Name: これは水 (This is Water)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:19:39.000Z
Duration: 21 min 57 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

There are these two young fish swimming along

and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says: "Morning, boys. How's the water?"

様態の副詞

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes:

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches: the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.

The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre,

but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be.

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude.

But the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence,

banal platitudes can have a life or death importance;

or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like these is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning

To try to explain why the degree you're about to receive has actual human value

So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre,

which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, teaching you how to think.

If you're like me, as a student, you've never liked hearing this,

And you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you've needed anybody to teach you how to think,

Since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché  turns out not to be insulting at all,

Because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this

isn't really about the capacity to think,

but rather about the choice of what to think about.

If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing,

I'd ask you to think about fish, and water

and to bracket, for just a few minutes, your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness,

And the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about after the fourth beer.

"Look, it's not like I have actual reasons for not believing in God.

It's not like I have never experimented with the whole God and prayer thing.

Just last month I got cut away from camp in that terrible blizzard.

And I was totally lost, and I couldn't see a thing.

And so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me."

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled.

"Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive."

The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and they showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis:

the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people,

given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief,

nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad.

Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from.

Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys.

As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size;

or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language.

As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal,

The nonreligious guy  is so totally certain,

in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help.

True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations, too.

They're probably even more repulsive than atheists,

But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever:

A close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean.

To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.

Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out,

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of:

everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe.

The realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive.

But it's pretty much the same for all of us.

there is no experience you have had that you are not at the absolute center of.

The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU

Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate,

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues.

It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting

which is to be deeply and literally self-centered

and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted",

which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect.

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education - at least in my own case -

is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff,

to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me,

paying attention to what is going on inside me.

字幕リスト動画再生

これは水 (This is Water)

stuff

conscious

obvious

matter