A Nonfiction Work
How Does Anyone Come to Understand That It Really Matters to Understand What Really Matters?
We have inquired into “How anyone might leave Plato’s Cave on their own?” and “How someone might be a Child?” We then associated these questions with “How might someone be persuadable?” which is critical because once people refuse to be persuaded there is nothing that can necessarily be done to change them (as Plato might have understood better than us, hence his skepticism of democracy). Here, we will associate these questions with another question that came up in a wonderful Voicecraft session, thanks to Josh Field, where he asked one of the most important questions in the world. Tim Adalin asked a corollary, and I think both questions are strongly tied to the mysterious question: “How does anyone leave Plato’s Cave on their own?” (which leads to “intrinsic motivation”). The questions:
“How is it that people come to understand that it’s truly important to understand what is truly important?”
“How do people come to understand the importance of understanding?”
Turning to theology, I think this question is similar to the Christian question, “How does someone know they need to believe in God?” Do people on their own come to understand they need faith, or is it only by God’s grace and “call” for us that we realize our need?¹⁹ ²⁰ Humility seems a good place to start, for if we aren’t “epistemically humble,” that basically means we think we already know what needs to be known, and if that happens to not be “what matters,” then it seems practically impossible that we would be “shaken awake” into realizing the error of our ways. Considering that it is highly unlikely we will naturally “know what matters,” I think it is very safe to say that the first thing we need to answer Field’s question is epistemic humility. Otherwise, it will not be possible for us to “move” from what we “think matters” naturally to what “actually matters” — but that just moves our question to “How might everyone be humble?” Indeed, we might adjust our question and reframe it a few ways as we advance.
To start, I think we can indeed say that we need “epistemic humility” to address our main inquiry, which is a kind of orientation to the world, a state where we overcome our pride and ego enough to have our minds changed. Without this, we likely won’t come to understand what matters unless we just happened to be born understanding this, which is very unlikely (though I cannot say impossible). This requires accepting our imperception, our finitude, our ignorance, and the like, but that just begs a new question: “How do people recognize their short-comings to become epistemically humble?” Basically, “How do people overcome their egos?”
“The Blank Canvas” by O.G. Rose explores why intellectual development ultimately requires a dialectic between thought and action. Thus, whatever the answer is to Field’s question, the answer cannot be “just thought” or “just acted” on.²¹ People must undergo a “process” (like Hegel’s “phenomenological journey” or Hume’s “return to common life”) which makes them accept their finitude and “integrate with lack” (a “negation” versus an “effacement, as discussed in “Negation Versus Effacement” by O.G. Rose). Alright, fine, but assuming people have “epistemic humility,” surely that is not enough to generate “understanding of what matters,” is it? Epistemic humility is only a starting point, an “opening” in which something can enter, but that “opening” itself cannot be that entering thing. Indeed, epistemic humility is only a precondition for realizing “what matters” — it is not the whole of it. Just because we are willing to change doesn’t mean we will experience that which will make us change, so how do we undergo such an experience? Well, not easily, seeing as it is so hard to determine “correspondence” while stuck in “coherence.”
To determine “what matters” suggests that we determine what really corresponds with value versus only “seem” to correspond with value. Determining “correspondence” through “coherence” is difficult, and this is because “the map is indestructible,” a phrase which refers to the second book in The True Isn’t the Rational trilogy by O.G. Rose. What I mean by this can be found in the work, “On Conspiracies and Pandora’s Rationality,” but basically we determine rationality and “coherence” relative to what we believe is true (“what corresponds”), but that means rationality comes after we determine a truth. This begs the question: “How do we rationally ascent to a truth?” Ah, well, we don’t…“Truth organizes values,” and this means we cannot determine “the rational” until we decide on a truth that thus cannot be decided on just rationally (as expanded on in a discussion with Samuel Barnes, “Mutually Assured Conversation, Ep #1”). Critically, if rationality is in the business of coherence and truth in correspondence, that means correspondence cannot be determined with only rationality. This point can be further argued by incorporating Kurt Gödel, as does The Map Is Indestructible, but the point is that we require something “transrational” or “nonrational” to determine what corresponds with what matters, and that means another framing: “How might we spread the conditions in which the average person is capable to value and discern the nonrational?” (which is to say, “escape autonomous rationality”).
