Introduction
Blog posts 147 and 148 have probed how individuals encounter reality through the relational organizations by which they constitute meaning. An individual does not simply receive reality as a collection of facts. What becomes meaningful depends on how the elements of experience are related to one another. The resulting relational organizations can be understood as personal ontologies: particular ways in which a person organizes the world so that it becomes intelligible.
But this raised a problem. If a personal ontology determines how reality becomes meaningful, then it is necessarily limited. No person can establish all possible relations among everything they encounter. Every personal ontology makes some relations salient while leaving others unnoticed. Reality therefore exceeds the organization through which any individual encounters it.
Information deficit
At first sight, this might appear to be an information problem: perhaps an incomplete ontology simply means that we do not know enough. If we could gather more information, observe more carefully, learn more facts, or accumulate more experience, perhaps the limits of our understanding would gradually disappear. This assumes that the problem is the amount of information available within the existing way of organizing reality.
Other aspects
As was shown in blog post 91, we can be limited by more aspects than just a lack of information. We can be also limited by flaws in our ways of thinking, by the level of fulfilment of our basic human needs, and by our social environments. These limitations are different from one another, and addressing one does not necessarily address the others.
This makes the idea of an information deficit less straightforward than it initially appears. If we encounter something that we do not understand or is new and seems off, how do we know what to do with it? How do we weigh whether we just need to update our information, or activate a more logical or appropriate mode of thinking, or improve our level of psychosocial integration, or alter our social identities and peer groups. And how do we know it is worth it?
In order to answer these questions, we would need a meta aspect, a dimension that would enable us to reflect on all original aspects from a higher point of view. But how would such a dimension look like?
Flatlanders
To explore this question, consider a flatlander - a thought experiment inspired by Edwin Abbott Abbott. A flatlander lives in a two-dimensional world. Everything the flatlander can experience is contained within this world. It can move horizontally and vertically, distinguish shapes, measure distances, and establish increasingly complex relations between the things it encounters.
Now imagine that a three-dimensional object enters its world. The flatlander can observe what happens. It can collect information about the object as it appears within its two-dimensional world. It can measure the changing shape of its cross-section. It can compare observations and construct increasingly sophisticated explanations.
But there is a problem. The flatlander has no third dimension from which to observe its own two-dimensional world. From the perspective of a three-dimensional observer, the flatlander’s two-dimensional world can be seen as a particular limitation. What is invisible from within flatland can become visible from outside it. But the flatlander has no access to that third dimension.
The hubris of a third dimension
Maybe many of the approaches to improving personal ontologies are either mono-dimensional - more information, better thinking, counteracting dislocation, deradicalization - or assume that we have access to a higher dimension from which we can revise our ontologies.
But what if we do not? What if every attempt to correct our ontology is itself made from within an ontology? We can acquire more information. We can improve our reasoning. We can address our psychological needs. We can change our social environment. We can even reflect on the ways in which these things influence us. But from where do we make these interventions?
What guarantees that the standpoint from which we diagnose the limitations of our ontology is not itself part of that ontology? Perhaps this is the hybris of the third dimension: the assumption that we can step outside the relational organization through which we encounter reality and observe it from a higher point of view.
But a flatlander cannot step into the third dimension by becoming a better flatlander. Perhaps neither can we. Perhaps we cannot escape our personal ontologies. Perhaps what we can do is interrupt them: create enough space for something that does not fit within them to exist without immediately forcing it back into their existing organization.
What if we can only experience reality as a Clive Bell art piece: not by grasping some reality beyond our organization of relations, but by encountering an organization of relations different from our own? What if we are flatlanders?