The Blind Men and The Elephant

Humility From Umwelt

A group of blind men heard that a strange creature called an elephant had come to their village, and none of them knew what it looked like. Curious, they each approached the animal to investigate by touch.

One grasped the trunk and declared, “An elephant is like a snake.” Another felt a leg and said, “No, it’s like a tree.” A third touched the side and insisted, “Surely, it’s a wall.” One held the tail—“A rope,” he said. Another, touching an ear, thought it was a fan.

They argued, each convinced of their truth, unable to see that they were all partly right and entirely wrong. The elephant, whole and complex, was beyond any one perspective.

Over the last day or so, I was fortunate to host Sean Havas (@raisedxsharks on IG), a media professional known for his work filming sharks, here in Virginia Beach. He came to record content with me for some upcoming projects—including videography of beach training, jiu jitsu, and a longer-form interview we shot at my home gym, Coastal BJJ.

Sean’s current project wasn’t just about sharks, hard physical training, combat sports, or necessarily physical skills at all. Instead, it was driven by his interest in exploring mindsets that propel human beings to evolve and achieve. For some reason, he wanted to make a stop on his drive back to Florida to talk with me.

In the conversations leading up to our interview—and during it—we covered a lot of ground around mindset. But a key theme kept surfacing: humility. I told Sean that I feel like humility often becomes just another trope, tossed around without much weight. It’s one of those words that’s like a piece of gum you’ve chewed too long—it’s still there, but it’s lost its flavor.

Humility is absolutely important. But if it’s just some empty advice printed on the back of a t-shirt—who cares?

Umwelt

The last few weeks I’ve been connecting with the idea of Umwelt. Check out my recent Instagram posts (@thecheckenginelight) to see some of the thoughts that preceded this article. Umwelt is a term coined by German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll; it's a philosophical viewpoint that we don’t experience the world as it is, but according to what is meaningful to us as we are.

“For each creature, a world surrounds it, filled with meaning; a world it has itself created. This is the animal’s Umwelt—a subjective universe that is as real and rich as ours, even if it is radically different.”

I had heard this term before but wasn’t deeply acquainted with its meaning until recently, when I read Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by renowned primatologist Frans De Waal. In it, De Waal reveals layers of animal Umwelt, and further shows how many experiments designed by humans to test animal intelligence were based on woefully shortsighted methodologies.

For example, one experiment that sought to determine whether or not chimpanzees could recognize faces first falsely concluded that chimps did not have this ability—because they failed under the test conditions. The catch? The images were of human faces. When the chimps were retested using chimp faces, they could easily tell their peers apart—and could even correctly assess familial connections. As it turns out, they’re not dumb at all. The test we devised was anthropocentric.

De Waal’s book is filled with examples like this, and it got me thinking. Not only is there species-level Umwelt, but there is also personal Umwelt. My felt and lived experience are different than yours. That means there are bound to be fundamental differences in how we perceive the world around us, and by extension, what opportunities for action we attune to. Take a minute and consider that on multiple levels of analysis—physical, psychological, social, etc.

All that to say: any and all perspectives are, by nature, limited. We have incredibly limited information, filtered through our own experiences and biases. This drives home how little of the picture we often have access to—not just from species to species, but from person to person.

Which brings me right back around to humility.

Blind Perspective

If we accept that there’s an Umwelt for each of us, and that as a result we have a limited perspective through which we interpret the world according to what’s meaningful to us, then in my opinion there’s only one reasonable conclusion we can arrive at: we don’t know as much as we think we do. Even the most informed among us is armed with limited information that is filtered through their own Umwelt.

So can we use this knowledge to better embody humility—so it doesn’t become another trite gas station bumper sticker? By admitting that none of us has the answers. During breakfast after morning training, Sean made an observation about our post-mortem debrief after each game we played. He said he’s never seen so much collaboration in group training before. Once my ego breezed past the compliment, I informed Sean that this is how coaching should be. I then shared with him a great quote from my friend and elite track and field coach, Stu McMillan:

“The athlete can’t see what I can see. And I can’t feel what they feel. We need each other.”

That’s collaboration founded on humility. There is no knowing so much that you’ve arrived. That there’s nothing more to glean and nothing else to learn. Not because we run out of hard drive space, but because our Umwelt precludes us from the experience of others. But if you know it, you can develop enough perspective to ask.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

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