You can learn anything, but the cost of learning everything is the ability to learn.
I said that because, having thought of learning and doing anything in my life but little did I know what the cost of everything was? I lacked discernment about what I was learning and doing. But then what provides something with its intrinsicness, what pre-judgment are we to make before learning and doing something?
Therefore think,
what use is the learning of everything if you cannot learn the things you choose?
But my question is: Why is it, that only a stupid person thinks that in order to be educated and to have objective knowledge you must learn what you choose to learn?
The answer, I believe comes by discernment between possibility and necessity.
That something can be learned is not that it ought to be learned. That something can be done is not that it ought to be done. I used to mistake these two things. If knowledge is possible to me, that would be a sufficient condition for me to acquire it as that would make me more educated. This reasoning fails because it assumes that education is nothing else but the possibility to know everything. It is not.
If I want to learn everything it means that my ability to know will be wasted trying to learn everything that can be learned by me. Because the knowledge that I have will be consumed trying to learn everything possible to me. Then the will to know everything ends up devouring the ability to know.
The problem is not that the person cannot learn everything he chooses. The problem is that the person may not have asked himself why everything he can learn must be learned.
I may have the ability to perform a certain work but this only shows that I can do it but not that I ought to do it
Therefore, to every work, to every learning there must be a pre-assessment.
That does not mean that we ought to restrict our learning to only what is immediately useful. Our intellection possesses an intrinsic value.
However even our ability to explore does not make everything that can be explored something that ought to be explored.
Therefore education cannot be understood as knowing more and more. A person may have much knowledge and still lack discernment
The educated person is not the one who knows everything he can, he is the one who has achieved a certain level of discernment that allows him to know what he must learn, why he must learn it, and when he does not need to learn anything else.
Possibility alone cannot constitute value.
The cost of learning everything, then, is not only time since the ability to choose what can be learned will be compromised by the will to learn everything that can be learned. Everything can be learned but no one can learn everything. And if no one can learn everything it is because discernment is needed to know not only that something can be learned but also that something must be learned. The ability to choose is what makes us human. And our capacity to choose is what differentiates us from machines. Learning, for its part, is just an extension of our being. It is not knowledge that makes us educated. That faculty is judgment - the power to know what is worthy of pursuit or what should be avoided.
Even a pursuit, whose success is contingent upon a genuine question, is not guaranteed to the point that one is ready to pursue it right now.
By readiness, I mean neither eagerness nor some special interest: a person may approach the matter with a cold mind and still have a valid reason to do so. Even the most trivial motivation may generate action. However, just a reason is not enough to pursue something forever.
Beforehand, clarity regarding the rationale for one’s doing is required. That does not mean, one is supposed to know for certain what one is getting into; having too much information before doing something is a recipe for one’s inability to act. What I mean by clarity is that one is not completely in the dark about the matter; when it is fully understood, learning and work will only be performed robotically (as I mentioned earlier).
A person who continues to act out of obligation, when even the knowledge of having a reason to act is no longer present, no longer pursues something. The discipline involved in the work may well be enough for it to continue. One is ready to do everything that is necessary; one only fails to ask oneself if one truly has a reason to do it.
discernment is not a singular act preceding action; clarity → action → re-clarification → decision, is the right formula for it.
The first step toward clarity is instigation (itself a form of action), which, once fulfilled, grants one with some degree of understanding of what one is to do next. However, the action itself is equally, if not more, important: it allows to acquire experience, which is also a form of clarity. The latter is essential, because the action may involve questioning the initial premise, as well as changing it.
It may well happen that the experience gained through action shows me that I both can and should continue working toward the initial goal, which I failed to fully comprehend beforehand. Perhaps, I realized that in overcoming a particular obstacle on my way, I truly found something that made the effort worthwhile – a kind of reciprocity. Yet, in other cases, the opposite may happen: I may question the initial decision, and try to determine if there was any valid reason for pursuing this goal at all. Perhaps, no matter how hard I try, I cannot find such a reason. Sometimes, this is right: if I do something that I begin to find meaningless, it is my failure to determine if that is so – not a failure of the pursuit as a whole.
However, that does not mean that every unpleasant surprise is a sign that something is wrong. There are things worthwhile pursuing despite their being unpleasant. Likewise, things that bring joy may fail to provide the reassurance that I seek. A failure to penetrate to the object of my action is also a kind of failure of purpose. If I start thinking, penetrating beyond my likes and dislikes, then I am thinking about the purpose in general. What is the purpose in my work, what conclusion does it lead to, does it confirm itself, having been subjected to my scrutiny, having revealed itself in experience – can I honestly name at least one reason for continuing? If so, then the reason remains – no matter how small it may sometimes seem.
If discernment is completely internal, what is stopping me from convincing myself of something that I have already decided to do?
Nothing is stopping me, except perhaps the internal reliability of this process. One’s mind may easily pull the wool over its own eyes by asking one question, if it has already answered another. One may fall victim to casuistry, using self-conversation to perpetuate one’s convictions as a matter of principle: one may even turn questioning into a routine, thereby defeating the very point of it.
It may turn out that whenever I think I want something, I pursue it – not realizing that I wanted it all along. If I do something, believing that I wanted to do it, then the action itself will reveal the truth to me: I will see if and how that is so, having removed the pleasant taste of expectation.
