I recently connected with Lea Redmond, the insightful writer/artist and founder of Leafcutter Designs. We share a common interest in David Abram's book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram succeeds in connecting the patterns of organic energy with speech, the alphabet, written language and scientific explanations. He weaves this incredible string into a rich path that includes anthropology, ecology, philosophy, mysticism and science. It is not a simple journey, but an enlightened one. The depth of his research and breadth of his references gives this book a magnitude of uncommon proportion.

"Our understandings rest upon our presuppositions which filter how we see the world," says Redmond. Abram's book begins with his surprising experience of an Indonesian ritual. Leaves are folded into little boats, filled with rice, and given to the "house spirits," (which end up being ants).  In Lea's thesis, she takes a close look at Abram's experience by considering the relationship between presuppositions and insights - mistakes and possibilities."

With her permission, I am including an excerpt from her thesis:

There is not a “right” and a “wrong” way to see because there are no neutral interpretive categories. This is because interpretation involves the projection of a certain range of possibilities that will cut off other possibilities.

An interpretive category can never be neutral because it will always include certain possibilities while excluding others. To include all possibilities would be impossible for any human being, for no single person can see or experience everything from all angles. So, since being mistaken is not about being “right” or “wrong,” it is instead about missing possibilities that might be worth considering—possibilities that might be important if we only knew that they existed. These possibilities are missed because certain presuppositions, certain interpretive categories, are blocking them from view.

A presupposition is something that a person takes to already be true in order for something else to appear to be true or false. A presupposition determines the range of possibilities for what can be taken as true or false. For example, in the era when people thought the Earth was flat, sailing around it would have been an impossible notion. The presupposition of a flat Earth narrowed their range of possible truths. We can be aware of some of our presuppositions, while others may be active from the unseen depths of our being.

But while our presuppositions can sometimes block important possibilities from view, they also enable our living. We cannot live without them; to try to would be paralyzing and crazy.

At any given moment there is a plethora of presuppositions supporting our thoughts and actions. Imagine trying to take a walk without assuming the functioning of your shoes, the strength of your legs, the solidity of the ground, and the existence of air? We would analyze forever and never get anywhere.

These things that we assume –shoes, legs, ground, and air – are what I call “habitual normalities.” They are phenomena that we experience regularly and come to take for granted, thinking about them and interacting with them in certain routine ways. And just as we cannot live without presuppositions, we also cannot live without “habitual normalities.” These are the many phenomena that we take for granted that enable our living at all.

However, there are other presuppositions we may carry around with us that shut doors, closing off possibilities that would actually improve our lives and the world at large. Our own presuppositions – and the “habitual normalities” that correspond to them – can sometimes harm us and others.

Thus, mistake-making, conceived as missing possibilities due to our blinding presuppositions, is ultimately a question of richness. To be oblivious to our mistakes is to live a life of scarcity, of narrow vision. To be open to mistakes, aware of mistakes, and
to learn from our mistakes, is to live a life of richness, of eyes wide open to the many perspectives and potentials that this world offers.