Preface

I wrote most of this in one sitting. And I like it that way, but when I came back I realized that what I was saying was tangled enough that the thesis was not as clear as it usually is. So I figured I should open with a brief very intuitive thesis statement. Sometimes in life, you’re struck with an “aha” moment. These are moments where you understand things, come to realizations, etc. It’s your brain making connections. The thesis of this essay is that you have to make these connections on your own to progress your thinking on life, hence “you have to figure it out yourself.” It’s probably not clear what this means yet, but it’ll come in handy so keep it in mind as you read on. I promise it’s a good essay.

You Have to Figure it Out Yourself

Let me start with an analogy. Let’s take a bad martial artist (let’s call him Agniv Sarkar). He can’t throw a good punch. If I put him in a room for a few years, he might learn how to throw a decent punch. Even if he doesn’t know what an optimal punch looks like, through seeing what works, he might figure something out. But after a few years, he’s probably still not great.

I happen to be pretty versed in punching, so I could give Agniv some tips. I could spend an entire day detailing every minutia of how I punch. Could Agniv then get up and throw a punch as good as mine? Of course not. But if I then stuck him in a room for a few years, he would, over time, figure out what I meant. He would throw a punch, and for some reason it wouldn’t be quite like the others. He would ask himself “why was this one different,” and suddenly something I said would make sense. Not that it didn’t make sense before — the words meant something in a literal sense before, and they still do, but now they have a deeper meaning — Agniv would “understand what I meant.”

Though slightly problematic (which I’ll get to in a bit), I’ll give a brief example: let’s say I told Agniv to make a pulling hand (or, for you boxers, connect to your lats — same idea). Agniv could immediately make a pulling hand. But it wouldn’t work — why would it? Eventually, by random chance, Agniv would make a pulling hand at the right time, at the right angle, and the punch would work. And then Agniv thinks “ah, that’s what a pulling hand is.”

I give this analogy to provide an intuitive foundation for the core issue at play: the term “pulling hand” fundamentally does not mean to me what it means to Agniv. In a sense, this is very obvious. But it’s also crucial — a good pulling hand is an experience, not an objective thing. This is where the analogy breaks down a bit and becomes problematic — in this case a perfect pulling hand for me is technically describable, while the issue lies in the fact that “perfect pulling hand” is a subjective term; were it a perfect example, we would want it to be the same experience, but one that can’t be conveyed through language. Don’t think about it too much — it’s an analogy.

Before we go on, note that this essay draws very heavily on my ideas on linguistics. It’s relatively short — if you haven’t read it yet, please do so and come back. A lot of terms won’t make sense otherwise.

My sub-thesis, broadly speaking, is that this gap in understanding applies to most things. If I’m describing an experience we’ve both had, usually there’s no issue (and recall I use “experience” very generally — it includes “the experience of having a realization” i.e. that realization framed so as to clearly be indescribable by first order logic, and this is the sense in which I mainly use it here). But if I’m describing some experience you haven’t had, often it gets parsed literally, associated with some vague simplistic experience, and categorized as understood.

In the analogy, the equivalent of this is “make a pulling hand” -> pull your first to your hip with your elbow back as you punch. While this is true, it’s clearly not the entirety of what’s meant by “make a pulling hand.” At least in this example, though, the lack of understanding is clear. Consider the summary of Buddhism: “form is emptiness / emptiness is form / the two are not different.” Take a moment to process what you think this means.

When I first heard this, my reaction went somewhat as follows: “hmm, I’ve done karate, I get the soft/hard, slow/fast distinctions, and I’ve read Emerson, so I vaguely get transcendentalism — this is probably just kind of the intersection of the two, right?” Needless to say: not right. I do not understand Buddhism. But it’s really easy to fall into this trap. We’re working with the same lexicon here, and we have experiential associations with certain words, so when a perfect description of an experience is processed, it means something completely different than it did to the provider.

