I am at once inspired and confused as to how my Astronomy professor played varsity soccer. The guy is so precious!! ...nerdy in that "I like physics" kinda way, not the kind of person I would take for a varsity athlete. But he also ADORES his family. He's one of those guerrilla picture people who sneak pictures of their family into places you wouldn't expect so you have to admire them. Guess it just shows that you can never judge a book by its cover. Without any introduction at all I would have never guessed that this guy could play soccer. But apparently he was good at it.
This actually raises an interesting point about prejudice. I should probably stop here and point out that prejudice doesn't necessarily have to carry a racial and therefore negative connotation. Prejudice used to be a legal term. In some ancient systems, a group would hand out a prejudgement to some plaintiff, sort of like an indictment. This prejudgement could be negative or positive, but the final judgement did not always have the same verdict as the prejudgement. It was simply a way of acknowledging that any given jury was inclined to view the evidence in such a way that would render such and such a verdict.
The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that our prejudices help make the world intelligible. Gadamer's definition of a prejudice was, "a judgement that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined." Gadamer was intensely interested in the study of Hermeneutics of Language. He was curious as to how language, and the way we process it is related to understanding the world, and by extension our fundamental way of being in the world. For Gadamer, we reach out to the world around us; we are not simply static creatures that passively collect information like a camera. Part of our reaching out to the world around us in a quest for understanding what's out there is prejudice.
The key to prejudice is understanding that you have them. For Gadamer, no one will ever be able to completely rid themselves of their preconceived notions and prejudices. But so long as you can understand and anticipate where you will make those expected projections gives you a deeper understanding of meaning, being, and yourself.
So maybe its not terrible that I would have scoffed the first time I saw my professor and thought there was no way that he was a varsity athlete. But what would be terrible is if I scoffed without realizing the projection I was making about his ability. It's the things that we don't understand or acknowledge about ourselves that control us and make life shallow.
