Dialog/Forming ourselves and our world
Forming ourselves and our world
V and R grapple with their difficulty seeing concretely what resources visitors and curators on A Place to Study will work with. They discuss a loose analogy: Wikipedia + WikiSource minus the prohibition of posting original research. They distinguish between a workplace and a website. V finds a bias in the preliminary content and R acknowledges it, but assures V that A Place to Study will move from this male, white, Western bias towards an inclusive racial, cultural, linguistic representation. They leave off contemplating factors that complicate efforts to realize that aspiration.
V 1 — There you are! I've got a question, R. You explained that forming ourselves takes place life long for each and all of us and suggested that A Place to Study seeks to serve as a constructive resource for us in that process.
R 2 — That's right. We talk about resources and discuss what we can learn about using them well as forming ourselves takes place in lived experience.
V 3 — Well, I went and poked around the active side of A Place to Study. The resources I saw there aren't quite what I expected. I understand the site is just starting up, but from the examples there, I'm not sure how you expect visitors to use it.
R 4 — Yeah, I've had the same worry. It's hard to explain. Lived experience is tricky—it's always right here, but then it's gone. Sometimes examples get in the way. When thinking about what the site would be, I'd say that it would be a little like Wikipedia, only different in a key way, but I wasn't very clear what that way would be. Imagining it, I simply pictured something like Wikipedia without its policy of No original research.
V 5 — Me too, that's what I've been doing, with various kinds of original sources thrown in—Wikipedia plus Wikisource. That's not A Place to Study, but somehow I'm having trouble making clear what it'll add up to.
R 6 — In working with the site, I discovered how hard it is to understand our own intentions well. For a long time, I was trying to start a website "for" study, using a variety of names, as if we could somehow package a program for study. We often think of ourselves going to websites for something—information, essays and ideas, news, opinion, social interaction.
V 7 — Well, we go to Amazon to shop, but I guess given Amazon's fulfillment powers, we go there for whatever it is we want or need. Ah ha! A place "to" study—people won't come here for something, to get something. They come to do something, to study something.
R 8 — Exactly. I like to think of A Place to Study as a workplace, not a website. We will have information, like Wikipedia, and sources, like Wikisource, but those are merely resources, not the objectives one seeks here. This is a place to study, and to study, not anything and everything, but specifically one's own self-formation and liberal learning, cultivating one's powers of judgment, taste, and conviction.
V 9 — OK, I'm beginning to understand what should and should not be here as resources to study. You want to include cultural resources that foster a person's self-cultivation and autonomous development. But how do you know what those things are?
R 10 — Difficult question! We are not going to put much faith either on mechanisms of revelation, religion, or on systems of confirmation, science. Perhaps the question is poorly posed, as if it has a conclusive answer.
V 11 — I don't get that. Questions have answers, even if no one yet knows the answer or how to get the answer. No?
R 12 — Maybe. Definitely if everything is fully determinate, the necessary result of its antecedents. But what if reality is in some small part indeterminate? Wouldn't some questions then have no set answers?
V 13 — The actuality of indeterminacy — I need some time to get my head around that.
R 14 — You and the physicists. But they're working at it. But let us speculate that in some ill-understood way some actual aspect of reality is in substance and process actually indeterminate. If reality is in part determinate and in part indeterminate, would not the interaction of the two parts go on indefinitely as a continuous process? On one side, life itself, in all its complexity, would be the agency of that process, forever making itself determinate by giving form to the indeterminate. On the other side, death, in its brute finality, would reset the balance, terminating the determinate form, giving it back, so to speak, to the indeterminate.
V 15 — Ah. . . . You've become kind of cosmic! Would this come down for you and me and those around us to the idea that each lives life forming it as best each can, and we will each give it the best meaning that each can manage in the midst of challenging circumstances until we each die and then it is done? Isn't that terribly egocentric?
R 16 — I don't think so. . . . I conduct my life in the company of many others, many different lives, not only human, but the lives of all sorts of other living creatures, animals, plants, bacteria, viruses. The lives we can lead interact and intersect—we're all in it together, each living as an autonomous agent in the company of many, many others.