At this point you might be thinking “Yeah, man, I read your essay on linguistics (because you made me). I get it. Words don’t word the same for all people. Get to the point instead of reiterating things.” Fair. Part of the reason it sounds so repetitive is because at a very abstract level, “language is subjective” and “experiences are indescribable” are vaguely corollaries. But there are a couple of details you have to be careful with, hence why I’m going slowly. For example, wasn’t one of my claims in my linguistics essay that you could describe experiences, it was just really slow because you had to define new terms? Well, it’s complicated. Some experiences can be described, though laboriously — there are a few experiences the subject of the explanation needs to grasp before getting to the core idea. This is called, among other things, an argument. You see it in philosophy all the time — it’s the whole business with the “defining terms so that we have the framework to make the real points.” I would argue that, in a sense, this counts as “figuring it out yourself.” Obviously it’s with some help, but that’s not what I mean by “yourself.” Rather, the main experience in question is the experience of understanding, so even if the argument induces said experience, understanding the experience and having the experience are fundamentally the same thing in this framework. Wait, what? Yup. The best I can do is give a brief analogy: let’s say you have a beautiful view at the top of a mountain. I can’t take a photo of it and show it to you — you wouldn’t really get the view. But to get it you also don’t have to find it on your own — you can follow me on a hike up the mountain. Because by the time you get to the vista, you still did the hike.

There are, to be clear also certain things that are not always describable, even with care. These are generally things where ideas are borne of experiences (used in the more literal sense), and the ideas are so intrinsic to the experience that it's inexplicable to someone else. The canonical example of this is the sublime. Another clearer example (though slightly less accurate) is relationship advice. When a friend of mine was going through his first breakup, he asked me how he should cope. My answer was that as time went by he would (hopefully) look back at his ex with gratitude, as someone who taught him a lot and as someone who, for a while, he enjoyed spending time with. And that while it hurts right now, that’s also a beautiful thing. Though in pain, he should try to find intrinsic beauty in the power of emotion, and use it as an opportunity to grow as a person (this is not quite what I said — it’s a bit more condensed, but it’s along the same lines).

xThere are a couple things to note here. The original point I was making was that, even if I put in a lot of effort to take my friend on the conceptual hike, it wouldn’t work — the perspective you get towards another person in the wake of a breakup (especially a bad one, I think), is kind of a unique experience. What I told him all vaguely sounds true in the sense described earlier — the words all mean things and have associations, and so they mean something to everyone. But at the same time, I think you have to already know what I’m trying to convey (or something like it) to understand what I’m saying. It also occurs to me, though, that if you don’t know what I’m saying, it sounds like a bunch of watered down truisms. Anytime anyone is going through difficult times, they’re told to have gratitude and use it as an opportunity to grow. But the important thing to recognize is that this doesn’t devalue this advice. In fact, it’s the exact opposite — it’s because these things are so correct that they become truisms. They become so commonplace that they adopt the pure linguistic meaning and lose the intended experiential association. In fact, this process which forms truisms is a major contributor to the issue of meaningful statements being associated with meaningless ones (as in the Buddhist example). I won’t justify this, but it should be fairly self-explanatory (comprehension check, I guess).

This idea seems complex, but in a sense it’s almost tautological — when it comes to understanding experiences that are solely based on understanding, understanding the experience and having the experience are fundamentally the same thing. You have to figure it out yourself.

Implications for Advice

If all this is truly the case, it implies a grave error in the way advice is approached. Usually wisdom is thought of as “this person is going to tell me something true.” While this is not immediately false, per se, it lends itself to, upon hearing the advice, responding with “ah yes, this is, indeed, something that sounds vaguely true.” It lends itself to the trap of assuming the nonsubstantive experiential association you ascribe to the advice is the intended interpretation of the advisor (I’m assuming the advice in question is vaguely life related and not strictly process related, e.g. add a comma here — at no point has that been the focus of this essay). This is, for obvious reasons, terrible. While some advice will be recalled later as it should be (I’ll explain this in a bit), most will simply be filed away as another useless truism.

So how should we approach advice? As something the advisor understands, and you don’t. Sometimes you will have already figured it out, which should be clear when it happens (even in this case it’s probably best to assume you don’t understand it). But generally, it should be filed away not as something you understand, but as something to keep in mind when you come to a realization — as something that, someday, will make sense to you, and when it does you’ll know that the realization that clarified it is correct (well, probably correct. You can never be sure — maybe you’re misunderstanding the advice — but the point stands).

