Understanding as a practice
In the intro of a statistics textbook I once read, the authors described understanding as a skill that can be practiced:
Understanding concepts such as the ones taught in this course requires you to practice thinking. What that usually means is practicing making connections. For example, you need to take an idea you learn about in this course and practice thinking about how it applies to new situations, and how it connects with other related ideas. This is what you need to do to understand.
Maybe this is obvious, but the framing made something click for me. It suggested how one might go about learning difficult, abstract subjects like statistics. Just think more!
Of course, it can be hard to think (truly!), even when regarding things that are meaningful and pleasurable to us. The cognitive demand is high, and thinking can be stressful. Viewing it as a practice can help.
Throughout my years of schooling, I’d thought of understanding as something that either happened or didn’t in eureka moments, contrary to evidence in other areas of my life. (I guess I didn’t really think about it, ha.) So whenever I didn’t immediately grasp what I was studying, I abandoned my efforts and dismissed the subject entirely. In retrospect, I just didn’t want to go through the struggle.
As with sports, the pursuit of understanding requires effort over time. This frees us from the impossibility of understanding something all at once, making the endeavor more self-sustaining and enjoyable. It becomes a journey, one that can reinvigorate what the modern world has worn away—our capacity for contemplation, our respect for stillness and the unknown, the ability to put things in perspective. These are necessary ingredients in the quest for deeper understanding.
What’s also needed is time to rest and recover. It surprises me how easy it is to bounce from one activity to the next without pause; there’s always something I’m engaged in whether it’s reading, writing, or playing music. The trouble is that non-stop practice and activity increases the risk of injury and burnout whether we’re doing physical or mental gymnastics. Thinking is a passive-yet-alert kind of engagement that requires distance, the silence and space to dwell, in addition to the work itself. Carve out pockets of stillness, take a walk without your phone, let your mind freely roam in unassailed fashion—downtime is needed so that our attempts at conceptual connection have a chance to solidify.
That understanding demands time and effort may actually steer you away from certain pursuits. You might discover, for example, that you don’t care about philosophy or Russian literature as much as you thought you did. Maybe you just wanted to feel smart and scholarly—which is fine!—or you’d rather be doing something else after your initial exposure to a topic or subject.
You may also discover and refine what you truly like (and dislike). I’m currently participating in a philosophy and classics discussion group. It’s clear that I don’t enjoy reading philosophy as much as I thought I would—which, again, is fine! I prefer Dostoevsky and Plato’s dialogues over, say, Aristotle’s Ethics; I’d rather meditate on emptiness than grapple in analytical futility at a definition of virtue. But I wouldn’t have known this unless I’d given the readings a concerted effort. They’ve also shown me that thinking can be fun, especially when done with others. This feels like enough to keep me coming back.
Making relevant connections is key. If the connections are irrelevant or meaningless or nonsensical, what you may develop is a degree of familiarity with something, breadth over depth, but not understanding itself. A visual may be helpful: if our knowledge is a large graph comprised of numerous nodes and edges, then the edges would represent the connections between concepts and ideas, the nodes. The practice is thus attempting to connect as many relevant nodes as you can to each other. A highly connected chunk of the graph would then represent how much you understand something. In social contexts, this graph is developed communally. The result is sometimes a cathedral.
Thinking often feels like waiting for something to pop into my mind. I’ll sit in the blank of the moment, waiting for something to emerge into awareness. If something does it becomes a pivot point in conversation, for example, with myself and others, assuming the goal is to understand something. This is different from the deliberate attempt to make connections between things. Hence why you fail to realize that you don’t understand something as much as you thought you did when you try to externalize it.
Having some kind of external output is important. It concretizes understanding as a practice. Writing is a clear example of this; some even say that writing is thinking. Additionally, when we externalize our practice, it becomes social. The benefit of this is that others can help you see where your understanding might be lacking. This facilitates learning and deepens your knowledge beyond what’s possible on your own. It’s also a basis upon which potentially fulfilling relationships can be formed. Nothing is quite like the beauty of witnessing a well-carved, passionate, spirited mind in motion.
It should be said that there are kinds of understanding that cannot be gained solely through thinking. I’m thinking—ha—about the distinction between mētis and epistēmē. Mētis refers to a kind of understanding that is developed through practice in relation to some aim. It is necessarily tied to an aim and thus dynamically evolves as the aim changes in response to one’s context and constraints.
I remember trying to help my dad de-fat a rack of ribs one Christmas dinner. I’d wanted to contribute more than my presence that year and to pick up some of my dad’s chef chops. The task, however, was beyond my reach. I moved too slowly, too inefficiently, too recklessly. Precious meat was lost with every cut. Eventually he took over and cleaned the entire rack with what looked like a single swing. He knew exactly where and how much to cut; he worked with the deftness of a seasoned artisan. It took him five minutes to do what would’ve taken me at least half an hour.
I understood why the fat needed to be stripped. I knew what needed to be done and how to do it. But my dad had the advantage of purpose and practice that made him effective in the kitchen. He had needed to cook for himself and his family almost daily from a young age. How he generally orients toward the world is more mētis than epistēmē. He’s the street-smarts guy you can rely on in a plumbing emergency while I’m over here fudging words about it.
Classical philosophy (from Plato onward) is very much epistēmē. It’s developed in the world of ideals and forms. It’s abstracted and generalizable, which certainly has its place and uses. But you won’t understand how to de-fat a pig by thinking about it. You gotta get your hand on the knife and cut. Meditation, and even statistics, involves mētis, the tacit form of understanding that you cannot gain without playing with your data or sitting on a cushion, working on real problems alongside other analysts and yogis. What epistēmē lacks mētis accounts for. Epistēmē is definable, idealized, a dream. Mētis is clutchness, vibe, moment-to-moment intuition.
A final thought: what might it look like to understand a person? It’s not so much about what we know of them than it is about having a good sense of who they are. It’s knowing what they find funny as well as how, tacitly, to make them laugh should the opportunity arise. This requires practice, showing up again and again in the web of relation, with a stance that is more mētis than epistēmē. To see and know someone as an immovable ideal is, at best, only part of the picture.