Differentiation Predilection

I was wondering last night on the possibility that all female led dynamic symbols are nothing more than ‘accidentally eroticized‘ (metastatic) symbols, when I suddenly, surprisingly and happily wondered why it mattered. After all, what works works, so even if female led symbols aren’t perfectly reflective of ‘objective reality’, what matters is that female led symbols be accurate to the reality of a person’s (or to a couple’s) experience, that female led symbols be transparent and accurate enough.

However I think this interestingly illustrates my predilection for increasingly differentiated symbols, even when the differentiation is unnecessary to adequately and accurate portray my experience. On one hand I think this tendency reflects my natural human curiosity about the nature of things and demonstrates my desire for my symbols to be true (e.g. make sure they are adequate and accurate to my experience), yet on the other hand I also think it shows a certain academentic prejudice for differentiated symbols over compact ones.

Realistically there is always going to be metastatic spillage between symbols, because symbols will always be more finite than our human experience; communication with symbols will always be an imprecise ‘science’. Realistically we only need symbols good enough to reflect experiential meaning and significance, not good enough to be experiential meaning and significance.

I say ‘academentic’ because I think it is one of the peculiar dementias of academia (and to some extent western civilization in general) that once we learn the valuable skill of differentiation applied to our environment (e.g. science, technology), we continue to needlessly (and sometimes heedlessly) apply this skill to all our human experience. Yet when we ignore the many meaningful non-physical dimensions such as emotions and spirituality (and this is partially why many feel they’re ‘missing something’ and ‘return’ to more compact ‘new age’ worldviews), it only illustrates how paying attention only to differentiating phenomena at the expense of experience makes our lives feel meaningless.