On Limitations
I know most who study very hard on any subject (especially multiple subjects) eventually come to this realization at some point. I’ve known that for a long time. I’ve long been familiar with Socrates’ aphorism, that I know nothing, except for the fact of my own ignorance*, and I’ve never disagreed. But now’s my turn to really learn what it means.
I can’t learn enough about everything. More importantly, I have to set explicit boundaries to what I’m going to choose to spend my time learning about, and what communities I participate in. Otherwise, there’s no end to things. I have to, arbitrarily, decide what I want to accomplish, and decide what’s not necessary to do those things. Then I have to cut out what’s unnecessary. When I’m reading along about something, and some sentence strikes a chord with my curiousity, I’m going to have to stop instead of clicking on that link or opening up a Google tab, and I’m going to have to consciously choose to ignore my curiousity, and say “I don’t need to know this to accomplish what I need to; I’m not going to look into it.” It will hurt, badly, but I will have to do it.
One of the expressions of my insatiable curiosity is a desire to become a writer. As a writer, I can firm up incremental blocks of thought that are then published, sometimes even with feedback. It makes progress seem real. But the progress isn’t real. The firmness of a given essay, if it ever comes, is illusory. I’ll never know enough to write a good essay, except maybe on one subject.
Because I’m such a “meta” person, (thus the name of the blog,) I think I do have some valuable and relatively new ideas about communication in various forums. At least, I seem to consistently be the most insightful person when the topic comes up. And I’ve been wanting for years to try to focus harder on that topic. Perhaps, now that I’ve nominally come to realize my limitations, this will start to happen. May it be so.
* OK, so I went to look this up, and apparently there’s no exact place in the dialogues where this quote comes from, even though I seem to distinctly remember it from a past reading. Oh, well. At the least, it’s a consistent theme in the various Socratic dialogues.
