In order to understand something a person must suspend his judgment. (Judgment, in turn, is dependent on personal values). So, for instance, if I consider myself a moral person (my personal values) and want to understand the inner workings of an immoral person, say, and to use an extreme example just for contrast, a child sex trafficker, I will have to abandon my personal values (at least for a time). If am able to see the immoral person’s worldview by putting myself in his shoes, such as through understanding (and even empathizing) of all the causes and rationalizations what am I to do with this view/knowledge? And what is the quality of such knowledge?
If I keep it untainted with my personal values (unbiased view) such knowledge would be essentially meaningless (empty) to me because it is incompatible with my own values. (I cannot identify with this knowledge on a certain fundamental level).
If I am to make sense of it (incorporate it into my worldview) and make it meaningful to me I would have to judge, because meaningfulness of knowledge is dependent on personal values.
How meaningful is unbiased understanding? Can I really understand an immoral person if I consider myself moral?
Imagine you’re quietly listening to an evil person talk for an hour straight as if you can decide her fate. She earnestly wants to try to put her evil actions behind her and live legally and within the moral parameters you set. You can let her try that, or you can send her where she might have a chance at happiness, but where she can’t hurt anyone, or you may also choose to send her to a prison or death. As you listen to her rationalization of her past actions you’ll likely have the overwhelming desire to end this courtesy of letting her speak uninterrupted for an hour.
Not only would you try not to interrupt her, you would try to suspend judgment in your own mind, to listen without your own words running quietly through your head. Perhaps it would be impossible, perhaps you would spend the whole hour also rationalizing, rationalizing away every excuse she makes - of course your rationalizations actually being rational.
If you were able to silence most of your thoughts for that whole hour it seems it would be a very traumatic experience for you. In your outer and inner silence her words would almost become your thoughts. It wouldn’t be worth it. Perhaps you would already have planned on giving her the easier sentence before you listened to her - if you’re naturally merciful. But, now that you did listen to her you would actually likely be considering death as her sentence, so that you may drive a stake through those thoughts of hers you allowed inside your head.
I Think so. I seem to find within me the seethings of all sorts of urges, some not very nice. I seem to find within me moments or longer where I refuse to admit what I actually did/am doing. I find rationalizations, urges to harm, urges to sneak, things I hide from myself, lies. So generally if I meet or consider on a more abstract level someone I find hateful or evil or disgusting I can generally imagine my way into an architecture of a mind that would be able to do what they do and Think the way they seem to Think. I can use myself as a bricoleur might to sculpt that person. Which is not to say ‘there but for the grace of the shuffle go I’ but that they are intelligible. Sometimes this can lead to a kind of sympathy, especially once they are caught or on the way down and I no longer am triggered by what they were able to do Before this.
I am also not saying that I am simply better at suppressing urges. They are likely suppressing urges that I am not. And also I have tended to work towards getting down into the roots of urges and integrating them. They seem not to be in diseased form anymore if that is done.
i didn’t fully get this, I don’t Think, but I liked the image/idea of this blank mind taking in. A mind that is not creating or ‘having’ any thoughts (here defined as language based stuff, I Think) but ends up being a kind of acoustic space for the other person’s thoughts.
To me what is ironic and important about this is that, those verbal thoughts are often only the tiniest Little portion of a person. But people identify with them and try to set them in order as if the rest will follow.
I tend to Think it is better to work bottom up. Let the rest be the basis of the thoughts, come what may.
You’re right, there. Although correct extrapolation of the causes (or needs as I’d like to see them) is a very tricky business, as different people express their needs differently and to different degree.
I do not know to what degree it is possible to identify with another’s experience in the first place. If I wanted to understand, for example, a mind of a person who tortures animals, and I’ve never had such experience, would I really be able to relate? Can a ‘normal’ person relate to someone like Dexter? At the most, we can see a causal relationship and go from there.
Sure though this would hold as much more people who seem like us in terms of behavior. I do happen to Think one can understand wehre people are coming from, so to speak. But following your argument there need be no distinction between those who seem like us and those who do not.
That stance, the universal one, seems more solid to me. Rather than saying I cannot understand this or that kind of person. Since once you Think you can distinguish between those like you ‘inside’ and those not like you, you are doing what you Think you cannot do.
Dexter is fiction, but yes, I think people can identify with and understand people who are different from them. The reason for this is what is the entire drive of a serial killer likely exists in us but as tiny drives. Or we have other drives that parallel these and we can imagine if that was all we wanted and had no Control, which is also something we all experience but about more trivial things.
I don’t believe thre is any such animal as unbiased judgment.