Epistemologicallywise

(This post was originally published November 29, 2014.)

It is now less than one week before my stay as a visiting scholar at Wuhan University ends. As I sit in an absolutely charming cafe decorated in European style, the walls lined with antiques, I find myself reflecting on the amazing changes that China has undergone over the course of the last century. One hundred years ago, the Qing dynasty had just fallen, ending more than two millennia of imperial rule. It was replaced by a nominally democratic government, but one that had no effective control of China, which descended into decades of chaos and civil war. Eighty years ago, the Nationalists united the country, and all but eliminated the Communists, who were forced to retreat on the infamous Long March, which left them decimated. Two years later, the Japanese invaded China, in what was effectively the beginning of World War II.

By the end of WWII (or the “War of Anti-Japanese Resistance” as it is often called here), the Nationalists were themselves decimated, while the Communists had rebuilt their strength behind the lines in China’s hinterlands. Consequently, a little over sixty years ago, the Communists swept to victory and established the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a radical (and largely unscientific) effort to boost economic growth and farm production. The results were disastrous. We may never know how many people starved to death in the resulting famine, but 10 million deaths would be a conservative estimate. Among those who had the courage to challenge Mao’s policies was Deng Xiaoping. In response, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Students were encouraged to drop out of school and join the RedGuards, to root out any vestiges of “feudalism” or “bourgeois thinking” in society. The Red Guards acted with all the judiciousness of the Salem Witch Trials, and all the kindness of the Inquisition. Universities were closed down, professors were publicly humiliated, and intellectuals were sent to the countryside for “reform through labor,” or simply tortured. (My first week here, I met a charming old professor, who showed me the scars where Red Guards had driven nails into his hands to try to ellicit a false confession that he was a spy for the West.)

Forty years ago, Mao died and Deng Xiaoping (who had been one of those “rusticated” to the countryside for his opposition to Mao) assumed power. Deng ended the Cultural Revolution, opened up China to the West, and allowed moderate capitalist reforms. I was part of the generation of students who became fascinated by China during this period. (In all honesty, the Kung-fu craze in the US also helped “inspire” me.) China’s economy boomed, and soon intellectuals (especially young college students) felt emboldened to express their views and call for greater democracy. This led, twenty-five years ago, to the Tiananmen “Incident.” However, most Chinese don’t think about this much anymore, and if they do, their views would surprise most Americans. As a cabbie told me on an earlier visit, “Well, of course we supported the students, but they really didn’t give the government any choice, did they?” (As they say on Twitter, “reposting does not indicate endorsement.”)

China today is a place where you can say anything you want about any topic — as long as you don’t say it on the internet, in the press, on the airwaves, or in a public protest. China has a booming capitalist economy that is generating home-grown billionaires — and students are required to study Marxism-Leninism-Maozedong Thought under college professors who say, without blinking, that China is on the road to communism. And they invited this white guy to Wuhan, to teach about Western philosophy — and the importance of free public debate.

At the beginning of December, I ended a semester as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University in China. (Wuhan University is officially ranked as one of the top 10 universities in China overall, and its School of Philosophy is generally ranked among the top 5.) It has been a fascinating experience, as I expected. I deeply miss my family at home, and will be very happy to be with them again, but I know that I will also miss China when I return to the US.

Living in China only reinforces one’s conviction that it is a vibant, exciting, beautiful country. It is no secret that the Chinese economy is on track to overtake the US as the largest in the world within a few years. The glories of earlier dynasties like the Tang may pale in comparison with what China has in store in the future. However, China also has some systemic problems that it must overcome to continue its positive trajectory.

One of the most significant problems is corruption. Every country faces this issue, of course, but it is no accident that President Xi Jinping has made an anti-corruption drive one of the cornerstones of his administration. This is not just an ethical problem, since corruption is fundamenetally inefficient. Too often, people get jobs or positions of authority through guanxi, personal connections, or bribery, rather than through merit. President Xi’s endorsement of Confucianism is part of an effort to instill a greater sense of integrity and compassion among Chinese who were raised on no values other than consumerist capitalism (under a Communist facade). However, both “liberal” and Marxist critics in China worry that the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on loyalty to family and friends, is a source of nepotism and injustice, rather than a solution.

