Alexander: I am fascinated by the diverse cognitive frames people have; the frames of different lifeworlds. That’s what Husserl and later Habermas wrote about, yes? — as being in different lifeworlds. Not just different cultures… it’s much more than a World View, as it is all about the way we experience and live into life. Our social and physical reality, and all the cues that we respond to, that come through our processes of socialization and acculturation and entrainment into society – these are all part of the experiential domain of our continual becoming – and of our forgetting of parts of ourselves, as well.
Shae: A complexity of so many dimensions, aspects and elements!
Alexander: Yes, and it is an ongoing complexity of becoming more of who we are and less of who we aren’t! In this process there always seems to be different layers or processes going on. There are so many layers of culture that we are wrapped up in… and they connect us, and they also estrange us. And on top of that, there are things that we can’t understand from somebody else’s culture, that we can’t possibly understand because we have our own biases and myopias, our own lenses through which we view life, and these are just different from the lenses they have.
Shae: Yes, in a deep complexity perspective many things can be affordances or constraints, and as you say, sometimes both at once. Aspects of our worldview, our salient patterning, can hold us firmly and securely, and may also hold us in a limiting way, especially when thinking about others who are very different from us. This is an important topic as there seems to be a backlash against difference at the moment. I know the 2SLGBTIQ+ community in the USA and in other places too are feeling it. I am also aware of an increase in reductive essentialising of gender in the heterosexual world as well, with a so-called masculine mindset that wishes to reduce women to functions of men’s needs and desires. Currently there seems to be a lot of effort put into finding concepts and words to even talk about the diversity of human beings.
Alexander: Indeed, there are things we need to be able to think, that we need expressions for even just to be able to think. You know the famous example of the twenty-eight words for snow from in the and Inuit culture and language? Well, it’s not actually twenty-eight different words due to the way their language is structured since it relates more to how the words are formed and used. But the fact is I can’t even recognise or distinguish that many nuances of snow! I could identify maybe five different types of snow, but I can’t even see more than that. I’m sure somebody who lives in the desert has that many names for sand, or those who live in island nations have so many different names to express types of nuances in water. Different people are able to distinguish types of differentiations that you and I don’t even perceive. When learning a language, we each learn the nuances and distinctions of difference and diversity relevant to our socio-cultural and bio-physical context, and as that context evolves over time, it becomes patterned in our perceptual frames.
Shae: So really, language and our cultural experience can both enable and/or constrain our capacity to even see things, like shaping our perceptive capacities. What is interesting is that there are always people who can see or sense more, who are less limited in their perceptive capacities. I wonder what accounts for that difference and diversity? From an educator’s developmental perspective, there is always at least 10% of divergent thinkers in any given classroom, and a further 10% of those who will be extremely divergent. This is true for all genders and cultures.
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- Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. Vols. 1 and 2. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Husserl, E. (1936). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. trans. David Carr 1970. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Press.