The category of “nonrational” is critical in Game Theory, as I discuss with Lorenzo regarding Neurodiversity and Nash Equilibria (or what I call “rational impasses”). We all must decide what we will “invest in” (as Lorenzo and I discuss regarding “financial epistemology”), and generally I think it’s safe to say that we all want to invest in “what matters” versus what doesn’t, but that requires a nonrational choice. By what criteria can we make such a choice? It cannot be rational, but that also doesn’t mean it is “irrational”: it must be a choice which transcends the dichotomy (and makes the dichotomy possible in the first place). Alright, fine, but what would that criteria be? Well, that’s a deep question and requires much of the work of O.G. Rose beyond Belonging Again, but here I’ll touch on topics found in The Fate of Beauty, seeing as “beauty” and “lack” can be thought together (critical subjects of O.G. Rose).
“The Blank Canvas” would suggest the criteria for “nonrational discernment” must entail action, and I would like to suggest that this action is one which leads us to experiencing something as beautiful. Beauty is an experience which says to us, “This matters,” and the action that leads us to having a beautiful experience can be the choice that results in us undergoing something nonrational which makes possible rational action. This point is expanded on in “What Is the Beauty of Life?” which hopefully establishes that “what we find meaningful” is often “what we find beautiful” (though this of course requires us to define “beauty,” which is attempted in “On Beauty”), but the point is that an experience of beauty can be a nonrational occurrence which gives us “reason to believe” that x “corresponds” with “what matters.” No, we can never be certain that “x corresponds with what matters,” but beauty nevertheless can give us confidence of such (a term elaborated on in “On Certainty” by O.G. Rose).²²
Alright, but what is it about beauty that suggests this? Beauty suggests an ever-mystery, something always beyond subjectivity and irreducible to subjectivity. This point recalls Kant’s thoughts on “the sublime” in his Third Critique, and for Kant beauty is an experience that suspends our faculties and yet the world remains “there,” suggesting that the world isn’t “just in our heads” even if we can’t move beyond some noumenon. If then we experience our values and actions “as beautiful,” this would give us reason to think they are not reducible to mere subjectivity, that there is something about them which participates in the world that is “there.” Maybe not, but beauty can give us “grounds.” Sure, but how do we experience something as beautiful? That’s a great question, and I hope that a metaphysical and ontological outline for this answer can be found in The Philosophy of Glimpses. Assuming it is though, we still have to ask, “How do we experience beauty?” This is explored in (Re)constructing “A Is A” and gets us into “Conditionalism,” which will ultimately have us consider how we must make “a real choice” and commit to something (which gets us into The Absolute Choice). There must be a possibility of failure and death, something we risk being a fool over and relative to which we seek “a new sincerity.”
Beauty can occur in the context in which we make a “real choice” and commit to something, which is to say meaning and beauty can emerge where we can fail. Meaning risks. As suggested toward the end of Belonging Again (Part I), for people to understand what really matters in life, they must take a stand for something. There must be the possibility of losing something. After all, if nothing matters, there’s nothing to lose, and if there’s nothing to lose, nothing matters. In this way, we can understand what matters by understanding what is worth dying for, and that is what we “really choose” to live for (as perhaps based on what we, nonrationally, find beautiful, the finding of which requires humility). Where there is beauty, we can find motivation to take these risks. Furthermore, to seek beauty aligns with understanding “what is truly important,” and the experience of beauty gives us both reason to think our understanding is capable of actual understanding (that it can be about something “there”), and that the thing we understand matters. Beauty can provide two answers, both to the question of “How do we know we understand?” and to the question, “How do we understand what matters?”²³ And we condition ourselves to experience beauty where we make “real choices” and/or “Absolute Choices.”
