I was surprised to discover that most of the readings involved concepts that have been discussed in previous classes. The Wurman reading, “Business of Understanding” discussed ideas that were a challenge for me to grasp in the past. One of the concepts that I have found most difficult was a practice of altering how a subject may be approached called, tagmemics. I learned about tagmemics in my WRT 360 class last semester, and at the time it seemed to be very difficult to grasp. In time, I gained a greater understanding, but it’s still a rather confusing subject overall. The Wurman essay was very similar to what we learned last semester, yet presented the subject in a slightly different way.
Interestingly enough, the Wurman essay also presented concepts that I learned last year in ENG 350: Literary Criticism and Theory. When Wurman wrote about the way in which people perceived ideas, I found myself thinking of Fredrich Nietzsche. Both of these men believed that it was impossible for a person to perceive something free of outside influence or previous experiences. Wurman wrote, “[i]deas precede our understanding of facts, although the overabundance of facts tends to obscure this. A fact can be comprehended only within the context of an idea” (9). A lot of what Wurman wrote reminded me of theories presented by philosophers I’ve studied in the past.
The resource that I've chosen to share is a video about Frederich Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideas I found somewhat similar to that of Wurman. The video presents the concepts of Nietzsche in a way that is easier to comprehend. I think that exposure to the ideas of Nietzsche will give students a greater understanding of how ideas may be perceived. His theories present a different approach to thinking, and understanding the perceptions of others.
I had a chance to read a little bit of Nietzsche and like you wrote, because of what pre-conceptions we have, we view ideas differently. The same thing that Wurman writes.
ReplyDeleteWhen Nietzsche criticized some Jewish beliefs in his book, "On the Genealogy of Morality", it was just that; a simple criticism. Any average person would not have thought more about it than just someone who disagrees with another person on regular ideas. However, it is believed that Adolf Hitler read so much of Nietzsche's writings that his original hatred of a likely Jewish father who abandoned him morphed into a murderous hatred that led him to mastermind the killing of six million Jews! There we go with pre-conception leading to (sometimes) misinterpretation of writing!