::What is Doxa?::

Our perceptions rely on our physical senses. But our senses only provide a limited and relative view of the universe. You may feel like you're sitting still right now, but you're really hurtling around the center of the milky way at 120 miles per second. We assume that air is weightless, when the earth's atmosphere actually weighs 5,000 trillion tons.

We rarely acknowledge the shortcomings of our senses because we instinctively project our values outwards, even if our perceptions are not universally applicable. We claim things "taste" or "feel" a certain way (a lemon tastes sour, for instance, or fire feels hot), when really it is we who are feeling or tasting. Conventional logic and conceptions of time are the sciences of our immediate senses; they do not necessarily compose the comprehensive geometry of the universe.

Unfortunately, our minds are incapable of processing everything. If we simultaneously listened to every song ever written, we'd only register cacophony. In the end, the only way we can make sense out of the overwhelming barrage of stimuli is to screen out the "white noise" we consider less important.

Perception is thus an active process. We seek, differentiate, choose, alter, and create sensory information every moment of our lives. But how much do we miss in the process? What of the stimuli we deem unworthy of attention?

Every age has its orthodoxies that are instinctively taken for granted as truth; such implicit values run on a deeper level of consciousness than mere ideologies. It's not that these beliefs are indisputable, so much as they are so completely self-evident to the thinker that that they hardly merit being detected or identified in the first place. Pierre Bourdieu refers to these automatically accepted assumptions as doxa.

When faced with the task of interpreting a puzzling scene, we rely on doxa by default. Our instincts assign familiar patterns to the unfamiliar, regardless of the appropriateness of such a reaction. And since we define everything by what we are used to, we do not anticipate (and thereby often fail to recognize) unprecedented things when we encounter them. More often than not, we end up imposing comprehension, rather than striving to discover it.

But if you only assimilate phenomena according to your established expectations, you will never learn anything new. Every discovery, every epiphany, every enhanced comprehension thus begins as an imaginative preconception of an unusual possibility.

To learn and grow, we must be aware and critical of our reliance on doxa. We must struggle with it, challenge it, rupture it.

Plato (who argued that human beings inhabit both a sensible world, which surrounds us, and an intelligible world, which contains the "ideas" of visible things), originally coined the term doxa to describe the only type of knowledge humans can derive from the sensible world. In the platonic sense, doxa signifies opinions, intuitions, beliefs, conjectures, or estimates...as opposed to unchanging and perfect truths. As such, doxa in both the Platonic and Bourdieuan senses is by its very nature relative.

No single perspective, not even the most familiar, provides a superior or more true representation of a multidimensional object. Whether it's space, time, cultural differences, personal tastes, philosophies, or pumpkin pie we're looking at, we must look beyond the instinct that guards our sanity by clinging fiercely to doxa. Instead of confining ourselves to a single point of view, we must strive to embrace the existence of multiple, alternative ones, thus surrendering a part of our minds and ourselves to a kind of dimensia.