I reread the David Foster Wallace piece I posted yesterday. I thought I agreed with him, but now that I’ve reread the whole thing I realize that while I agree with his goal I disagree with him on how the goal is reached.

We do not get to choose our beliefs. We are only able to move about and see from different angles. What we see at these angles determines our beliefs for us.

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Starting with the belief you’d like to have and shifting angles in order to make the belief believable 1) is intellectual dishonest, and 2) will leave you with bad-faith “faith” that puts the heart and mind in conflict.

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If you hate what you see, your only recourse is to look differently. You cannot change your seeing directly. The seeing is determined by the looking. You have to work with your angle of sight. Take the metaphor of “perspective”, of “seeing differently”, of “insight” seriously. Stop squinting. Keep your eyes open. Get your intellect off its ass, out of its comfy chair and make it walk around its objects until the objects show themselves to you in a way that reveals new and better meaning.

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Intellectual honesty without ideals is cheap. Ideals without intellectual honesty is cheap. The marriage of intellectual honesty with ideals is more difficult and much more valuable.