I tend to go through new mottos every few months. Background on some of the old ones are here, here, here and here.
“Learning is personal, knowledge is social, truth is an adventure” came to me while staring at a blank description field in the settings of thinkingalive.com, a new WordPress-powered site I set up for more personal, philosophical, literary-inclined writing.
Here’s the post hoc deconstruction:
I’m a big fan of Michael Polanyi’s notion of personal knowledge. I used to develop a lot of ideas about “personal education” but that was before I blogged so those didn’t see the light of day. A couple weeks ago I stumbled on Polanyi’s Study of Man and his ideas crept back into bed with mine — all the stuff about “learning alive” I’ve been writing… Ergo the spontaneous association of “learning is personal.”
Then that thought reminded my of Polanyi which reminded me of “personal knowledge” and when I wondered about poor old “knowledge” getting left out, I thought:
If A is x, then maybe B is y… and if x = personal, the first thing that comes to mind for y is social. Therefore learning is personal, knowing is social.
I went with “knowing” rather than “knowledge” because it’s consistent with “learning” and I’m in the habit of turning as many words into a verbs that I can. I changed it to “knowledge” because it sounded too consistent (softening the coarse dialectical edge), plus it has more resonance in the mind and relevance in search engines.
Speaking of resonance and relevance, is there a bigger buzzword than “social”?
Normally I tend to avoid buzzwords but I’m trying to shake that aversion as part of my ongoing effort to soften my logical edges. Besides, the practice of social is a genuinely central aspect of my new attitude.
In that spirit of renaissance and growth, “truth is an adventure” came along a couple days later after I had the urge to resolve the first two statements in a complete triangle.
Then more geometry: learning is a verb, knowledge is a little more concrete… the next step in that linear trajectory would be truth — or maybe “Truth.”
But I’m not a believer in the conventional kinds of concrete absolute truths. I’m a pragmatist; I constantly remind myself to beware of what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: even the firmest truths (like those in geometry in math) are abstract, not concrete.
So my thought about the problem with “truth” led to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness which led to Whitehead which led to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas which led to… “truth is an adventure.”
Summing up, “learning is personal” refers to my strong belief that we should all be personally responsible for what we know (and what we don’t); “knowledge is social” refers to my strong belief that all of that knowledge should be shared and improved through conversation, and especially in writing (e.g. on blogs); “truth is an adventure” refers to my strong belief that ultimately the process of learning and dialog is worthwhile in itself.
Counterintuitively, I think it’s more effective to simply love learning than to deliberately set out to solve things as the primary purpose.
The love of learning needs things to learn about, so it naturally reaches for opportunities and challenges — the most fruitful of which happen to be the same problems that need to be addressed; through the love of learning we can hit the world’s biggest challenges with a lot more speed and momentum than we do now.
And we’ll see where this leads…
