*Open Mindedness* and *The World as It Is*

Introduction

This essay follows my previous essay. In this I want to express how we may be confident in our apprehensions of reality, apprehensions we grasp as a consequence of true open-mindedness.

The "how" of the previous paragraph is meant ambiguously. It has two senses, both of which I shall chase down in this essay.

1. "How" as in "what justification we have for saying our perceptions are true."

2. "How" as in "the best method for coming to know the truth."

In the end we shall find that these two "hows" are actually one: our justification and our method interweave kaleidoscopically at many points, the name of all of which may be drawn together into one called "faith." That is, at the end, we shall see why and how the "how" of truth is "faith."

"How" as in "what is our justification for saying we know *The World as It Is*?"

As for our seeking justification for our open-minded attitude, the one that takes what it sees as true, with affirmation, we must reflect on our perception. Is what appears to me to be true *really* true? To this question are only two answers.

(1) We may have no certainty to the degree which our perceptions reflect what is really "out there" in reality. We have no way of knowing how firm a grasp our perception has on what is "really there."

(2) All that we perceive is really there.

To first appearances, (1) has the upper hand. The reason is simple, We've all been wrong. In other words, the appearances we apprehended did not do justice to reality ultimately. So it does not seem that all our appearances are "really there."

But on further investigation, we find that (1) leads to consequences that are unacceptable and undermine all ability to affirm knowledge of reality so long as we simultaneously entertain it. There being only two options, the untenability of (1) forces us to adopt (2), which despite its apparent strangeness, actually proves to live with us congenially.

The reason (1) undermines all confidence in knowing *the world as it is* can be discovered on a moment's reflection on what (1) says. Since we have no certainty that our perceptions reflect what is really "out there," we have no confidence in knowing the world as it is at all. In any respect.

We may think that our knowledge of our thoughts are safe; and therefore we may still know that we exist with certainty. As Rene Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." But this is actually confusion, and under belief in (1), we cannot trust our perceptions of our thoughts or (however indirectly) of ourselves. This is because, under (1), we have no confidence that our perceptions reflect the reality they purport to represent. This includes the perception that our thoughts are our thoughts or the perception that our being is really our being.

This is deep skepticism. And it in principle, it undermines explicit affirmation of even the proposition (1). It is imaginable, though, that one may live in deep distrust of all thought and perception without explicitly affirming (1). Those who do so are complete nihilists. They believe in nothing, and their whole world is meaningless. It is safe to assume no one actually takes this route. But because it is an inherently possible attitude to take, it means that belief in (2) is based on a leap of faith.

In other words, our reasoning says (2) is the only thinkable option, and it even represents the attitude of each man insofar as he is not a nihilist. Thus all perception is real; the perceptions themselves are directly true reality. To put it more strongly, all that we see, taste, touch, feel, hear, intuit, think, and otherwise perceive, all this is equally real and fundamental. This means that our own experience is fundamental to living a life of justified knowledge. And again, by the previous paragraph, we can only assent to this reality through faith, a personal commitment to an unprovable experience.

"How" as in "what is the best method for coming to know *The World As It Is*?"

This conclusion will be met with an objection, which illustrates *how* faith brings us from knowing *the world as it is* to knowing *the world as it is* even better.

There is our earlier objection to (2): We've all been wrong. What appeared to be there actually turned out to be a mirage, and after the mirage was cleared, we saw what was *really there.* But the appearances were not really there, and so they were not true.

The force of this objection lies in a misunderstanding of what is meant by "reality of perception." When the misunderstanding is cleared, a fuller appreciation for (2) shall be plain.

By "all perceptions are all equally real and fundamental," I do not mean that all relations between perceptions are true. A mirage is a perception. By the argument above, it is "really there," but it also coexists with our later perception that it had no physical "hard" substance. Both the "hard" substance and the "mirage" are perceptions, and on this level, they are equally real; in that they inform us of reality, as it really is.

However not all relations between these perceptions are true; that is to say, intelligible, or in other words, perceivable. We cannot imagine, and so it cannot be true, that the desert mirage is a perception that has the tactile sensation of, say, the cool undulation of water. Rather the mirage's perception is of the sort that if we move close to it, it vanishes. Thus, while real, it has properties that change as all our perceptions change, and *what is really there,* in this case sand, has the property that it is hot to the touch at midday.

By extension, knowing a collection of perceptions is there and *is the world as it is,* but in correctly understanding the relations between the perceptions grows us to understand *the world as it is* to an even greater degree.

Thus to plainly answer the objection, when we are mistaken as to the relationships of our perceptions, we are not perceiving a thing at all; rather we experience a confusion, and a confusion has no reality, just as the term "married bachelor" is a confusion which cannot possibly have reality.

Our faith in the truth of the appearances, their reality, leads us into living in this world of appearances; and this living leads us to make this *world as it is* into even more the *world as it is.*

Conclusion

Hidden within this discussion are many implications. Since experience is fundamental, it precludes any theories that deny experiences in toto. Insofar as a theory obscures what one truly apprehends, it confuses things; because it serves as a prejudice to say that an experience is not an experience, that it does not belong to reality. But this we see is a contradiction, to have an experience one does not experience.

