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MattBurkeSecondEssay 8 - 21 May 2015 - Main.MattBurke
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| | | -- By MattBurke - 18 May 2015 | |
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< | Wrong ideas
Someday, I’d like to write a compendium of wrong ideas—Lamarckian transformation, Ptolemaic geocentrism, and Aquinian scholasticism. My thesis: Each wrong idea struggles to formulate some truth until the truth becomes incompatible with the idea that formulates it. The formula, though essential, is essentially incidental. The struggle to formulate produces the greater insight. But that compendium is a long game. I mention it here to help introduce a wrong idea of my own: We desire others to accept for us that which we struggle to accept about ourselves. | | | Anecdote 1: A speech
When I was nine, my parents separated. After, I had trouble in school, frequent fights, diminished quality of work, that sort of thing. My mother took me to a therapist. At our first meeting, the therapist told me a story: A man came to her office with a boa constrictor around his neck. Whenever the therapist tried to engage the man, he would ask her to pet the snake. So, the therapist told the man to put the snake down, or she would not help him. | | | Then he asked me: “Is it okay to join a gang?” I said, "no," but my answer missed the point. | |
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< | Aporias
I put the second anecdote in my law school personal statement. There, it was about society, about "social problems." I didn’t use the word “aporia” because it didn’t fit the tone, but the meaning would’ve been right. As to the first anecdote, this is the first time I’ve joined the two scenes that form it—the realization upon which I premised the story is one I had while writing it, not, as I claim, while experiencing it. Together they relocate the aporia I previously located in society into people—the desire for something from another that none can give. | >
> | Exegesis: Wrong ideas
The realization upon which I premised the first anecdote is one I had while writing it, not while experiencing it. For this reason, the anecdote ends in silence. I wasn't then, nor am I now, sure that anything productive could be said. The second anecdote might as well have ended in silence: I recently spent some time volunteering at the high school and neither faculty nor student had heard from Jon. The notion that either anecdote could end with the saying of some productive truth is, I think, a wrong idea.
Someday, I’d like to write a book of wrong ideas—Lamarckian transformation, Ptolemaic geocentrism, and Aquinian scholasticism. My thesis: Wrong ideas struggle to formulate a truth until the truth becomes incompatible with the idea that formulates it. The formula, though essential, is essentially incidental. The struggle to formulate produces the greater insight. But that book is a long game. I mention it here to help introduce a wrong idea about interpersonal behavior, something lying in the interstices of my two anecdotes: We desire others to accept for us that which we struggle to accept for ourselves.
If my wrong idea carries any weight, the "no" I said to Jon was a truth I wanted him to accept, just as was my therapist's speech to me and Peterson's to the student, as was my silence concluding the first anecdote. But each touches the wrongness of the idea—its futility. Each one had some truth, and the other could accept it or reject it for the sake of the one, but still the one struggles. | | |
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