Equally important is the problem of pollution. Critics of environmental policies in the US complain about the negative effects of regulations on business, but China is a case study in how bad pollution can become. I have never seen the air quality in Wuhan get better than “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” and the air quality in Beijing frequently reaches “hazardous,” which means that phyical exertion has become dangerous for everyone. Of course, this is not something that China advertises. I visited Beijing to give a presentation recenty, and commented on how beautiful the sky looked. One of my hosts remarked sardonically, “Ah, yes. There is an international conference in Beijing at the moment, so they have shut down the local factories to improve the air quality, and turned off the internet censorship. They want to make sure the Winter Olympics will come to China in the future.”

A third problem is unrest in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. Each problem is more complex and multifaceted than most people in the US recognize. For example, a significant source of tension between people in Hong Kong and on the mainland is not political, but cultural, including language (English and Cantonese vs. Mandarin) and mores. There was a huge ruckus not too long ago when a tourist from the mainland let her toddler pee in the middle of a busy sidewalk, and got rebuked for her bad taste by the locals. Regarding the issue of pro- and anti-Tibetan independence, a student from China once ingenuously asked me, “Who is right?” I said, “It doesn’t make any difference. What matters is that you have a problem on your hands comparable to England in Northern Ireland. Tibet and China have become so integrated that it is hard to imagine leaving now, but the problems will only get worse while Tibet is part of China.”

The fourth problem is the Chinese military. This is the least significant problem, at least for now, but it could become the problem of the future. China has a huge and well-funded military, including a blue-water navy, cutting-edge fighter planes, and intercontinental ballistic missles with thermonuclear warheads. China has not fought a war since the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 (which ended pretty much the way the US Vietnam War ended), but the result is that many in the military would love to prove themselves in battle. (And it doesn’t help that every night on TV here there is some miniseries or a movie about the glories of the Chinese military fighting the Japanese or the Nationalists. The Korean War is downplayed, reflecting a generally positive attitude toward Americans at the moment.) President Xi is one of the strongest leaders China has had in a long time, and he has deep ties with the military establishment, so no high ranking general is likely to go rogue under his watch. Nonetheless, one over-aggressive ship captain or figher pilot playing cat and mouse over islands in the East or South China Sea could lead to a confrontation that neither side could back down from. Since the US has defense treaties with Japan and Taiwan, our involvement would be all but assured.

So will China resolve these problems? One of my best teachers when I was an undergraduate said, “I have noticed that professional ‘China watchers’ have never been right in their predictions. Who could have guessed that the Communists would come back to win the Chinese Civil War after the devastation of the Long March? Who could have forseen the orgy of violence in the Cultural Revolution? Who predicted that a few decades after the death of Mao China would be more capitalistic than many European economies? So I have given up trying to guess.”

Sounds like good advice.

Following are some reflections on Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), which I recently screened to my students.  This is not really a review, but rather something that one might enjoy reading after watching the film.  (Warning: There are SPOILERS in these reflections.)

The original Chinese title is Chungking Mansions, which refers to huge housing/commercial complex in Hong Kong, famous for its cultural diversity, liveliness, but also crime.  The film may be seen as an action/comedy/romance featuring two storylines that seem only tangentially connected at first, but are actually thematically parallel.  The mood of the first story switches back and forth between the tension of an action film and a light romantic comedy, and does so surprisingly effectively.  The second story is more consistently a romantic comedy.  The themes that bring the two storylines together were only apparent to me on a third viewing (and with the help of a handout from Vassar Emeritus Prof. of Philosophy and Film Jesse Kalin):  the difficulty of obtaining the object of one’s love, and the instability of love even when it is obtained.  In the first story, we meet the Woman in the Blonde Wig (WIBW), who is arranging a drug smuggling operation, which goes horribly wrong  I assume that WIBW was originally in love with the white guy (her pimp?), who has now sent her on a drug run.  We see him converting his next “victim” into a clone of her.  So WIBW has already loved and lost that love.  Eventually, she will kill him.  Why?  Perhaps it is to prevent him from sending someone after her.  But White Pimp operates out of a seedy bar.  He hardly seems the type to have international hitmen working for him.  Perhaps she is motivated by jealousy?  As Oscar Wilde wrote, “And all men kill the thing they love / By all let this be heard / … / The coward does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword” – or a revolver in this case.

