Being able to see right as right and wrong as wrong

When we say that events are sometimes simpler than we think, are we saying that we should be content to accept that the world always unfolds with the simplicity we see? Of course not. If that were so, neither science nor technology would advance.

Everyone has sufficient experience that, beyond what we see with the naked eye, there are entirely different worlds we can see by using some simple seeing devices. Through X-rays, ultrasound, MRI and other means, do we not see, in the human body alone, many dimensions that cannot be seen one way but can be seen another?

Of course, we do not always see all the dimensions of every event, and behind the causes we see there may be other stories, other constructions. Depending on what we want to see, or what kind of knowledge we want to reach starting from what we see, we resort to different ways of seeing and methods of analysis. Of course, one should not be indifferent to any possibility that there may be another reality beyond the visible reality.

But acquiring another seeing instrument to measure what lies beyond the reality visible to the naked eye, and in the end making guesses about the unseen realm, are different things from seeing. In fact, theories often come into play precisely as "explanatory models" introduced to account for unseen realms.

In ancient Greece, the sun's disappearing each day on the western side and reappearing the next day on the eastern side was a familiar thing visible to the naked eye every day. What was unseen in this event and demanded explanation was where the sun went when it disappeared and how it reappeared. That the sun went around behind a hill and came from the other end of the hill the next day seemed convincing enough, but it was wrong. As a continuation of this explanation, the world being a flat tray was likewise convincing.

Persuasiveness of course cannot be a measure of truth, but people have been able to be convinced of this false knowledge for hundreds of years. There are many scientific explanations that convince us of the truth of many false pieces of knowledge. Many scientific theories consist of such falsehoods, and to the extent of their persuasiveness they can make us believe in the truth of some falsehoods for a long time.

Theories achieve this largely through the habits of seeing they form in us. Because our seeing in fact cannot be independent of our prejudices, our concepts, our theories and our culture. In order to grasp the reality of an event we may need to wrestle with all of these. That is why the theories we construct to explain events can turn into obstacles that prevent us from seeing the facts.

Our Prophet prayed to God "to show us things as they are." And also to show the right as right and grant the ability to follow it, and to show the wrong as wrong and grant the ability to avoid it...

Theories are in fact more refined and more consolidated forms of our prejudices and ideological illusions. After all, they are spectacles that have been put through a scientific process, inspected and approved by a certain scientific circle or authority. The idea that by putting them on our eyes with confidence we can see the facts better is again engraved in our brains as a prejudice.

This is precisely why postmodern thinkers assume that to the extent that we get caught up in theories or concepts developed to perceive or imagine realities, we can fall into the trap of ideology. They explain that these concepts and theories turn into the greatest obstacle to things appearing to us as they are.

On the other hand, there is no way for human beings to meet realities without using concepts, without resorting to a model of understanding, and above all without looking from within a language. Then perhaps the remedy is to migrate quickly to other concepts without getting too attached to any concept, without giving a conceptual framework the chance to become our dungeon.

Thus the nomadism of thought, settling on it in its very essence, provides a degree of protection from the comfortable but equally truth-distant state of settled thought.

The metaphor of "a thousand plateaus" that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to healthy and clean thinking expresses this. Every concept, every theory is a plateau. One must stop by each of them but settle in none, migrate at once to another plateau and look from there too, feed from there too.

Does this nomadism between concepts and theories really bring us closer to seeing things as they are, or how much closer does it bring us?

If it itself turns into a separate comfortable plateau, how can we prevent it from creating the illusion that we are truly protected against every kind of theoretical or ideological mold?

It is a question worth thinking about.