The following is an introduction to a pursuit, an exploration of a quality, an attribute, a capacity, and a tacit recognition of an ever re-configuring present. This exploration has more to do with the concept of understanding in its many and varied modalities, than it does with how they are considered, expressed, or how understanding impacts they who are directly or indirectly exposed to the experience.
Since Sunday, January 30, 2011, the world has been impacted by yet another growing collection of voices saying: Enough! The remnants of an ancient culture, a people calling for change; and the scattered, tenacious cousins, nearly two weeks earlier, starting the cry with a good young man setting himself on fire because his voice had been ignored, unheard, and lost in the chorus of voices calling from their suffering. He could no longer believe that he had within his power the ability to provide for all the members of his family; and, because his voice was lost, he chose to give up his life in the horrific act of self-immolation, in perhaps a most desperate attempt to be heard in his cry for justice.
What do we take from this? As far as understanding is concerned, it is yet another example of the many viewpoints and modalities in a veritable explosion of permutations. From this example of what has been occurring in the Middle East, we may draw upon comprehension and imagination to readily sift out the relevant and concurring examples in order to shed light on: what is understanding?
This is merely the start of an exploration.
What we see as compared to what we understand can be entirely distinct. It seems that understanding requires that we bring a variety of internal components to what we perceive in order to composite a cogent portrait. Such a picture, as we undertake to describe it, begins to decay as the inevitable influence of our subjectivity, our filters, further contaminates the event from the initial affect of perception. What then are we understanding, the event or our relationship to the event?
Perhaps it would be fair to say that our understanding is fluid, thus that it ebbs and flows, gathers and releases. It is important to mention that empirical evidence is no less subject to dynamic interpretation as are abstractions, deductions, or raw data: perfectly separating the the investigator from the subject being investigated is not possible; however, it can be argued that these points of contact, through rigorous measures, can to a greater extent be mitigated, particularly if they are only tangential, wherein the influence on the subject tends to decrease as the obliqueness of the relationship to the subject increases. While the previous statement seems obvious, there could exist a non-transverse plane where divergence (static or dynamic) could tend toward return to the origination point. While this may be provocative as an intellectual exercise, it is of course academic; such considerations do, however, help with the idea that understanding has a probabilistic component.
Before further considering any other aspects about understanding, let us agree that understanding can be derived from so many perspectives that this effort should never encompass. This examination has to do with questions about acquiring determinate markers which indicate either the process of understanding or a collection of milestones arranged so as can be referenced to represent at least an echo of understanding which by some means is transmissible. There is little more than this: either we experience or we live vicariously. Both exact demands on the imagination, but what follows has less to do with this than it does with the meta consideration of understanding; however, this reflective perspective or mode has its value as a tool for indicating, amplifying, and dissecting. Nevertheless, one should remember that by whatever correspondence, all things leave an imprint on each other even if they are juxtaposed at random, proximity not withstanding.
How does understanding vary as a time-imperative experience as to a time-conditional experience? Does will play a role in understanding aside from being drawn upon incidentally for the sake of comprehension so as, for example, to meet with some requirement for undertaking a given task? Is the intentional aspect of will impactful to the fabric of understanding, such as to shape it and to be a constituent part? Whether incidental or intentional, will is unavoidable in the copse of understanding: the entirety of one's interior life, even of one long dead, is a wilderness across which to pass for every composited picture. Here we have another mode for considering the traces, the qualities of understanding.
( to be continued at a later date. 11 days till heart-song, plus 30 yet)
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