Taking a Moment to Survey this Project of Dangerous Intersection
I recently received an email from a new reader ("Greg") who expressed appreciation for some of the articles he has read at Dangerous Intersection. I decided to share my response to his letter (see the bottom of this post).
This website has been important for me as a tool for me for trying to understand the world around me. It has not been entirely successful, of course, and never will be. The world is a inherently confusing moving target, making the quest to understand an ongoing project. It is also a complex adaptive system that demands multi-layer analysis. It's a big onion that requires exploration involving constant reframings based on both reductionism and emergence. Further complicating things, the tools we can use for understanding, spoken and written language, can only scratched the surface of our world. I have been increasingly expressing my frustration with this mismatch between our language and our quest for understanding by focusing on the "meaning of meaning." It's not that we can't make progress, but we often have to be satisfied (if we are honest) with what Nietzsche refers to in this "five fingers" reference:
Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.Greg's email served as another reminder to me (this has become a constant topic for me) of the intersection between group dynamics and truth. I would bet that I've written about this intersection on dozens of occasions here at this website, The problem being illustrated by Solomon Asch's classic social science experiment.--from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl
Greg, thanks for your email, and welcome to this website. I look forward to your comments, especially when you disagree!