Idea, to see what you think:
Thinking is biological.
Understanding is social.
Listening is biological.
Hearing is social.
…It’s just a thought. Run with it as you like.
Of course, understanding and hearing are also spiritual and existential. The idea being that biology to an extent stands alone — although it’s actually a part of an eco-web. But developed human faculties are networked and only exist between people. We need references and relations to have the richness of our human reality. (The word reality is linguistically related to relationship.)
So that we can’t just tell people things to have them hear us. They hear us depending on how what we’re saying relates to the relationship between us.
And we can think all we like but we’re likely to make mere assumptions or at best reinvent the wheel (badly) if we don’t take advantage of our relations with others. Hence the role of teachers among us humans. Teachers, of course, aren’t just trainers. Just like education isn’t just training. It’s why we talk about standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. We found out what’s been done then seek to go farther. For ourselves, to find ourselves. But, then, too: no man is an island. We can only find ourselves by making efforts on our complete network/web. So that we work for: *our selves, *our souls, *family, *God, *role models, *school/church, *society. All the angles, as we see them. As we can come to see them after learning what there is to learn.
Going even higher it can be shown that our faculties become our virtues. This happens as they are related in our lives to the eternal or non-physical realm. It’s presented like this in classic Church teaching (in the various religions) and it even makes sense. So that our power of Understanding when unshackled from identification and dependence on the senses becomes Faith. Memory unbound becomes Hope. Will unfettered becomes Love. What’s not to like?
What about learning? Is all learning the same? There’s a cool book by Idries Shah called “Learning How to Learn.” Those Sufis were into that.
I’ve bumped into the ideas of apophatic and kataphatic learning. These are obscure words but they seem helpful because they show that learning has at least 2 sides. Apophatic means liberation from illusion — it’s a negative process of getting rid of what is not right or real. Kataphatic learning is positive content, getting the material you can use to build roots and a base in life. This material comes from symbol and myth. Facts are the “food” of limited utility for bio-life, socially conditioned as ideas about “fact” and “biology” are. Myth is for deeper existential-life. A society’s myths let its people know what something like a fact means to them. The apophatic process as it relates to facts would show that they mean something to us different from what we thought they did.
So when someone says that they “just want to have fun” they could find out what they’re really saying if they wanted to. They might be surprised…and intrigued!
