A train of thought.
After living in Israel for more than forty years, I have come to realize that I will never understand this country. The society is too complex and diverse. The history is too deep and mixed up. People's agendas are strongly conflicted. And the symbolic importance of Israel in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people in the world - friends and enemies, both categories too extreme - not only makes it impossible to stick to facts, it also makes it impossible to figure out what the facts are.
Then I started thinking about the ways a society understands itself, if it's at all permissible to think of societies as entities that can understand or misunderstand. As individuals and as members of a society, we use the stories we tell about ourselves to persuade ourselves that we understand ourselves. Historians, social scientists, journalists, authors, film-makers, religious leaders, politicians, and so on to create and modify these stories. But every story is partial, selective.
This also applies to the stories that individuals tell themselves about themselves, to explain to themselves who they are. At bottom, I think people are as helpless to understand themselves as they are to understand the society and world they live in. We don't know enough, even about ourselves, to understand ourselves.
This thought led me to realize that all understanding is partial. No one can know enough to understand fully even the tiniest thing or event. For what would full understanding be like? To understand a water molecule in my blood, do I have to know how hydrogen was produced in the big bang that purportedly marked the beginning of the universe? Millions of biological processes transpire in our bodies every second. Can I ignore them if I want to understand myself? Only if I think that what goes on in my body has no connection with what goes on in my mind and heart.
Experimental science has moved toward understanding phenomena by keeping every variable but one constant, so as to understand how that variable works. But as soon as you put that variable back into the context of the whole phenomenon, you get stuck in a wilderness of details.
Also, of course, things are constantly in flux.
This line of thought led me to understand [sic!] something I heard years ago about the importance of metonymy - the part for the whole. Think of an ordinary film. In two hours or so, it takes you through a much longer period of time, years, perhaps. It does so by persuading us that the little scenes of life that we see on the screen are representative of much great chunks of experience.
This is true of all our experience of other people and of life. We have a conversation with someone and feel as if we know that person. We spend a week in Paris and feel as if we know the French. We know four or five supposed facts about someone and imagine we know their life history.
It's upsetting to think that all knowledge is partial. We want a story that will explain everything perfectly and leave no loose ends. So, inevitably we will be either deluded or disappointed.
After living in Israel for more than forty years, I have come to realize that I will never understand this country. The society is too complex and diverse. The history is too deep and mixed up. People's agendas are strongly conflicted. And the symbolic importance of Israel in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people in the world - friends and enemies, both categories too extreme - not only makes it impossible to stick to facts, it also makes it impossible to figure out what the facts are.
Then I started thinking about the ways a society understands itself, if it's at all permissible to think of societies as entities that can understand or misunderstand. As individuals and as members of a society, we use the stories we tell about ourselves to persuade ourselves that we understand ourselves. Historians, social scientists, journalists, authors, film-makers, religious leaders, politicians, and so on to create and modify these stories. But every story is partial, selective.
This also applies to the stories that individuals tell themselves about themselves, to explain to themselves who they are. At bottom, I think people are as helpless to understand themselves as they are to understand the society and world they live in. We don't know enough, even about ourselves, to understand ourselves.
This thought led me to realize that all understanding is partial. No one can know enough to understand fully even the tiniest thing or event. For what would full understanding be like? To understand a water molecule in my blood, do I have to know how hydrogen was produced in the big bang that purportedly marked the beginning of the universe? Millions of biological processes transpire in our bodies every second. Can I ignore them if I want to understand myself? Only if I think that what goes on in my body has no connection with what goes on in my mind and heart.
Experimental science has moved toward understanding phenomena by keeping every variable but one constant, so as to understand how that variable works. But as soon as you put that variable back into the context of the whole phenomenon, you get stuck in a wilderness of details.
Also, of course, things are constantly in flux.
This line of thought led me to understand [sic!] something I heard years ago about the importance of metonymy - the part for the whole. Think of an ordinary film. In two hours or so, it takes you through a much longer period of time, years, perhaps. It does so by persuading us that the little scenes of life that we see on the screen are representative of much great chunks of experience.
This is true of all our experience of other people and of life. We have a conversation with someone and feel as if we know that person. We spend a week in Paris and feel as if we know the French. We know four or five supposed facts about someone and imagine we know their life history.
It's upsetting to think that all knowledge is partial. We want a story that will explain everything perfectly and leave no loose ends. So, inevitably we will be either deluded or disappointed.
