Confession

If Socrates was right that ”the unexamined life is not worth living” it is evident that we must examine not only others but perhaps even more importantly ourselves. The other day I discovered yet again that I don’t always have an open mind. I overheard a conversation between two students after a seminar. During the seminar we had briefly discussed the meaning of a certain word in Nietzsche’s work. In German there are more words for “explanation” than in Swedish and one of the words has a meaning more like “illumination” perhaps with a hint of “self-evident”.

Translations between languages are always difficult and a reason to really learn different languages and understanding the meaning of the words, not merely a translation of the words, is that it will let you understand how your own vocabulary limits your possibility to think, and of course to expand those limits with new concepts. But I digress.

I am an imperfect human. I over heard this conversation and I at once formed my opinion that this person was not thinking in an intelligent way, that he was a buffoon, a philosophical buffoon but all the same a buffoon. Of course my reasons for thinking this can be found in what he said. But no matter what he said I had not sufficient evidence to jump to that conclusion.

Before I explain what I found so silly in this overheard conversation I have to confess that my opinion of this person is still negative although I know that I didn’t hear enough to be in a position to form a well founded belief. First impressions last.

The person who did most of the talking was writing a master thesis in sociology. He was glad that he had found a new idea of what an explanation is. He wanted to get away from the “theoretical explanations” that he found in sociology and have something more like “revelation”.

I hope that what he wanted was a way to describe how people use the word “explanation”. It is perhaps not always the case that what is given as an explanation in everyday life really explain things.

Of course I do not know what he meant with “theoretical explanation” but in my mind I formed the idea that he wanted to avoid analytical explanations, explanations that divide things into little pieces, explanations that limits the mind from seeing the big picture, so that he could just understand how it is. Indeed I got the impression that he wanted to steer away from old time ideas about explanations that limits the free and open mind of the researcher in sociology.

I am afraid that he will only find conviction, and conviction is a poor substitute for explanation. The important point of an explanation is that it explains things. It gives others the possibility to follow the analytical train of thoughts that lead to an understanding of how something works. A conviction, an understanding that is only based on revelation can never be anything else but personal. A personal explanation as well as a personal language is dead. Explanations are theoretical and analytical because they have to communicate something.