Choice is central, as Forrest Landry emphasizes, and without it we will not be able to understand why we need understanding or what matters for us to understand. But choice is hard and existentially difficult, and so another framing: “How might more people make ‘real choices?’ ” — and more pressingly how might more people make “Absolute Choices” (which is for us as A/A in Understanding to make ourselves “toward” A/B in Reason). Beauty and “lack” are linked, or can be if we so choose to interpret them as such (an “Absolute Choice”), and so the logic we use to discuss “beauty” could likewise apply to “lack.” But that gives us another framing: “How might more people ‘integrate with lack?’ ” “How might we spread Childhood?”
So far, to respond to “Plato’s Challenge,” we have suggested that we will need to create conditions which “incubate Childhood” and “intrinsic motivation,” conditions which help us gain capacity for:
Epistemic Humility
Nonrational Discernment
Conditioning
Absolute Choice
More could be added to this list, such as an “A/B Ontoepistemology” like what much of O.G. Rose seeks to elucidate, but these are at least what we have covered here (and that I think manifest A/B). Still, we’ve not answered Plato, only described what people do who “understand what’s important” and who “understand that it’s important to understand what’s important” — Plato still has an edge on us (for he might say we must force people to do what we have described). Can we deny him this counter? Not yet.
A Nietzschean Child is defined in this work as someone who can “leave Plato’s Cave on their own,” and it is clear that there have been people like this in history and among us today. These people understand the importance of understanding, are capable of “intrinsic motivation,” are persuadable, and everything else we have touched on. They are different in this way, A/B versus A/A, and they think and live differently, as is needed for us to address the concerns of Belonging Again (Part I). Why do we need people who can “think differently?” Because that is the only way we might negate/sublate “The Game Theory Dynamics” (of “Game A”) described by thinkers of “The Meta-Crisis” into a preferable alternative. Those “who think differently” are those described as Absolute Knowers, Deleuzians, and Children in Belonging Again (Part I), and it would seem we must become like them. Why exactly can be elucidated by an exploration of neurodiversity, which will lead into a consideration of Simone Weil (a Child Saint).
But here we might find more strength in Plato and his challenge, for are we not in trying to “spread Childhood” trying to spread the conditions which force people to face reality in all its complexity, difficulty, and even madness? Is this really a moral and just thing to do (suggesting why our notion of justice might not be that much better than Plato’s)? In his excellent discussion on Parallax with Andrew Sweeny (“A Revelation of Wonderment”), Greg Kaminski noted that reality will accommodate our delusions, and if we try to learn the truth we will find out how deluded we can be and how little we can know — and then we can never go back (“Find the Sailor,” Nabokov…). If becoming a Child requires this, are we mad? Perhaps, but with “the loss of givens” and “spread of philosophical consciousness” (following Hume), we’ve already collectively begun heading in the direction Kaminski warns about, and it’s impossible to go back — we either figure out how to face reality at scale or who knows. Perhaps we’ll be fine, but if so I still see no harm in trying to think through the problem of “spreading Childhood” and Plato’s Challenge, all the same.
As Peter Berger taught, we are all philosophical and existential now, but doesn’t that mean we’ve all left Plato’s Cave? No, for to “lose givens” is for us to be at best dragged out of Plato’s Cave by sociological forces: we are not yet at scale subjects who are able to leave Plato’s Cave on our own. It seems like we’ve advanced and “seen the truth,” and in a way we have, but we are yet at scale to be subjects who can live with this truth. That would require us to become “subjects who can leave Plato’s Cave on our own,” and if we’ve already been dragged out of the Cave by “the loss of givens” in a sense, that might make it all the harder to become Children. After all, what’s the point? If there is none, that is why the choice can be an abyssal and nonrational “Absolute Choice,” which means it can negate/sublate A/A into A/B, thus becoming “neurodiverse” and capable of avoiding Nash Equilibria. (Also, perhaps we’ve only seen shadows on a wall, on a screen, in a mind…of us leaving a cave alone (FI)…)
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