“…the thing is lost through its packaging.”

-       The Loss of the Creature

This is a frightening thought because nothing can be taken as it is, or as you see that it is, or as it is presented to you. This is especially true of education and knowledge, and unfortunately it is rarely mentioned because if it is then everything would be called into question.  Truth and Knowledge are social constructs.   This means that everything we know to be true and everything we learn in schools or on the street is tainted by the Truths and Knowledge of other peoples; professors, family, friends, authors, media, experts, politicians.  This is extremely problematic for me, and it should be for everyone.  I argue that the only way it is not problematic is if you don’t really think about it or not deeply enough, or perhaps you have it all figured out.  If this is the case please reply to this and tell me how I should be looking at the world.  Oh wait that is problematic too because you’ll just put it in the packaging that best fits your argument and point of view.

I have said many times that objectivity is dead, that it is impossible to be objective because of our biases, because we are socially constructed beings with opinions, experiences and world views.  I truly believe this.  I also believe that knowledge is not neutral.  I believe that Knowledge is a social agreement.  I believe that Truth also is an agreement.  The problem for me is not that these things are agreements.  It is not that there may not be a right and wrong or black and white.  The problem is not that I live in the gray.  The problem is unwrapping the packaging.  The problem is trying to uncover and pull away all those experiences, all those biases and social conditioning. The problem like Percy says is the struggle, “the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for.  But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is.”  It is the struggle to be an individual, to be yourself.  “As Kierkegaard said, once a person is seen as a specimen of a race or a species, at that very moment he ceases to be an individual.  Then there are not more individuals but only specimens.”  Simply by saying “I am a person” means I am not an individual.

This struggle extends beyond classroom observations.  There the struggle is apparent.  There the struggle is between objectivity and subjectivity, between the participant and the observer.  The struggle to unwrap is compounded when I think of it in terms of Knowledge and the ways we gain Knowledge in education. 

Knowledge is pure only for a short while and then only at moments.   It is pure when you’re a child and you reach out and touch the stove and it burns.   You know touching the stove hurts.  You may not translate that into it being extremely hot.  That comes later through education from your family, and that can be questioned.  Knowledge is not pure it is wrapped when you reach out to touch the stove and your mother who is holding you in her arms smacks your hand away.  You just learned that touching the stove is bad, a very different thing than it physically hurting you.  This analogy can be translated to education and learning and this piece by Walker Percy.

The way I read this piece, though all my biases, experiences and social conditions, is that Percy is trying to get the reader to see that everything our experiences, the things we see, our knowledge, it is all wrapped in social constructs.  I agree.  However, I have a few problems with this.  He doesn’t admit that even he is a social being and that this piece is written with biases, so his words must be questioned as well. 

He seems to think that somehow some experts can see things lucidly if they try hard enough, but the lay person can only do this by accident.  “Yet the caste of layman – expert is not the fault of the expert.  It is due altogether to the eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman so that he may take up the role not of the person but of the consumer.”  But we have to remember that he coming at this from the perspective of a so called expert.  I would argue that it is just as hard if not harder for the expert to truly see the thing because they are indoctrinated in a wealth of knowledge and have more biases because of that fact. 

Earlier, he puts the layman in a lower position of power.  “Seeing the canyon is made even more difficult by what the sight-seer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known.  Instead of looking at it he photographs it.  There is no confrontation at all.  At the end of forty years of perfomulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do?  He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years.  For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated surrendered to the past and future.”  I think Percy is right in this assessment; however, the expert is under the same constraint.  He is there to study.  The simple act of studying changes the thing it changes the canyon.  The only way that it can be seen truly is through the eyes of a child, who has never heard of it nor anything like it and was brought there through some divine intervention.  The journey of going there with parents would taint the vision of seeing it.  Anticipation and excitement would cloud the eyes.  Or as Percy said, “the-thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather ‘that which has already been formulated-by picture post-card, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.”

All this is as I said problematic for me because it makes me call into question everything I know and everything I am.  If I define myself by the way I look at the world, and the way I look at the world is defined by my Knowledge, and Knowledge is a socially constructed agreement and packaged and fed to me through the lens of other socially constructed beings, and if I must question everything that is socially constructed then I must question who I am. 

My wrapping of this commentary:

I have no page numbers for citations because the sample that was given to me had none.