Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [11]
This same basic idea has received countless secular treatments as well. Plato thought that our primordial soul was at one with the universe, and that we only began to err when we took on our current physical form and forgot those cosmic truths. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke thought that error seeped into our lives from the gap between the artificiality of words and the reality of the things they name—from the distance between an indescribable essence and the nearest sayable thing. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought that error could be explained by the fact that we live in time and space; because we are bound to a particular set of coordinates, we can’t rise above them and see reality as a whole, from a bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view. As different as these explanations seem, all these thinkers and many more conceived of error as arising from a gap: sometimes between the particular and the general, sometimes between words and things, sometimes between the present and the primeval, sometimes between the mortal and the divine—but in every case, and fundamentally, between our own mind and the rest of the world.
For the most part, we spend our lives blithely ignoring this gap. And with good reason. Who wants to be reminded of the fall from grace, the separation from truth, the particular and limited nature of our existence? When we get things wrong, however, this rift between internal and external realities suddenly reveals itself. That’s one reason why erring can be so disquieting. But another, oddly paradoxical reason is our failure to spot this rift earlier. Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality. That’s a dismaying discovery, because it is precisely this quality of convincing-ness, of verisimilitude, that we rely on as our guide to what is right and real.
Yet if we find this mental trickery troubling, we should also find it comforting. The miracle of the human mind, after all, is that it can show us the world not only as it is, but also as it is not: as we remember it from the past, as we hope or fear it will be in the future, as we imagine it might be in some other place or for some other person. We already saw that “seeing the world as it is not” is pretty much the definition of erring—but it is also the essence of imagination, invention, and hope. As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far sweeter fruits than the failure and shame we associate with them. True, they represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what’s wrong with that? “To alienate” means to make unfamiliar; and to see things—including ourselves—as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew.
For error to help us see things differently, however, we have to see it differently first. That is the goal of this book: to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility, to expand our vocabulary for and interest in talking about our mistakes, and to linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong. There’s an obvious practical reason to do this, which is that our mistakes can be disastrous. They can cost us time and money, sabotage our self-confidence, and erode the trust and esteem extended to us by others. They can land us in the emergency room, or in the dog house, or in a lifetime’s worth of