Later in the same storyline, we meet Cop 223.  He is still in love, but no longer has the woman he loves, “May” (rhyming with the Mandarin Chinese 没 “to not have”).  He tries to find someone – anyone, really – to replace her.  He seems to be “in love with the idea of being in love” (as St. Augustine said of his own adolescent self).  After going all the way through his “little black book” to the number of his grade-school crush, he ends up in a bar, where he pursues WIBW.  In a sense, he “gets” her:  they spend the night together in a hotel.  However, she simply sleeps while he watches TV and eats several room-service meals.  In a sense they are living in parallel, unconnected, but he is watching over her, and even takes her shoes off before he leaves so her feet won’t swell up.  The last time he will ever hear from her (she is about to flee the country) is when she leaves him a message:  “Happy Birthday.”  It is simple, yet touching. He hopes that his memory of her has no “expiration date,” even though everything else in life seems to.

At the start of the second story, Cop 663 is in what appears to be a successful romantic relationship with a sexy airline stewardess.  Faye, a quirky girl who works in a noodle shop, spots him and develops a crush.  The object of her desire seems unobtainable.  But then 663’s girlfriend dumps him.  Instead of pursuing him directly, Faye begins to stalk him.  She gets the key to his apartment, which his ex-girlfriend has dropped off to return to him.  Faye wheedles out of him his address, then starts to show up at his apartment when he is out.  At first, she just “plays house.”  However, she gradually starts to redecorate, the way any girlfriend might do with a new guy who lived in “a total bachelor pad,” as one ex-girlfriend of mine described my Vassar apartment.  (This was after my first marriage had reached its “expiry date.”)  663 does not notice the changes, or rationalizes them.  Does he really not notice?  This requires an immense suspension of disbelief.  Then again, if you asked me, whether my bathroom walls were “lime” or “mint,” I could not tell you to save my life.  Prof. Kalin hints that the film may be warning us that its own narrative is not trustworthy.

Why doesn’t Faye just approach 663 directly?  He invited her to “drop by” his place, which, if not precisely a date, is a starting point any interested woman would take advantage of.  We realize what the problem is when 663 finally catches her red-handed in his apartment.  She escapes, but he finds her at the Midnight Express noodle bar where she works and asks her out.  She agrees…but then runs off into the back of the noodle bar and shouts, “I’m doomed!”  And when the night of the date arrives, her boss shows up at the bar to tell 663 that she has left the country.  Faye dreamed of flying away to California.  (In Mandarin, “Faye” is a homonym for both “to fly” 飞 and “is not” 非.)  If she gets into a relationship with 663, she has to give up her California dream.  He is (perhaps) her true love, but obtaining him is her “doom.”  (“The coward does it with a kiss….”)

At the end of the film, Faye returns as an airline stewardess.  This allows her to travel the world, as in her dream, but it also makes her transformation into 663’s ex-girlfriend complete.  Cop 663, meanwhile, has bought Midnight Express.  (Has he become her?  Not exactly, since she was an employee, whereas 663 is now the owner, but still some strange through-the-looking-glass transformation has occurred.)  663 asks Faye to a late dinner, but she refuses:  “I have an early flight tomorrow.”  663 shows her the pretend boarding pass she left for him a year ago, when she skipped their date.  He asks her to make him another one.  “Where to?” she asks.  “Wherever you want to take me,” he replies.  Does this mean that they are a couple?  My wife and I argued over this one.  She thinks he has proven his love (by keeping the boarding pass, and by buying the place where she used to work), and has expressed his willingness to go with her anywhere.  But how can he follow her if he just bought a business in Hong Kong?  Will she continue to be a stewardess but visit him when she is on layovers in Hong Kong?  We saw how well that worked with his last girlfriend.  The film ends with uncertainty, just like Faye’s favorite song, “California Dreamin’ “:  “If I didn’t tell her / I could leave today.” Will the narrator of the song leave “her”? Why is he walking in the cold instead of staying with her? Why hasn’t he left her already?

