“Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial...No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."
This quote from one of Ursula K le Guin's short stories has rattled around in my head since I first read it. Having recently reread some of her short stories in memoriam, it struck me just the same, and despite her somewhat self-assured absolutist tone, there's a lot of wisdom inherent in it. Many of her anecdotes, insights, philosophical musings scattered throughout her writings are laced with her own very human experiences and thoughtful observations, so much so that it's difficult to read her stories without them feeling like an unguarded personal confession at times: lessons for perceptive readers to learn from. This is a technical no-no from a writer's perspective, but in her case she personified her heroines, injected a kind of molten core of self-conflict, suffering, emotional strength into their characters (and wrote complicated male characters that can be emulated) that feel alive, literally jumping off the page as extensions of the author's psyche.
In learning theory, experience plays the greatest role in crystallizing self-knowledge from an instinctual basis, within the cloud of group interaction, and in the more protracted internal push-pull of developing personhood over time. In the case of le Guin's idea of 'local knowledge,' my point here centers more around the social function of learning and how it is essential as a counterbalast to individualized learning i.e. experiential, hands-on, personal background and history because it reaffirms reality or sheds light on or banishes misconceptions. Hegel's concept of the Lord and the Bondsman comes to mind as a handy analogy: the developing person and the public persona, or in other terms, the waking self and the unconscious. Tying this back into le Guin's statement, individual self-knowledge is as dependent on behavioral, cognitive, and social learning of Self - in this case, the agglutination of everything that makes a personality - as group cohesion is on shared individual perspectives: the foray of partial truths in group context is neither more true or untruth, simply gathered knowledge. The opposite, a group or idealism imposed on its members is totalitarian - the Lord on its Bondsman, delusion. More self-assured absolutism aside, her insight is a clarion lesson on the virtues of rigorous self-questioning, how accepting the unconscious mind or, in the context of these forums, the blending of your shadow with your archetype is the point of the individuation process - especially when you're sure of something! Frankfurt's On Bullshit comes to mind: “Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.â€