V 17 — Now I feel overwhelmed with complexities. What do you think this all means for the studying that we might come here to do?
R 18 — To me it means that we have a criterion which suggests that we come here to study, in the company of others, how we can and should achieve form ourselves and give ourselves meaning through our lives. We do so as peers of one another, all being here in the world together. We recognize that each can and should make our judgments for ourselves, based on the best reasons we can set forth, and we do that collaboratively, together, in common, within the scope of the place itself in a narrow sense, as this place to study together, and in a broader sense, as a place within the large world of living interaction, as the locus within which our lives will all unfold.
V 19 — Uh. You talk a lot about "the best" — the best meaning, the best reasons, I suppose the best resources as well. Who are you to say what of all things are the best ones?
R 20 — Whoa! I have no idea what's better or best in an objective context. I don't think these terms have much meaning in the objective world of the objective observer. But we are talking here about lived experience—your "I" coping with your circumstances, continually buffeted by actual forces having to perceive your situation, make judgments, and take actions to maintain yourself. In that situation,worse and worst, better and best, have existential meaning, however contingent and difficult to grasp. They are ideas the meaning of which to us we put to use in dynamically judging how to modulate our attempts at self-maintenance.
V 21 — OK. Maybe I'm beginning to understand what was bothering me in what I found looking at the initial resources put up to study here. I see how they relate to the intention, but they seem do so in a skewed or biased way—primarily the literary work of dead, white, Western males.
R 22 — Yeah. It's a biographical accident. That indicates the context of lived experience within which self-formation and liberal learning has taken place for the persons who have been starting the site up. They don't want to limit it to that, but they would be faking things in filling it out with matters outside their past experience.
V 23 — So as their experience broadens and people with other patterns of experience join in, you think the site will outgrow that bias.
R 24 — I think so. But circumstances are real constraints, so the selection of resources will outgrow initial biases gradually, slower than many might like.
V 25 — What sort of circumstances will have significant limiting effects?
R 26 — Well, I think that over long haul copyright will disappear, but over several decades it will affect what resources we can and cannot work with. Right now the site has a very small user community, limiting our technical sophistication, which in turn limits the modes of study feasible through the site. And it also severely limits our scope of knowledge. Further, I suspect the concern people feel over potential biases—linguistic, racial, ethnic, gender, age—has been exacerbating a sense of inadequacy because so little in contemporary communication brings out the common humanity that spans us all. We revert to the least common denominator and fail to grasp for the apex to which the encompassing community of all can and should aspire.
V 27 — Your hope is moving, but the de facto bias will be a problem for many. But maybe it will work. You're saying, that anyone, whatever their roots and self-perceived identity, has to recognize that they come to questions of self-formation with de facto biases and work with those in a constructive way. The living whole encompasses all of them. It is not some abstract residue after all the de facto biases have been subtracted out.
R 28 — Yes, but I haven't put it very clearly, and I think it is something we are only going to muddle our way to eventually. I believe that ultimately all life shares a few common aspirations, but there are many formative contexts within which we experience self-formation and liberal learning, and within each of those contexts some of us are more favored by it than others are. The irony is that the least favored often perceive most clearly the actual formative power of the context.
V 29 — You are describing with that irony how woke minorities call on complacent majorities to strive more actively to realize more fully the possibilities of the shared aspirations?
R 30 — Right.... When I was young, a very thoughtful critic and novelist, Albert Murray, published a book that impressed me a lot, The Omni-Americans. He was born in 1916 in a rural Black community in Nokomis, Alabama, less than an hour from Mobile, and he kept transcending, but not forgetting, his origins. I think of him as a great humanist writer, one who expressed a humanism through an American sensibility, an American sensibility sharpened as a Negro within it, from that vantage having a kind of an omni advantage, an ability to affirm expansively all of life in its whole vitality while actually saddened by the binding limitations that need not be. That's the humanism of the blues. We must study to hear the blues in all its forms.