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IV.
As a teacher, how do you not become the “philosopher-king,”
“the know-it-all who has seen the True and come to tell us about
it”? How do you avoid possessing - and becoming possessed by -
the “True” of Certainty and the “True” of Uncertainty, both of
them no less “fixed and immutable,” no less “absolute and
unshakeable,” than the other for those who would wave their flag
and worship at their altar? As I have tried to explore and
explain throughout this until now, neither extreme is fruitful.
As I have tried to say, the pursuit and perpetuation of either,
to the willed exclusion of the other, is detrimental. Western
Civilization – religion, science, politics, rhetoric, and other
defining features of Western Civilization - arose out of that
privileging, the privileging of a severely dualistic way of
perceiving “Truth” and “reality,” it is true. Because it was
static and universal in its utter Certainty, that Western vision
was extremely strong and influential and enduring. But despite
this, this black or white perspective, in the end, is indeed
detrimental when it comes to seeing new sights, dreaming new
dreams, and telling new tales. It is detrimental to, as, again,
Hélène Cixous wrote, “understanding the incomprehensible, facing
the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable,
which is of course: thinking.”
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