The Ultimate Life Hack: Turning Your Terrible Logic Into My Intellectual Growth
The deepest reason for cultivating charitable attitude is not politenessbut learning. Because every mind contains information you do not possess. Even when the conclusion is wrong, the argument is weak, the person is confused, the mechanism that produced the confusion is itself worth understanding. A child who believes monsters live under the bed is mistaken. Yet the fear, imagination, and reasoning process that produced the belief reveal something important about the human mind.
Likewise, a philosopher who concludes that life amounts to nothing may be wrong, partly right, or entirely right. But before deciding, there is tremendous value in understanding what sequence of experiences and thoughts made that conclusion seem compelling to them. This is why you may keep returning to different authors even when you disagree with them. You may not only evaluat their claims. You are trying to enter the machinery that generated them.
That is already very close to what a charitable attitude is called. Not agreement, tolerance or politeness. The sincere attempt to understand how a particular mind arrived where it did. The next step is the learning attitude where the deep investigation of someone's point of the never reaches an endpoint. If wealth is the value, there is always the possibility of losing it. If status is the value, others can take it away. If health is the value, time eventually wins.
But understanding is unusual. Even disagreement can increase it. Every conversation, every book, every strange philosophy, every mistake, every wrong turn contains information about how minds and worlds operate. In that sense, learning is one of the few values that can continue functioning almost until the final moment, because the next thing to understand is always arriving.
