What Do I Know?
In the movie Stranger than Fiction, IRS auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is asked by university professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) what his favorite word is.
“Integer,” is the reply.
Now, that isn’t a bad choice for an accountant.
I’ve often thought about how I might answer that question; I believe what I’d say is “epistemology.” It is a word with such lyrical quality and, additionally, has great meaning to me as an academic. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, asking such questions, “what does it mean to know?”
Of course, one does not have to be an academic, scientist, or philosopher to love that word or be concerned with epistemological issues. How it is we know, how we come to know, and what we count as knowledge, are concepts everyone deals with in everyday life, in our ordinary and not-so-ordinary interactions with others.
Naturally, what we know, or think we do, bumps up against the elusive, oft-debated, and intellectually-and-emotionally-charged notions of “truth” and “reality.” What is true? What is real? … are questions we do not typically spend a lot of time thinking about, mostly because we tend to take a lot of things for granted. But our differing beliefs about what we know as true and real, as individuals, groups, organizations and nations, are the source of immense miscommunication, angst and conflict in the world. Perhaps we could and should spend a little more time paying attention to how it is we know what we know.
As I write this, I am in the midst of a gigantic inner struggle about the nature of reality: about what I think I know. Over the course of the last couple of weeks or so, a significant person in my life has expressed a worldview about our shared experience that is hugely at odds with my own. In fact, where once there was some sense of shared understanding, and a mission of mutual purpose, it all seems now to have been replaced with confusion, defensiveness, anger and distance.
Our versions of reality are, to me, incomprehensibly disparate. They are, perhaps, totally irreconcilable.
So, here I sit with my thoughts: about the nature of reality. And relationship.
Breathing in and out, in and out. Alone. Confused. Finding myself, once again, in the middle of a life that’s stranger than fiction.
Goodbye, Teddy
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the last of the brothers, died and was buried this week. Along with millions of others, I will miss him.
It’s been reported that Kennedy wrote a letter to Pope Benedict XVI earlier in the year, asking for the prayers of His Holiness, as he struggled with the brain cancer that ultimately took his life. In that communication he admitted to being “an imperfect human being.”
Of course, yes, he was imperfect. So were Jack and Bobby. So is everyone. We are, after all, human. Despite his imperfections, however, he was a giant of a man... doing so much for so many for so many years.
David Horsey published an editorial cartoon last Thursday, with this Kennedy quote:
If by a liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind; someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions; someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties; someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicion that grips us; if that is what they mean by a liberal, I am proud to be a liberal.
RIP, Teddy.
My Mission Statement
Last March, I posted an entry entitled “Really: Who Are You?” – an essay where I attempted to outline, as clearly as I could, some views on the meaning of my existence. Since that time, it’s been a summer of continuing reflection as I significantly changed most of my vacation plans in order to address health issues and to confront, once again, the matter of my mortality.
As I was browsing some of my older computer files yesterday, I came across a document composed sometime in 2004. [That was the year I found myself struggling to redefine my identity after being involuntarily displaced from long-term employment (with the Oregon University System) and commenced a process of job-search (and high stress) that ultimately lasted three and a half years.] I entitled that 2004 file “Personal Mission Statement” – which I restate here:
The multiple purposes of my lifetime on this planet are to:
Nurture my intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual selves
Have deep and meaningful relationships
Experience life to the fullest and live until I die
Show up, be present, and tell the truth
Be involved, yet free of attachment, and, above all things
Be true to myself.