327. To (Not) Understand

When we first encounter a complicated artwork, confusion can dominate. We aren’t sure what the piece is supposed to be or what it is trying to tell us. Questions come to mind, but no answers. If we cannot tolerate these questions we might move quickly to judgment: we decide that the artwork has no value because we cannot see any in it.

In some cases, we might go further, and declare that the apparent absence of value means that the piece was created badly and lacks merit. And if this judgment persists over time, we might extend it to cover all art of a similar type, thereby excluding it from further consideration.

We do these things because we desperately want to understand and we hate not understanding. We want to understand because we know that understanding itself is valuable. It allows us to incorporate new things into our knowledge, to see their use and their message. We hate the possibility of not understanding because it seems to suggest there are parts of the world that are somehow beyond us. We might even feel like we are being kept from learning a secret that everyone else knows.

The implications of not understanding are terrifying because they seem to threaten the reliability of our understanding in general. For if we cannot understand this new thing, what else are we not understanding? And what might this say about all of the things we feel certain we already do understand? The worry that we have no adequate answers to these questions can haunt us.

But our ability to accept things we do not understand depends on our ability to leave these questions open. We have to allow for doubts about ourselves and our understanding to arise freely. Of course, this means that we also have to allow our desire for perfect understanding to go unfulfilled. It is precisely when our questions about our understanding are left open that we also create room for it to grow.