The consequences are vast. It urges every knowing person to cast aside everything that holds him back from understanding truth. It encourages us to strain forward to know *the world as it is* to greater degrees.

At the same time, it affirms the objectivity of truth. Perceptions are not "just in our own mind" but are existentially connected with *the world as it is.*

For those who believe that the truth will set them free, this is reason to be truely *open-minded*: to see *the world as it is.*

The Air

Without a while; within a while; we while a worn wind:

Turning out, our tremoring teeth toothweeze a tune

Timed to the tappings of treachery and tessellates,

Tried and tired tilings for torn time, tracts, and trists;

And gorging, inward gulping, gaping: a gathering grin,

Grinning at guiles and games, gusto and guilt, girls and gams

Growing our groaning gaffes, but giving great guffaws.

Truth and Open-mindedness

In this post I want to encourage openness to truth found in experience, any truth; even those that conflict with doctrines and dogmas that are well established in our communities, central to our understanding of our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to God, threatening what we see as our sources of life.

This post is a response to a conversation my friends and I had on a road-trip. My friends are philosophers, and one of the marks of contemporary academic philosophy is careful questioning of all terms we use, seeking precision of thought. The leads to reconsidering what we think about all things, and it can breed a kind of liberalism of mind when it comes to examining one’s beliefs.

Now my friends see this questioning which is instilled into their everyday thinking as a hinderance to productive living. And this is for a natural reason, if you’re questioning your assumptions, you can’t use those assumptions to live your life. In addition, it doesn’t make a man a good leader; for good leaders need to have a firmness that gives their followers direction, and it is hard or impossible to be a good leader while questioning your foundation.

This reasoning lead them to conclude that it is desirable to have a closed mind. So in theology, it would be better for them, they would say, to eventually decide on what is orthodox and firmly stand on that point without budging. No more developments would be made from that point on.

And I believe they make a fundamental and disastrous mistake. The reasoning is faulty for it confuses things. It misunderstands how we come to know truth, and it encourages avoidance of things our conscience may press us to change our minds about.

To avoid confusion, I should speak of a good kind of close mindedness; and it is this I suspect my friends are partly concerned about, and I can commend it. However, I must later speak of another kind of close-mindedness I condemn.

The good kind of close-mindedness is skeptical of charlatanism, of a kind of linguistic magic, where intelligence weaves a spell of argumentation around our heads to move us in a direction we know in our gut is wrong, or at least a direction we do not understand and we feel an inner distrust in moving towards.

An example may be taken from the movie Idiocracy, a future dystopia, where the earth’s population’s IQ has dramatically fallen, and everyone lives according to the most inane commercialization. In the film, a gatorade type product is sold as containing electrolytes. And the citizens of this future love it and always praise it’s having electrolytes. But when asked why this should make the drink a good product, they have no idea. The goodness of the product is a blank concept. They are fooled by sophistry where they ought to have been skeptical.

But on the flip side, we ought not to invent or rely on sophistry to obscure what we intuitively feel to be true. And I cannot see this to be otherwise than exactly what is commended by my friends. Again, their view, and I believe this a charitable summation, is this, “We ought to trust our systems of reasoning that have proved to be true over against our momentary intuitions of what is true, even when the system seems to fail for the intuitions.”

And again, this is true insofar as it avoids intellectual charlatanism and sophistry as I said before. But let me show that it is disastrous when it comes to what we intuitively feel to be true. It is disastrous because my friends’ sentiment is self-contradictory.

They put the cart before the horse. We see this immediately when we suppose the following. Suppose that we have reached a system of belief that is reasonably true and safe. How did we reach this system? By a series of arguments the truth of which never intuitively struck us as true? By no means! No, we come to believe in systems such as mathematics or a political ideology because they strike us as true, good, or beautiful. This is how we accessed what we believed to be true in the first place.

If we then abandon the truth we have heard, and close our hearts to its goodness in favor of old ways of thinking, we actually reject the means by which we came to some truth originally. So if we are to seek consistency, we ought to keep the same method. And the method for finding truth is this, we meditate on our experience of the true, beautiful, and good. We articulate it in a more or less structured manner to show of fellow men what we see; and then we again see how much further our perception may perceive truth.

Further, if we should consider this view from a practical view, we shall find it no hinderance to strength of conviction and fortitude of mind. To outline with very simple examples, I do not have to become close minded when I use the world practically or consider mathematics. It is absurd for me to say that I am closed-minded in my view of how to drink from a cup, if I say that I should drink from a cup by either using a straw or lifting the brim to my lips. It is equally absurd for me to say I should become close-minded about mathematical axioms and theorems lest I be tricked into believing false things by arguments. No! In both these cases I can, must, and do judge what is true for myself. I just know how to use a cup. I just can assess what is true in mathematical phenomena by following a proof carefully. Openness to experience in this way is obviously no hinderance. The same goes for how we use other systems of thought or live in other modes of experience.

There are many applications to our lives this method should bear on our lives. But I have written already long enough for a blog post. In the future I will relate these ideas to other modes of thought such as religion and politics.

Famously, G. K. Chesterton said “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” But “I say to you, Be wise as serpents but innocent as doves. Indeed no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he be a little child.” And little children are not ones for convoluted argument, but see what is with wide and unapologetic eyes.