Zhuangzi, Big Birds, and Intellectual Humility
Here’s a common problem: we don’t know what we don’t know, and can’t see from a vantage we haven’t climbed. Someone of intellectual humility takes it on faith that, up on that vantage, there are sights to see. Someone of intellectual arrogance, however, from his place down below, will dismiss any message from up top. They will certainly dismiss any encouragement to start climbing.
Hence you find people ready to write off whole fields they have never engaged with. “Philosophy, economics, quantum physics, etymology, literary studies, sociology, what are these,” thinks the arrogant man, “to what any man on the street thinks?”
They mistake the limits of their vision for the limits of the world. This mistake is perfectly dramatised by the foundational Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi:
There is massive bird, larger than a city, called Peng. As it is massive, the skies it flies through must be more massive. The Peng will fly in one direction the length of many cities, many countries, and it will fly back the same distance.
Now, down on the ground, there is a cicada. This cicada can’t understand why the Peng is flying. “I fly too,” says the cicada, “I leap up, fly, and land right back where I started. That’s all flying gets you. The Peng is stupid to expect anything more.”
Zhuangzi says (translated by Martin Palmer):
The understanding of the small cannot be compared to the understanding of the great.
And this is fundamentally the problem. Everyone has small understanding of every topic. Everyone is a small philosopher, a small economist, a small quantum physicist, a small etymologist, a small literary scholar, a small sociologist. From this small understanding small minds believe they’ve seen the limits of these massive fields. They are as small as the cicada, who mistakes the limits of its leaping for the limits of flight.
The one of great understanding is like the Peng. Though the Peng is massive, it knows it flies through space even more massive.
What I am saying is: do not dismiss any field when you are less than a novice. They hold things you do not know and sights you have not seen.
