Last week's blog post was a big one for me. I still think that we can really make a difference in changing society for the better if we can establish this word in our language. However, after trying for a week I do realize that it’s really difficult to casually drop it in conversations. The concept just doesn’t come up too often. It’s most useful when you disagree with someone and people tend to avoid these situations. There are other places where you can use it, but it feels forced then because it’s not really necessary as other formulations are available. For example, instead of “I believe that …”, you could say “in my eidon …”. But that is difficult because the former is so much more natural than the latter. It just feels forced. If you really believe in the good this word can do, I’d say it’s still worth it, but I recognize how difficult it is, especially since people just tend to ignore words they don’t know and many will not even pick up on it.
Nevertheless, let’s use this blog post to reflect on the concept a bit more. Maybe that will give us more confidence in using it. Let’s start by getting rid of a potential misconception. Saying that something is true in your eidon does not mean you aren’t sure. There is no higher degree of certainty than something being true in your eidon, as nobody can ever say anything about truths outside their eidon. In fact, you usually don’t have to say that something is true in your eidon, because you’re already saying that when you’re saying that it is true. It’s what everyone means when they are talking about the truth. This is the essence of why I think this word is so useful, but also why it is so exotic. Most people don’t know the difference between eidon and truth. I really want to establish this word to make people see this difference.
At the moment, almost nobody is aware of it, from the dumbest conspiracy theorist to the smartest scientist. In fact, I think scientists and well educated people are most susceptible to ignoring it, since they spent their whole life chasing the truth. It may feel uncomfortable or even devastating to realize that you can never acquire it. But the difference between eidon and truth is just that one is an approximation of the other. Your eidon can get arbitrarily close to the truth but it can never reach it. It’s actually something that any scientist knows and is aware of, but they don’t express it in their language because language doesn’t support it. That is, unless you introduce the concept of eidon.
Can you imagine how much our society could improve if everyone understood that scientists don’t “have the truth” but that their eidon is supposed to be an accurate approximation of it in their respective field? If someone is expected to know the truth, any mistake they make directly contradicts this premise because truth is a binary concept. Either you have it or you don’t. Eidon is by definition imperfect and human. Mistakes just show you that it could be better but it could always be better. It can be compared between individuals like any other skill. It’s similar to an athletic performance. And while it certainly plays a role in many sports, there is no sport where it is the primary focus.
Unless you count stock market trading as a sport. Because what makes you a good trader is precisely your eidon. To make good trades, you have to predict the future and you have to do it better than your competitors. You need to integrate a lot of information into your eidon to make decisions about what to buy and sell. Having all the factual information does not help you at all, it’s your ability to condense all that information into actions which counts. Not that I would know a lot about that, but it’s my eidon on how the stock market works. I see it as an eidon competition.
This also highlights another nice distinction we get for free: the difference between knowledge and eidon. You probably know that learning lots of facts by heart will not help you very much, unless you are going to be questioned about precisely those facts. It’s how you can graduate from university without actually learning anything. Or did you? Because isn’t learning the acquisition of knowledge? And those facts you learned, assuming you didn’t immediately forget them after the exam, are knowledge. But, as anyone who knows a bit about education can tell you, there’s two kinds of learning. One is the aforementioned memorization of facts and the other is “understanding”. But it’s really difficult to define what understanding really is. People might say “it’s the ability to apply knowledge” or “it’s seeing the bigger picture” but that’s all quite vague. But what about this definition: understanding is the improvement of one’s eidon.
A review I’d give to most of the museums I’ve been to could be that it failed to improve my eidon. It feels wrong to say that I didn’t learn anything. Those places are full of knowledge, if I chose to not remember any of them it’s not their fault. But I didn’t go there to learn facts, I always seek to improve my eidon. Some good museums do that, but most don’t. And without the word eidon, I wouldn’t really know how to express that criticism unless I explained the whole concept in my review. Unfortunately I still have to do that, because nobody knows what an eidon is, except you and me. You can’t google it either, bird.lol has terrible SEO.
I dream that some day we will make it to a dictionary. I have no idea if it’s realistic, but I truly believe that it would be a serious improvement to our language. If you believe that too, please help out by … spreading the word … literally.
