Give humans something to see, and we make a world of it. A phrase from a contract, a flower in a field, one moment out of the infinite moments of a day. We give it meaning, significance. Or we don't. Context matters, so both are true. The smallest thing means everything, as the largest, not at all.
This might just be another of saying that life and all its enterprise gives itself over to excess. We find meaning in the slightest fragment of perception. We plunge into what jumps to mind, what presents itself with the slightest flicker to our open senses. All is Surface, without end, perfectly smooth and complete, but infinitely dense. Depth is the meaning we give, the fullness we find in all things. We live in that slippage; content to skim across things as they are until forced by habit or purpose or intuition to free-fall into the grain, which we catch as meaning.
Think of some professions. Medicine, teaching, state craft, law; all require inquiry and expense. When dealing with others, heuristics make for human need. Doctors and teachers, politicians and soldiers must burn through resources with impunity if they are to heal or to lead. Outcomes matter, but these are the outcomes of people, for whom being is more than a description. Means must be human, too, must give in to the accelerating complexity of what being human requires. Our bodies constantly self-stabilize, unlike clocks whose gears lie inert before the clockmaker. Doctors get to know the body, how it functions and interacts with itself, through an extensive process of exploration. Again, the means are profligate by function. Teachers, too, come to understand their students in a similar; learning is both piecemeal and indefinite, the result of an individual's own condition, not the application of technology to a clear problem. No less legislators, nor generals, when dealing with others, can avoid messy extraneous efforts. We have to go too far, because the outcome in its rightness shows itself only after we wade in. In this sense, we splurge in order to figure out what we want the ends to be.
Isaiah Berlin once said that "we must be free to make mistakes." He was talking about political democracy, but I take him to imply truth as well. And it truth, reality. Being free to err is not a license. Rather, Berlin means that we are free to be correct. The world is not given (less so a government). We thus have a responsibility to search it out, to find meanings - many wrong, few right - benefiting our task. That is an awesome load. This "negative" liberty, in Berlin's phrase, restricts prior constraint on our experiences. Put another way, institutions (whether the state or church, the academy or the hospital) do have any final answers. Citizenship of state and of humanity requires us to ask more than the given.
The difficulty in this life is obvious. We must chart things for ourselves, in concert with others on their own courses. No more so than in the professions. Doctors and teachers go as far beyond the horizon of what is known as necessary to attend the person in need. Each patient, each student brings something new in a new way with new conditions. The freedom to make mistakes is limited by the dangers of being wrong, of course, with their deadly finality. Being right, though needs the space to avoid that danger, while also engaging the difficulty of understanding the particulars of any one person.
Learning is the word for the layered interaction of what a student knew and felt previously and how the new material is experienced. Teachers can not mandate nor control that experience. At best, they create climates rich with material (content, say) for students to work through, then layer on pedagogy. Since not all students will experience the same thing, not all students will learn the same way or at the same speed. A teachers keeps this classroom practice going, long after something has been learned. She is not being inefficient; rather, she is exercising her freedom to be right for this student in this lesson at this time. Business hates waste. Teachers hate doing less than is needed since what is needed might only be known after the fact. We call this "time." Imagine the irresponsible doctor prescribing the same drug to every patient with the same symptoms. Now imagine the teacher treating every reading problem with the same lesson. It takes time to create the work that leads to learning, for each and every student. In schools, time wasted is time not being taken.
To sum this up, think about the invisible hand. It works wonderfully for economic reason by evoking the image of centrifugal wind that naturally blows goods and services to their best use. It creates an order, spontaneous and beautiful, from the combined self-interest of its participants. Yes, if we consider the hand always already at work. Within its functioning order, energy is efficiently expended to achieve known, expected outcomes. That is the system in its pure form. How, though, did it get that way? What happened before? The human need for more, for expansive time and excessive action, generates the hand. Our interests follow from our discoveries, which follow from the kind of mazy runs we take across new fields. And new fields come to us in the briefest of forms. We find patterns wherever we look; meanings emerge with the effort to form them, no matter the text.