Prof. Kalin (who always grasps more of films than I do) notes the political subtext of the film, which was made a few years before the handover of Hong Kong from the UK (which had essentially stolen it from China in the Opium Wars) to the People’s Republic of China. Who is the only white person in the film?  It’s the guy (presumably British) whom I called White Pimp.  He betrays WIBW, and when he gets killed it’s hard to feel bad for him.  In the second storyline, when Faye shrieks, “I’m doomed!” she seems to be talking about a potential relationship with 663, but she expresses the fears of many Chinese about staying in Hong Kong through the transition.  It turned out to be less traumatic than anyone thought.  Hong Kong is a special economic zone, with a measure of independence from the Mainland government.  Hong Kong natives are most comfortable speaking English and/or Cantonese, and many of them are positively hostile to anyone who speaks Mandarin (the official dialect of the Mainland).  So Hong Kong has managed to maintain its identity as a semi-independent, multicultural, laissez faire capitalist metropolis – and home of some of China’s greatest filmmakers.

I very much enjoyed and learned from the Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought, which was held at Wesleyan earlier this month.  This conference was much larger and more expertly organized than the first one at Vassar (where five of us got together, with only slightly more people in the audience, and ate fruit salad for lunch, with a dinner at a local Chinese restaurant that I think was Dutch treat).  The Wesleyan incarnation brought together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines with many different perspectives, including some from the West Coast and overseas, with the lovely Mansfield Freeman Center as its location, along with Continental breakfast, box lunches, and a delicious catered dinner hosted by Steve and his charming wife.  This sets the bar high for the next NECCT, which I hear may already be in the works.

One point that particularly interested me was the ongoing debate over the historical processes by which texts come into existence and are transmitted.  E. Bruce Brooks gave a talk on the historical composition of the Shijing, Michael Hunter of Yale presented his evidence that the Analects as we know it is almost exclusively a Han Dynasty creation, and A. Taeko Brooks applied a version of her (and Bruce’s) accretional theory of the Analects to the Mengzi.

Michael’s argument depends upon a statistical study of what percentage of quotations from the received Analects are found in early sources.  For example, many early sources attribute quotations to Kongzi that are not in the received Analects.  (I apologize in advance if I have not done justice to his argument.  I am reconstructing it from memory.)  Here is a question I had for Michael, though.  Just after getting back from the conference, I was teaching the Zhuangzi to my students. We looked at the extensive quotations of “Kongzi” in the Zhuangzi, and we discussed how that text seems to self-consciously use “Kongzi” as a literary character, putting into “Kongzi’s” mouth claims that are clearly intended to represent the perspective of the author of the passage, rather than what the author (or anyone else) thought was the historical Kongzi’s view.  See, for example, the long dialogue between “Kongzi” and “Yan Hui” that occurs in Chapter 4 of the Zhuangzi.  I don’t think any sensitive contemporary reader was supposed to think that this was historically accurate.  Rather, it is a rhetorical appropriation of a figure that both author and audience are aware of.  (This is similar to the way a contemporary show like South Park puts statements into the mouths of historical figures that self-evidently represent those of Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  Stone and Parker, having been raised in Utah, seem to take particular glee in ironically putting words in the mouth of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.)  Michael may be way of ahead of me here, and may have already excluded from his survey passages in the Zhuangzi.  But even if he did, I wonder how many  passages in other texts may be appropriating (more or less self-consciously) Kongzi as a spokesperson, or simply using “Kongzi” as a figure to represent what “those people” think, rather than “quoting” (as we understand it) a text.

In addition, my sense is that, by the Han, it was taken for granted that one should have something to say about human nature (性), qi (氣), the Five Phases (五行), yin/yang (陰陽), and other topics central to cosmology and philosophical psychology.  If the received Analects is largely a Han dynasty work, why are the preceding concepts either absent from, or very peripheral to, the discussions in the text?  I raised this concern with Michael, and he said something that was helpfully responsive, but I don’t think it is fair of me to try and paraphrase what he said here.

I also have a general suggestion that is relevant to the methodology that Bruce and Taeko employ, but I think it is most illuminating to approach it in a roundabout way.  Let’s consider two philosophical thinkers whose authentic corpus of works is largely undisputed:  Aristotle and Kant.  Those trained in the history of philosophy take for granted several things about their writings.