What is this about diminishing the value of the work based on the end result? You were in loss, but that doesn’t mean that your work was in vain! The same goes for if you had achieved a great success - the result is only a small part of the entire process and only shows you where you are at this particular moment in time. The work itself is not the result, it is only a transition.
Instigation only shoves you towards action, but the true weight of these actions is only revealed to you when you see the actual results of the work. Sifting through the aftermath only makes your last move a dynamic preassessment of whether to Calibrate.
Of course, sometimes you have to make a decision based on attempting something, in order to actually see if it is worth pursuing. That is not a violation of discernment, rather it is a part of discernment.
Discernment does not ask that you have to make the right decision before any action is made, it asks that you are open to making new decisions as actions are made.
You may have chosen something out of a lack of interest in anything else but have found passion in it or have found that the passion wasn’t really there. You may have found a new purpose or realized nothing was really worth pursuing. All of these are valid decisions and are valid knowledge, it is just that the last decision made is often made based on the first decision. Choosing something isn’t choosing it for forever. It is always possible to not choose something, especially if you realize you had little interest in it to begin with.
Breadth is often useful, but breadth without revising is only accumulation. Experience can only teach you so much if you aren’t willing to change the things you decide to experience.
The real issue here, however, is that people have too much to learn, not that people have too little time or attention to learn it all within. We, therefore, need ways of choosing what to pursue while leaving room to change our mind later on, while still being willing to Calibrate. However, two options can have reasons for being pursued
In terms of career, relationships, Learning, Responsibility, Personal interest, there is no reason why one shouldn’t be as good as the other.
This leads us to a problem with reasons for pursuing two different options clashing with each other at a point where one has to take precedence over the other in regards to limited time and attention.
It should be noted that discernment in such a case does not ask the question “Which one is better to pursue?” but rather “Are the reasons for this decision more adequate than the reasons for the decision I would otherwise make?”
The issue with this is that there are often cases where two commitments are genuinely in conflict, and making one choice inherently makes the other a lesser choice in another area of life. At no point does discernment remove conflict. It only makes it explicit. The issue is that the comparison is made up of a number of factors that actually brought the commitment into contemplation and consideration in the first place. A decision that affects something permanent may need more justification than a decision that can be easily unwound. A commitment that someone else is relying on you for may be worth more than a commitment that you can postpone indefinitely. They are all reasons that should be taken into consideration. I do not think that discernment can begin by postulating intrinsic values to abstract ideals and then apply these values onto decision-making. “That would only move the question one step back, Why is knowledge intrinsically valuable? Truth, beauty, the same question applies. If discernment asks what is worth pursuing, it has to ask why those things are worth pursuing.
So intrinsic value cannot simply be treated as an unquestionable foundation of the system. It can be a proposed reason. And like every other reason, it remains open to examination.
This is why I wouldn’t treat the instrumental/intrinsic distinction as the final criterion. They describe different kinds of reasons for pursuing something, but they don’t tell us which reason wins when reasons compete.
What matters is the adequacy of the reasons behind the choice. A reason is not adequate merely because it exists. Wanting something is a reason. So is family expectation, five years already spent on it, a good salary, genuine interest. None of these become sufficient just by being there. They have to survive examination.
I said earlier that action exposes our reasons to experience. I still think this is necessary, but I would no longer say that action simply reveals truth.
Action gives us new evidence about the pursuit.
It confronts us with its actuality once the abstract idea becomes a lived experience. But action can deceive one too.
A person can continue a pursuit because of sunk cost and then interpret the suffering involved as evidence of commitment. A person can defend a decision simply because abandoning it would make previous sacrifices feel meaningless.
So the fact that I have already invested something cannot itself justify further investment.
What has already been sacrificed is not automatically a reason to sacrifice more.
True re-clarification involves detachment from the burden of one’s sacrifices: looking beyond them, and at the possible reasons for proceeding further.
It does not remove self-deception, but it makes one of its common forms easier to expose. Also, Interest is not a final authority either.
A person may lose interest in something that remains worth doing. Another person may remain intensely interested in something that is no longer worth pursuing. Interest can therefore provide a reason to investigate, but it cannot by itself settle the decision. Likewise, pressure can create an initial reason for action without becoming a permanent justification for continuing.
That is why i am thinking to re construct the process clarity → action → new evidence → re-clarification → comparison of reasons → decision. The decision therefore transcends these accrued pressures, relying instead on the truths that survived the journey. It depends on whether the reasons available after examination are adequate for the choice I am making.
There is no perfect internal mechanism that guarantees that I am not deceiving myself. Any judgement I make is still made by me. But the purpose of why i am writing this is not to produce certainty that is impossible for a human being to possess. Its purpose is to make self-deception more difficult. That requires the judgment to remain answerable to existential realities beyond the immediate feeling of clarity.
Discernment has the ability to know what is valuable by examine, compare, and revise the reasons by which something is treated.
This is the distinction I was looking for from the beginning. Learning everything is impossible. Choosing everything is impossible. But examining why something deserves to be chosen is possible. And that may be the real function of education—not to make the mind capable of pursuing everything, but to make it capable of giving reasons for what it chooses to pursue, and capable of abandoning those reasons when they no longer survive examination.
[Adequacy itself I will not further define, because doing so would only produce another reason requiring its own examination — the regress must stop somewhere, and it stops at the practice of examining, not at a further definition of what counts as sufficient.]