The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
Authors: Alan Watts
Tags: Religión, Fiction, General, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Philosophy, Eastern, Movements, Buddhism, Self-knowledge; Theory of, Self, Humanism
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But the troubles begin when the fictions are taken as facts. Thus in 1752 the British government instituted a calendar reform which required that September 2 of that year be dated September 14, with the result that many people imagined that eleven days had been taken off their lives, and rushed to Westminster screaming, "Give us back our eleven days!"
Such confusions of fact and fiction make it all the more difficult to find wider acceptance of common laws, languages, measures, and other useful institutions, and to improve those already employed.
But, as we have seen, the deeper troubles arise when we confuse ourselves and our fundamental relationships to the world with fictions (or figures of thought) which are taken for granted, unexamined, and often self-contradictory. Here, as we have also seen, the "nub" problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world. Part of our difficulty is that the latter view of man seems to make him no more than a puppet, but this is because, in trying to accept or understand the latter view, we are still in the grip of the former. To say that man is an action of the world is not to define him as a "thing" which is helplessly pushed around by all other "things." We have to get beyond Newton's vision of the world as a system of billiard balls in which every individual ball is passively knocked about by all the rest!
Remember that Aristotle's and Newton's preoccupation with casual determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are casually connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat.
It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself (Kant's Ding an sich ), whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable—it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology. Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves.
This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation. Sharp and clear as the crest of the wave may be, it necessarily "goes with" the smooth and less featured curve of the trough. So also the bright points of the stars "gowith" (if I may now coin a word) the dark background of space.
In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background. If, for example, you come so close to me that the outline of my body lies beyond your field of vision, the
"thing" you will see will no longer be my body. Your attention will instead be "captured" by a coat-button or a necktie, for the theory also asserts that, against any given background, our attention is almost automatically "won" by any moving shape (in contrast with the stationary background) or by any enclosed or tightly complex feature (in contrast with the simpler, featureless background).
Thus when I draw the following figure on a blackboard—
and ask, "What have I drawn?" people will generally identify it as a circle, a ball, a disk, or a ring. Only rarely will someone reply, "A wall with a hole in it."
In other words, we do not easily notice that all features of the world hold their boundaries in common with the areas that surround
But the troubles begin when the fictions are taken as facts. Thus in 1752 the British government instituted a calendar reform which required that September 2 of that year be dated September 14, with the result that many people imagined that eleven days had been taken off their lives, and rushed to Westminster screaming, "Give us back our eleven days!"
Such confusions of fact and fiction make it all the more difficult to find wider acceptance of common laws, languages, measures, and other useful institutions, and to improve those already employed.
But, as we have seen, the deeper troubles arise when we confuse ourselves and our fundamental relationships to the world with fictions (or figures of thought) which are taken for granted, unexamined, and often self-contradictory. Here, as we have also seen, the "nub" problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world. Part of our difficulty is that the latter view of man seems to make him no more than a puppet, but this is because, in trying to accept or understand the latter view, we are still in the grip of the former. To say that man is an action of the world is not to define him as a "thing" which is helplessly pushed around by all other "things." We have to get beyond Newton's vision of the world as a system of billiard balls in which every individual ball is passively knocked about by all the rest!
Remember that Aristotle's and Newton's preoccupation with casual determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are casually connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat.
It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself (Kant's Ding an sich ), whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable—it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology. Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves.
This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation. Sharp and clear as the crest of the wave may be, it necessarily "goes with" the smooth and less featured curve of the trough. So also the bright points of the stars "gowith" (if I may now coin a word) the dark background of space.
In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background. If, for example, you come so close to me that the outline of my body lies beyond your field of vision, the
"thing" you will see will no longer be my body. Your attention will instead be "captured" by a coat-button or a necktie, for the theory also asserts that, against any given background, our attention is almost automatically "won" by any moving shape (in contrast with the stationary background) or by any enclosed or tightly complex feature (in contrast with the simpler, featureless background).
Thus when I draw the following figure on a blackboard—
and ask, "What have I drawn?" people will generally identify it as a circle, a ball, a disk, or a ring. Only rarely will someone reply, "A wall with a hole in it."
In other words, we do not easily notice that all features of the world hold their boundaries in common with the areas that surround
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