This is as important to understand for giving advice as receiving it. Don’t give the result, give the proof. The result is probably already a truism — most things are. If you can induce the experience in question, by all means, go ahead. But if you can’t, make sure that when the advised gets there, months or years down the line, what you say comes back to them, and guides them through their new realization. Advice should not be showing a photo from the mountain top, it should be describing the view, and giving directions up the mountain. They can get there on their own — they must, and once they do, make sure they can appreciate the view.

Implications for Philosophy

For the most part, philosophy concerns itself with describable experiences. But even with these, there’s a danger — as argued in Linguistics, the aim of most philosophers is to induce a foundation of new experiences in the reader that then allow description of the main experience in question. But if you misunderstand, if you interpret in bad faith as something simple even one of these terms, you’re lost. Returning to the mountain analogy, the philosopher provides you directions to get to the top, but only one wrong turn and you end up somewhere completely different (this is, by the way, another way of thinking about my thesis in Linguistics that real-time discourse is much better — it’s like having the philosopher with you on the mountain to tell you if you take a wrong turn. Like I said, abstractly speaking these two ideas are kind of corollaries).

As an interesting side note, I suspect this is part of why most philosophical writing is so tangled — it makes it impossible to interpret it as something simple, increasing the likelihood that you get the intended message. Nietzsche, I think, is the best example of this — more on that later.

This is not a criticism of philosophy, nor a criticism of us as readers. As you delve deeper into the implications of this theory, it becomes very clear that many philosophers understood this issue either intuitively or practically. What emerges from this is a new way to approach philosophical writings. Most of the time, reading a philosopher will give you an idea vastly different from whatever was in the author’s mind. This is not something to be fought against — rather, it should be accepted. Because this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (though it would be nice if it wasn’t the case). Rather, it’s an indication that we, as readers, lack the prerequisite experiences to grasp what the author is getting at. But this is how philosophy has always been — these writings are all responding to each other, presenting new experiences, new realizations that build off of the constructed intellectual tradition. Read Hume, and then read Kant’s reply to Hume. But don’t think you understand either of them after doing that. Go read Hume again. You still won’t understand what he’s actually saying, no matter how confident you are at the time (I’ve fallen into this trap many times), but if you think he’s saying something different than you did last time, your thinking has progressed — you made it a bit further up the mountain before making a wrong turn. So expose yourself to different philosophers. Read dissenting opinions, and re-read assenting ones. Approach the intellectual history of philosophy not as a collection of ideas for you to interpret and absorb or dismiss, but as a collection of great thinkers, far better than you or I, who leave their writings to us, a vast conversation we must reconstruct, so that we may eventually reach where they did on the mountain — for truly it as yet has no peak, only vistas on the way — and discover the next wrong turn.

Nietzsche Agrees

Though it pains me to not end it there, this section is very important. While most of these ideas are my own, some of the concepts have (in my understanding) actually been put forward before by Nietzsche. He mentions it mainly in chapters 1 & 2 of Beyond Good and Evil with his idea of the “free spirit” — philosophers of the future who understand the futility of searching for perfect truth, and instead draw their own from aspects of the world. A lot of the ideas I’ve mentioned here also apply to Nietzsche — both the principle I just mentioned of providing pieces that one can draw their own truth from and the idea of providing the proof but not the theorem (to be fair, these two ideas are very similar) are very apparent in his approach to writing. If you want a better understanding of what I’m talking about here, go read those chapters.

A Final Note

For better or for worse, I don’t write like Nietzsche. Looking back at this essay, I think it says everything that needs to be said, but it says it in a sane enough fashion that it’s easy to read each sentence, nod your head, and then a paragraph later have no idea what you just read. This is the nice thing about Nietzsche — if you don’t get it, he makes sure you’re aware of it. I won’t ask you to re-read this essay carefully, because that’s a lot of work. But I do think it’s a very important point. So at least re-read the thesis section in the preface, and think about what I’m saying by it in the context of the rest of the essay. This, too, I think, is an idea that you kind of have to figure out yourself. So file it away as such. When you figure something out about life, see if it was really something you already knew in a literal sense but didn’t get. Then maybe you’ll understand what I mean. When you give or receive advice (especially receive, and remember advice is a very broad term here), check if you’re interpreting it in bad faith. Then maybe you'll understand what I mean.

I’ve said my piece — figure the rest out yourself.

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