Trying Very Hard

Right now my brain is a bit muddled. It is in the process of attempting to connect the dots between Giacomo Casanova, David Hume, Epictetus, quasi-miracles, Frank McCourt, and teaching phonics. The most obvious connection is that I’m dealing with all of these things on an incredibly regular basis currently. But there is always some way in which the things most seemingly unconnected can be connected.
All right, I fully understand that there is danger in attempting to make connections between the unconnected. This is, as a matter of fact, South Park’s bread and butter: what kind of ridiculous non sequitur crap is going on in the world at the moment. A beaver dam collapsed, people are stranded on their roofs, and it’s obvious that the REAL cause of the problem is global warming.
Epictetus warns us that we should consistently call things by their right names:
“When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgments that aren’t there. Does someone bathe quickly? Don’t’ say he bathes poorly, but quickly. Name the situation as it is; don’t filter it through your judgments. Does someone drink a lot of wine? Don’t say she’s a drunk, but that she drinks a lot. Unless you possess a comprehensive understanding of her life, how do you know if she is a drunk? … Give your assent only to what is actually true.”
This has actually been a big theme of my time here in Korea: what is the right name for something. I remember the first time I looked at a 5000Won note and said in my head, “Sweet, I still have oh-cheon-won.” The fact of the matter is that it is not five thousand won. It is oh-cheon-won. That seems like a really minor example, but the effect is astounding. Korea is actually ripe with madness for calling things by their correct names. My Korean Made Easy book has this to say:
“In Korea, people are addressed by titles based on age and position, which are complex even for Koreans! … So now you may understand the reason Koreans almost always exchange business cards upon first meeting—these cards contain each person’s appropriate title.”
This idea of calling things by their right names is a rampant issue in modern society. For example, I recently was presented with the argument from a farmer that large-scale, factory farming is more efficient and therefore more sustainable. Here we are presented with exactly the kind of non sequitur that ought to be avoided: efficiency and sustainability are exclusive terms. One does not imply the other, and they are only barely even related. What he meant to say was that large-scale, factory farming is more efficient that small-scale, organic farming at producing large amounts of product because that’s what efficiency actually implies.
Extending this idea into the world of literature, I have been recently reading over Giacomo Casanova’s conversations with Voltaire that he recounts in “The Story of My Life,” and when your life is constantly running between languages, you are placed in the very difficult position of ensuring that you are consistently being accurate in your naming of things. More than once in the text he refers to times when he is embarrassed in France by his inappropriate turns of phrase or inaccurate verbiage due to his Venetian heritabe, and being in Korea—with its multitudes of titles and ambiguousness in accuracy for determining those titles—has made me feel his pain very acutely.
The most obvious arena for this discussion is in philosophy, language theory, and the discussion of what words actually mean. What is an idea? What is a thought? Defining the simplest terms is sometimes the highest goal of philosophy. Hume is attempting to differentiate between things like belief and THE IDEA of a belief. What’s the difference? Is it significant? What if it is? More importantly, he’s trying to figure out what the difference is between cause and effect, and THE IDEA of cause and effect. Imagine if you will that not every existent thing has to have a cause prior to it.
This really messed me up today. Think about it for a second in terms of your own life. Your existence right now is not determined by some previous cause. Even if you were to say that you were caused by your mom and dad having sex you could fall into error very easily. That sex was merely the canvas on which your existence was to be painted. That would be like saying that the canvas Leondardo purchased caused the painting of the Mona Lisa. The reality is that the effect of their sex was the man ejaculating into the woman. That’s it.
This question has been messing with me lately as well: what of the spirit? Reading Rudolph Steiner a while ago gave me the messed up idea that the spirit is outside the body, wrapping it like a glove. At first, this idea made a lot of sense because I believe wholeheartedly in the Joni Mitchell-an “touching of souls,” but it also seemed strange that the spirit would simply exist outside the self. What I have come to think in the last few weeks is that the spirit permeates the self and extends beyond it. Yes, it does exist outside of the self, but it also manages to saturate the body with its essence. I have recently come to really hate the idea of the spirit being inside me: how can I share something that is doomed to remain inside me. No. I like this idea of a saturating, permeating, extending spirit that can touch people.
Frank McCourt is an Irish-American who taught in New York City for thirty years. Teaching is one of the most honorable professions that any human being can engage in, but I want to qualify this statement by saying that it is a profession that should never be entered into lightly. What is education? To call it by it’s right name would be to say that it is the foundation of the human character. It is everything. One of my students today said, in the course of a grammar lesson about “used to”: People used to think that food was really important, but now we know that money is more important than food.” She didn’t learn that from experience, she learned that from the education she achieved. (In a bit of a side note, I went ballistic, but they couldn’t even imagine a world in which there were no supermarkets from which to purchase food.) The question Mr. McCourt seems to be posing is: what is education?
To be honest, I leave it up to my phonics kids. They teach me almost more than Hume and Epictetus and Casanova together. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent twenty minutes of your life trying to teach six-year-olds the difference between pup and pop. The Korean word for rice is pronounced pop, and, even at six years old, these kids have been saying pop for the bulk of their life. After twenty minutes of repeating the pronunciation of pup for them, they still didn’t get it. Imagine the power of the mind that allows for this kind of thing. At six years old the mind is already very powerfully trained. Imagine the kind of training it has received, and how much experience it has, at calling things by the names it’s been taught to call things. The final question is, what if all that education, all that time being taught what to call something, is fallacious, and you wind up calling something by its wrong name anyway? “To live outside the law you must be honest.”