Friday, February 26, 2010
self-reflectivity: where learning never ends
Genuineness is one mode of validity, which is also about realism/factuality and appropriateness/exemplarity, including a welcoming of critique as a chance to grow.
Writing in good conscience, questioning what’s presumed to be valid by another, is no problem for another who’s acting validly (believing, assessing, thinking, etc. validly). Validity isn’t intimidated by good-faith questioning of it; so, validity isn’t intimidated by others’ misunder-standing. Living validly, with regard to some point (or focus or habitation), implies feeling rightly confident about who one is, relative to what’s rightly held to be valid. So, relationships are easily unthreatening, and a person living validly values helping repair misunderstanding for the sake of the valued relationship.
Good faith questioning of presumed validity that intimidates (and angers) the person holding to that claim to validity mirrors something wrong with that claim to validity.
Being the invalid one isn’t useless! If I’ve had a stance that I know is invalid relative to what it’s primarily about, the event of that may nonetheless validly tell me something about my own [mis]understanding of things (good for critical learning), self-understanding, and what I might’ve been doing that relates constructively to creative process (especially via critical learning).
Dear others are likely in no position to understand what’s going on. I have to trust in their good faith. But trust in others is good reason for candor, and that can be a risky venture.
Anyway, misunderstanding may involve features that are important for me independently of the contexts that caused an invalid stance (made in good faith, I hope). Fictionalization of the features provides a way to make good use of them later—for exploration, fleshing out in new contexts, and self-reflective learning. Though fictionalization also provides a way to simply organize lots of features (regardless of implied validities), giving some coherence to a bricolage, fictionalization creates a venue for informing questions like: What did I want to do or to understand? Was the intention good? Did the interest have integrity? How does it happen that good faith stumbles? Better understanding of what I wanted to do (what theme or story or project I subconsciously wanted to actualize) requires courage to sometimes stumble tellingly.
