base ignorance.

Work to turn ignorance into knowledge, but don’t overlook the value of humility.