The ad hominem argument is our chief means of muting the humanity of others. It strips others of the most human quality: the capacity to teach.

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When we take an objective stance toward another person, this means is we are not open to being taught by them.

We might learn from the other, but we are trying to learn through observing behaviors, as physicists learn about the behavior of matter and energy. The other’s speech is interpreted as one more kind of behavior, which we comprehend in the terms of our own understanding.

When we pursue being taught, we allow the teacher to convey to us his terms of understanding.

A teacher’s understanding manifests most concretely in how he comprehends, and so, the attempt to comprehend observable aspects of reality as the teacher does is one of the more reliable routes to understanding. The teacher shows us something, tells us what he sees, and we try to conceive it so we see for ourselves what he has described. But when we see, we conceive it our own way. To stop conceiving our own way means to temporarily open ourselves to chaos so a new understanding can be born in us. It means braving anxiety, perplexity and dread for the sake of new insight.

For this to happen a student must be aware that some aspects of truth are fixed and invariable, but other aspects of truth are variable. The fixed aspects provide us points of reference in coming to share the variable aspects, just as we use fixed landmarks to direct a friend to a meeting-place. It is the variable aspects of truth that make it matter to us. Sharing the variable aspects of truth with others makes togetherness palpably real.

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A fact is acquired by understanding. Insights are the acquisition of a new way to understand.

Some insights are partial, like scientific paradigms. Philosophy aims at the deepest and most comprehensive insights. Philosophy voluntarily wrangles with perplexity. Reading philosophy is submitting to being taught, dying to outworn insights and being inhabited by new insights, again and again.

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Between the bit of reality we readily grasp with our minds (the already-conceivable) and the realities that are altogether beyond the grasp of human intelligence (what is inconceivable on principle) is a strip of reality that could be grasped on principle if we knew how to grasp it (the potentially-conceivable). We’re comfortable with the already-conceivable and the inconceivable, but that middle region is terribly uncomfortable.

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Reality can be sliced and diced innumerable ways. Many articulations of reality are valid (though this does not mean that all articulations of reality are valid).

A pizza can be sliced into 4, 6, 8 or 12 slices, and none of these ways are wrong. However, to someone who has only seen pizzas sliced into quarters, a slice of pizza can come to mean not only a division of a whole, but specifically a one-fourth division — mainly because no other division had ever been considered. If someone speaks of a pizza sliced into twelve, which is still somehow, miraculously, still only one pizza, despite having 3 times as many slices as a normal pizza. It is at once a single pizza, but also, somehow, three.

If we mistrust the person telling us about this 12-slice pizza, we reject his claim out of hand.

If we trust him, we might take it on faith that in some mysterious way beyond human comprehension, this pizza exists simultaneously as one pizza that is also three pizzas.

Both of these responses preclude teaching and learning.

Both of these conclusions show no faith in the other as a teacher.