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Published: 17 May 2021

• Kuhn

Apparently it's all about the company you keep: if you just hang out with the right crowd of nice reasonable people, you too can get sanded down by a thousand grains of perfectly sensible-sounding little things to become a largely inoffensive tool of the establishment.

The mode seems typical of pre-analytical thought — before the method became institutionalized of meticulously spelling out an algorithm step-by-step, the Egyptians would simply give examples of calculations and hope that the student caught on to the general idea; with small-batch tutoring, it may have made little difference.

Gradual change of course brings to mind that obligatory citation, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The book's inception was through his study of Aristotle, which was something he found to be very slow going, up to a tipping-point: after that, apparently the hypno-ads started unfurling in his brain to transform it into a shape that was more hospitable to the slave-owner temperament.  He wasted the rest of his life waffling about ineffable "paradigms" in a manner that was so muddled it might as well have been intentionally misleading.  Still it took considerable effort for his critics to even point out how he was vague, as if they themselves were stuck in a paradigm — of refusing to internalize new information because it would force them to confront the reality that people they trust had lied or misinformed them.

The experience is rather like learning to play a complex game: once it clicks, there's a payoff simply due to the effort of comprehension and the relief of finally seeing the big picture.  But, once the jigaw has snapped, you cannot un-see it.  This makes the curse of knowledge especially dire for the disciplines that could be described as hermeneutical since there is no way to examine "holistic" ideas without becoming enmeshed in them to some degree, and so just reading the descriptions can cause you to start seeing dragons all over the map.  Getting into this at all is not very popular, possibly because it is itself something of a quagmire (and it makes you look like a meanie who's picking on the humanities).  It would however be a glaring omission to not mention that the pre-analytical processes leave their practitioners more vulnerable to grandiose schemes with a tenuous connection to reality; you'd only have to consider Martin Heidegger, the other big name of the 20th century to have tangled with Aristotle at a crucial juncture.