This idea of self-creation suggests something else important about error. Being wrong doesn’t just make us human in general; it also helps make each of us the specific person we are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears. This is what Benjamin Franklin was getting at in the quote I used as an epigraph to this book. Error, he wrote, is “the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it,” a place where “the soul has room enough to expand herself.” Mistakes, he meant, are the evidence and
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