Sometimes when I speak with certain people, I find myself having to explain things that seem as obvious as the blue sky, conclusions I would normally regard as common sense. I have to connect points that should have been clear on their own.
On the other hand, I’ve met people, who immediately grasp where I’m going the moment I mention an idea. They just get it.
it almost feels like as if some people were granted the gift of clear understanding. In The Republic, Plato famously addresses this. He posits that God fashioned humans with different souls: some containing gold (those with the capacity for wisdom and governance), others silver (courage and execution), and others iron or bronze (producers and laborers).
No. Please don’t make this judgement because I’ve been in your situation. In one moment the same person who understood you in another time would completely missed your meaning. There are a lot of background prep that we take for granted that’s why sometimes to us something should be understood instantly.
If there’s something to be understood in this phenomenon, it is how we subconsciously place primacy to our mind and not others’.
In college writing, what’s the number one principle we need to use in our written report? Do not assume your readers or audience know what you mean and skip on introduction, no matter how obvious it already is to us.
I’d say it is more likely that those who readily understand us probably share some of the same sense-making values and approaches as we do, rather than having intrinsically enhanced abilities to grasp ideas.
I’m talking about a hierarchical levels of understanding
That’s example
In The Republic, Plato maps human comprehension along a hierarchy. The highest level, Noesis (direct intellection), describes minds that instantly grasp foundational principles without relying on intermediate physical
Plato says up front that his supposedly “noble” lie is just a trick to encourage social harmony. He was bullshitting the masses. Popper rips Plato a new one one this. The metals of the soul were not thought real even by Plato.
So no, you don’t have a “golden soul”, even for Plato. You just came across someone who agrees with you.
But animals do get along because they share something in common, a cat is more likely to bond with another cat than with a bird, if someone strongly disagrees with you on stuff, it can be harder to get along with him.
If I say, “Do you understand?”, I am asking for you to make a claim (y/n), which is then judged in differing ways, depending on the standards that would need to be met for us to accept that you, as you say, “get it” (i.e., you do understand) in a particular case. But since this is a logical conclusion (a judgment that we make), there is no “thing” (my “understanding”) that I have, and so there is no need for any internal mechanism (no “gift”). If the process of understanding, as @Tom_Storm says, is not an “intrinsically enhanced ability”, we could still say there is a skill that one can be better at (making connections, recognizing distinctions, i.e., learning what matters about a practice), or that one would pick something up quicker based on a shared practice or context or experience (echoing @Banno). I would say that philosophy itself is based on the idea that thinking can be taught, bettered, and so is a “process” like problem-solving (working it out over time, or explicitly), rather than a “process”, say, of the brain. And so the metals of a person would be just different areas of skill and interest, rather than intrinsically granted and not attainable by others (as if courage were like blood type rather than like resolve).
The first and most obvious is general intelligence (g) which affects processing speed and working memory. Some people “connect the dots” with minimal prompting while others need intermediate steps made explicit. Just don’t ask me to define it because not even scientists really know what intelligence is.
Then there’s cognitive style. Some people enjoy and engage in effortful thinking (“need for cognition”) and are more likely to spontaneously draw inferences and follow complex arguments. This is about personality.
Also, as others have pointed out, understanding is heavily shaped by existing mental structures. If someone already has the relevant concepts and relations, a brief cue can activate a whole network of inferences. This “expertise effect” is domain-specific and relies on prior exposure or education.
Finally, there are communication issues. Conversation relies on inferring unstated assumptions to some degree (Gricean implicature). Some people are simply better at grasping what’s implied rather than literally said. This can be related to neurodevelopmental conditions also.
All of these complicate the idea that some people are simply better than others.
@Banno is right that Plato says upfront that this is a “noble lie.” But let’s say you believe it, as you seem to. Not the metallic part, of course, but the idea that some people are “born with” certain capacities, some fit for leadership, some for laboring.
Can you see how scary such a premise would be? For a well-ordered society, someone or ones would presumably have to make the call about which categories all the citizens belong in. This someone would have complete authority, because of the circular nature of the concept: They would claim themselves as being of the “leader-type,” so those who disagree could be safely ignored – or punished. To me, it’s a recipe for anti-democratic authoritarianism.
As others have pointed out, maybe you should ask yourself whether there might be a different reason why something “as obvious as the blue sky” to you might not be so to others. Different, that is, from being born incapable of understanding.
Plato’s myth of metals fails on two fronts at once. Normatively, it clashes with individualist egoism: egoism grounds a person’s worth and action in their own self interest and self determination, while the myth exists precisely to make people accept a fixed rank in a collective hierarchy and subordinate their own ambitions to the good of the city so an egoist has no principled reason to accept a story whose entire function is to make him content with being told he’s bronze rather than gold. Explanatorily, it collapses under determinism determinism holds that a person’s capacities, including how fast they grasp an idea, are the product of prior causes genetics, upbringing, environment, accumulated exposure and practice and that causal history already accounts for why one person “just gets it” and another doesn’t, with no need to posit a metal poured into the soul at birth. This is especially damning because Plato himself introduces the myth as a “noble lie” he proposes telling citizens, not a claim he’s asserting is literally true so treating it as a real causal account of who understands quickly and who doesn’t means treating an admitted political fiction as if it were an empirical mechanism, which no deterministic or egoistic framework has any reason to do.
I’m not sure what’s scary about truth. To me, reality seems to operate something like this: people have different “capacities,” and they aren’t equal in everything.
The scary part is that you believe you can adjudicate how reality operates, when it comes to people’s innate capacities. Not just your opinion or experience, but reality itself, the truth. Surely you’ve noticed that there’s a wide range of views on these topics?
We might as well fit the entire periodic table into the soul-intellect valuation analogy.
We owe our capacity of understanding to people of many mixtures. Our convenient means and leisure to think is propped up by a lot of undervalued manual labor. Though from the standoint of having to pay we’ll exclaim in the next moment: “that’s just too expensive”.
One of the greatest and worst sayings ever:
“You are what you eat.”
The metaphoric periodic table of becoming is a buffet open to all:
Eat what you must eat. Eat what you will eat. Eat according to your needs. Eat to build up your strength. Eat for taste. Eat.
Or don’t eat.
We are all the same at heart, however depressing that sounds.