First, their writings are systematic and complex.  For example, if you want to fully understand Aristotle’s views in the Nicomachean Ethics, you should read what he has to say in De Anima, and if you want to fully understand what Aristotle says in De Anima, you need to read what he says in the Metaphysics.  Similarly, Kant’s epistemology and ethics are tailor-made for each other.  Because of the limitations on human knowledge that are sketched in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is possible for the moral philosophy of the Groundwork to be accurate, while other views of morality (like that of Hume) are ruled out.

Second, despite their best efforts to achieve systematicity, there are tensions in their works.  Famously, Aristotle seems torn in the Nicomachean Ethics between a conception of human flourishing as the exercise of theoretical rationality, and a conception of human flourishing as the exercise of practical rationality that is aimed at the well being of the community.  Turning to Kant, he seems to suggest sometimes that the noumenal realm is the cause of our experiences in the phenomenal realm, but this is inconsistent with his own claim that causality is a category that the mind imposes on experience, not a property of things-in-themselves.

Third, when we find a tension within their works, the methodology employed by a historian of philosophy is to try to construct an interpretation that reconciles the passages that are in tension.  For example, some have argued that Aristotle’s comments on the practical life are meant to be understood the way Aquinas would later understand them:  if humans were the most important thing in the universe, it would follow that the exercise of practical reason in human communities is the highest good; however, humans are not the most important thing in the universe, so the exercise of reason on humans cannot be the most complete form of human flourishing.  Regarding Kant, it is common to suggest that he had trouble shaking free of the earlier empiricist view of thinkers like Locke that there is an external physical world that causes our subjective experiences of secondary qualities.  While Kant sometimes unconsciously lapses into the earlier Lockean manner of speaking, the most charitable interpretation is that Kant’s considered view is that the noumenal realm is the “ground” of the phenomenal realm, but not in a causal sense.  (What it means for something to be a “ground” without being a “cause” is  a further issue.)

Of course, the situation we stand in with regard to the texts of Kant is very different from our situation with regard to Mengzi or Xunzi.  In the case of Kant, we have surviving copies of first-edition printings, copious correspondence between Kant and his contemporaries, and even manuscripts in autograph. Our link with Aristotle is more tenuous, and parallels in some ways our textual link with Warring States Texts.  For one thing, Aristotle did not write and edit his comments for publication the way that Kant did.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Aristotle” explains:

Aristotle’s extant works read like what they very probably are: lecture notes, drafts first written and then reworked, ongoing records of continuing investigations, and, generally speaking, in-house compilations intended not for a general audience but for an inner circle of auditors.

Nonetheless, as the SEP article goes on to note, there is no serious scholarly dispute over the fact that the “thirty-one surviving works (that is, those contained in the ‘Corpus Aristotelicum’ of our medieval manuscripts that are judged to be authentic) all contain recognizably Aristotelian doctrine.”  Part of the reason for this confidence is that we can tell a persuasive story about the transmission of the Aristotelian corpus.  We know Aristotle’s texts were widely read and circulated in the Hellenistic world.  After the Roman Empire fell and the library at Alexandria burned down, Arab culture flourished.  While my ancestors bashed each other with clubs and cowered at lunar eclipses, Arab scholars admired, preserved, and translated the works of Aristotle.  As a result, a fairly reliable Aristotelian corpus was available when Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas reintroduced Aristotle to the West.

So although their texts followed very different paths to get to us, there is little doubt among informed scholars that they represent the views of Aristotle and Kant. However, suppose the situation were different.  Suppose, due to whatever accidents of history, we had considerably less independent reason to trust the historical transmission of the texts of Aristotle and Kant.  How would most philosophical historians read Aristotle and Kant?  Probably not too differently from the way they read them now.  But one can easily imagine thoughtful, serious, intellectually rigorous scholars who challenged what they would describe as the “naive reading of a text [that] naturally assumes that the text is simple and consistent.” Perhaps they would say things like the following:

• “How do you explain the fact that we find one view of human flourishing in Book X of the received Nicomachean Ethics and another view in Book I? Surely, the theoretical tension between these portions of the received Nicomachean Ethics indicates that they were composed by two different authors.”
• “You make a heroic effort to render consistent Aristotle’s views on human flourishing in Nicomachean Ethics I and X.  But Aristotle never explicitly says what you attribute to him.  Your interpretation is based on inference, whereas our attribution of multiple authorship is empirical:  it is based simply on what we directly observe in the text.”
• “The received text of the Critique of Pure Reason displays unmistakeable evidence of editing.  Indeed, there are manuscripts that contain substantially different version of the Transcendental Deduction, one of the central arguments in that text.  Obviously, a later Kantian (perhaps Schopenhauer or his school of Kantians), was dissatisfied with Kant’s original formulation, and rewrote that portion of the text.”
• “Not only are the A and B versions of the Transcendental Deduction by different authors, neither one is likely to be by Kant.  We know for a fact that Kant taught Aristotelian logic.  However, the Transcendental Deduction is not a ‘deduction’ in the sense Kant would have used when he taught Aristotelian logic.  The use of one term in multiple senses is definitive evidence of multiple authorship.”
• “The writings attributed to Aristotle include works on ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, political philosophy, natural science (including biology, physics, and astronomy), and formal logic.  This is a remarkable heterogeneity in subject matter, which goes unchallenged only because of the unquestioned assumption that these works are by one author.  The most plausible explanation of the diversity in the received Aristotelian corpus is that later leaders of the Peripatetic School wrote works and attributed them to “the Philosopher” to legitimize their own interests.  In particular, after the death of Alexander the Great, the political influence of the Peripatetic School declined precipitously, which probably led them to change their focus from sensitive issues in ethics and political philosophy to more politically safe issues in aesthetics and metaphysics.”

What the preceding is intended to suggest is the following.  A certain methodological approach might lead us to attribute multiple authorship and accretional composition to texts that largely represent the views of one author over one lifetime.  In particular, it is not prima facie evidence that texts have multiple authorship if we find in them theoretical tensions, evidence of editing, the use of one word in multiple senses, or heterogeneity of subject matter. We should expect all of these things in works by profound, multifaceted thinkers. Furthermore, there is nothing illegitimate about making inferences or extrapolations in interpreting a text.  Indeed, one of the theses of my own presentation at the NECCT was that every interpretation requires theoretical claims that go beyond the bare empirical evidence in front of us.   For example, the claim that tensions in a text are due to unobserved manipulation of it by later members of a school might be true, but it is no more of an empirical claim than the suggestion that an author made an implicit assumption that reconciles two statements that seem to be in tension.

One might attempt the following reductio ad absurdum of my argument above. “But what if a text actually is by multiple authors?   Aren’t you ruling out a priori the very possibility of our discovering this?  That conclusion cannot be correct, so your argument must be wrong somewhere.”

In fact, I agree that there absolutely can be persuasive evidence that texts have multiple authors, and that we can sometimes identify interpolations in a text with a high degree of confidence.  For example, I have argued in print that the following passages are interpolations:  Analects 4.15 (“Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4.15″ in Confucius and the Analects:  New Essays), Analects 13:3 (Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy, pp. 82-96), and both Mengzi 4A12 and 7A4.  Of course, my own arguments may not be convincing. In response to my 21-page article on the “one thread” passage, Paul Goldin provided a detailed refutation, which I here quote in full:

I do not see any reason to follow Van Norden’s argument that Analects 4.15 is an interpolation.(Goldin, Confucianism [Acumen Publishing, 2011], p. 125n18.)

Touché! 🙂

I would only insist upon the following.  We cannot start slicing and dicing a text into sections belonging to different authors or different eras simply we notice in it theoretical tensions, evidence of editing, the use of one word in multiple senses, or heterogeneity of subject matter.   I worry when I see what appears to me, at least, to be the quick jump to the conclusion that a text is historically composite before any substantial effort has been made to engage the plausibility of philosophical explanations of the text as a coherent whole.  In short, we intellectual historians are admittedly sometimes too quick to jump over textual issues in our excitement to get to systematic philosophical interpretation. However, you cannot address this problem by leaping to the conclusion that a text is historically composite every time you encounter a passage that you don’t immediately know how to reconcile with what you thought you understood before.

(I honestly meant this to be a one paragraph comment that I would dash off in 10 minutes.  I should know myself better by now.   If anyone cares to comment, I will likely not have the time to respond any time soon.  Perhaps this post can serve as a draft of my presentation at the next NECCT, and I can learn the error of  my ways then and there.)