Be curious, not judgmental...

“Be curious, not judgmental.” – Walt Whitman

We are all judgmental. Yes, even you. Some say its human nature, I think its the easy/lazy way out of truly taking time to understand and view things in totality.

And yet, while it is in our lazy nature to be judgmental, I don’t think it’s always useful to us. We look down on others, as if we are so much better … and that creates division between people. Humans have this drive to establish hierarchy before understanding. Thats a little backwards to me - how about understanding first then hierarchy?

Think about it for a second: we see someone, and based on their looks or actions, we pass judgment on them. Not good judgment, either. Usually without even knowing the person. And that’s it — that’s usually the extent of our interaction with that person. We don’t make an effort to get to know the person, or understand them, or see whether our judgment was right or not.

And let’s consider what happens when we pass judgment on people we do know. We see something they do, and get angry at it, or disappointed in the person, or think worse of them. We judge, without understanding. And that’s the end of it — we don’t try to find out more, and through communication begin to understand, and through understanding begin to build a bridge between two human beings.

Can you build a bridge with every single person you meet? Probably not. That takes time and effort, two things we’re usually short on anyways. But I’ve found that taking that extra time, even just once a day, can make a huge difference. Avoid passing judgment and instead build a bridge between two human beings.

Which bleeds into my next point about this topic - judgements from ideas.

Ideas are the raw materials of knowledge but ideas are not in themselves true or false. There is no truth or falsity until we take two or more ideas, compare them, and express an agreement or disagreement between them. Only then can we speak of truth or error.

Truth and error lie in the judgment, not the idea. A judgment is an act of the mind pronouncing the agreement or disagreement of ideas among themselves. It is an act in which the intellect affirms or denys one idea of another.

There are three things necessary for making a judgment. First, the mind must understand the two ideas about which it intends to make a judgment. Second, the mind must compare the two ideas under consideration. Third, the mind must express mentally the agreement or disagreement between two ideas. This latter act constitutes the essence of the judgment.

Put in the simplest terms, we take one idea, let's call it the subject, and we say something about it (with another idea), let's call this part the predicate, and we compare the two ideas. We then pronounce agreement or disagreement between the two ideas.

But how do we determine if a judgment is true or false? The discussion of this question does not, strictly speaking, belong to the science of logic. It belongs to a branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is the philosophic study of knowledge in its most general sense. Logic deals with the validity of an argument, not specifically with the truth of an argument.

Nevertheless, a brief discussion of truth and falsehood may be appropriate. We have said that an idea is fundamentally a representation of a thing as it is in itself, independent of the mind. Since judgments are constituted of ideas, the judgment is also a representation of things as they are in themselves, independent of the mind. When our minds compare two ideas with each other and pronounces an agreement or disagreement between them, it actually compares two things with each other and judges about their agreement or disagreement among themselves as they are in reality. If a judgment coincides with reality, it is true and, if not, it is false.

The "test" of truth is, therefore, agreement of the judgment with reality. We verify a judgment by comparing it with the reality it is supposed to represent. We refer to this as objective evidence and this is the criterion of truth for us.

All in all I think that we get too caught up in trying to hurriedly sum someone up in 140 characters or less (twitter). Why make judgments that "fast" anyway? What's the rush? What's the point?