On Beginnings

Towards the end of college, I read an argument that Hegel wrote called the Swimmer Analogy: “to want to know before one knows is as incoherent as the resolution to learn to swim before venturing into the water.”

When he wrote it, philosophy had just suffered a major splinter into two schools after discovering that the past hundred years’ tools of proof were no longer effective. One school, analytic philosophy, argued that the only thing we could do was to reexamine our abilities to seek knowledge and their limits. They believed that, before answering philosophy’s questions, we would need to understand the instrument of cognition.  The continental school (of which Hegel was a part of) felt that this approach to knowledge was contradictory. Hegel felt that investigating the act of knowing could not take place other than by way of  knowing itself. Instead, we have to jump straight into the act of knowing. 

In a paper on this analogy, Kasey Hettig-Rolfe describes this conflict as one over the demand for “metatheory,” or, put more simply, theory about theory. The analytic philosopher believes that before trying to know, one must understand how knowing works and what its limits are, then set out to know. But Hegel’s analogy claims that the analytic claim is the same as trying to learn to swim without ever going into the water and actually trying to swim. You could read the best textbook in the world about swimming, but realistically, once you’re in the water, there’s no telling if it would give any help at all. Should we try to understand what it means to know? Or should we simply try to know and see how it works out?

Although this is all abstract philosophy jargon, it’s a question that I have thought about a lot leading into what will be several months of traveling. In truth, for much of the fall I felt plagued with anxiety about this trip. I wanted to feel that I understood the full picture before actually going— what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what I would hope to learn from doing it. But at the same time, the answers to these are unknowable. I can’t know what I hope to learn by going somewhere new because doing so would require that place to no longer be new to me. I was demanding metatheory about my own travel, and doing so only made me more indecisive and more stressed about setting out on a trip that I was excited for. If I accept the proposition of the swimming analogy, I ought to see that the only way to learn from and about my travels is by embarking, by entering the water. 

In the realm of philosophy, many of you may already know that I am quite the advocate for Hegel’s systems, and this specific argument is no exception. So I find it ironic that, despite my beliefs against the priority of metatheory, I, as a person, am  neurotically predisposed to these sorts of “meta” investigations. I often find myself seeking out information about whatever I’m doing instead of spending that time actually doing it. To an extent, I think this is a healthy way to enrich activities, but taken too far, I have certainly held myself back from committing the hands-on time needed to make outside learning worthwhile. 

Funnily enough, the act of blogging is itself a sort of metatheory about travel. In the first chapter of Yue’s book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino speaks about the sort of performance that comes with writing on the internet: “In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action… Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment… there’s essentially no backstage on the internet.” The act of blogging is mediated, once removed from actually engaging with the target experience. And perhaps even further astray, I have devoted this inaugural blog post to meta observations about blogging itself. 

So if that is the case, then what am I doing writing a blog? Perhaps this is a concession to my “self” that would not permit me to forge on without a sense of reflection (or of over thinking). Or maybe I am just trying to do both, as I sometimes do as well. Fortunately, as Hegel and they who swim would believe, if I am to do both, it’s only by committing that I would find any answers for either, not by ranting about it now. I feel, then, that this is the appropriate stopping place for my first blog post. I hope and promise that future posts will be more fun and less rambling. Thank you for reading, and please feel free to reach out if you want to get more direct updates about what I am up to!  

Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra?morally