On Knowledge

I must confess, prior to writing this present investigation, to be a lover of that which I will soon describe to be my subject. While that might not seem a big confession, or even on that is necessarily due, given that writers write what they know and they know, often, what they love, or in defense of that which they love and write in opposition to its opponents, I think in this given instance it is important for me to disclose my prior association.

The reason for this disclosure is I aim to write about Knowledge and Knowing, concepts which invariably are tied to the concept of Truth and carry with them something of terms like “Subjectivity” and “Objectivity.” In the context of philosophy, and in light of the modern scientific vogue, the former of these terms is treated with a measured level of suspicion and the latter is seen in a light of something more akin to “Truthful.” A more thorough discussion of Subjectivity and Objectivity awaits my writing elsewhere, but I bring those terms to bear here because it is important for me to observe that the mere confession – or profession – of a “love of knowledge” has an effect on how my discussion of Knowledge should proceed.

Which is to say, that if someone were to press me to become “Objective” regarding Knowledge, I would say that what they ask me to do is impossible. There is no way for me to Know about Knowing outside of Knowing it, and to Know it is to be Relational, i.e. Subjective, with that thing. This will become even more clear as I describe what I view to be the eternal character – that is, the essential character – of Knowledge. Yet for some this “un-Objective” method of engagement is discouraging; they would rather that I would be able to put Knowledge in a box, say that I have mastered it, say that I “have” Knowledge or “get” Knowledge or “control” Knowledge.

Yet a person can be a master of something without having “total Knowledge” of the thing. This is the funky thing about “Knowing” in that “to Know” implies some sort of mastery – “I Know how to play piano,” “I Know how to make scrambled eggs,” “I Know basic Calculus” – one might even describe that mastery in ascending layers of Knowledge: “I Know how to play a little piano,” “I Know how to play piano, fairly well,” “I Know how to play Beethoven on the piano,” or “I Know how to play anything of any difficulty on piano.” Even that final term of mastery, what we might call “the greatest piano player” or whatnot, there are limits: there are pieces that the pianist does not yet Know, albeit has the confidence he or she could play them (after all, Joseph Haydn wrote 60 piano sonatas; how many of them does our pianist know off-hand?); there are pieces that have not yet been composed that the pianist has no way of playing; and, even more abstractly, there are pieces that will never be composed or which have not been composed because they are technically impossible, and etc. etc.

It is utterly appropriate for us to call the master pianist a master, however, and to say that he or she truly Knows the Piano. This is deeper than a competitive “Knows the Piano better than me,” for instance. Our master pianist does not need to provide the Socratic paradox to confess this gap in his or her Knowledge and Total Knowledge. We do not need to over-analyze the impossibility of him or her “having” Knowledge. It is just sufficient to note that this person, who beyond doubt Knows the Piano, is still confronted with the Mystery of not “Having Knowledge” of the Piano. We could go further in this sort of analysis, of course, a describe how the master pianist, unless he or she is also a physicist, has no understanding of the physics underneath sound or the engineering mechanics of the piano beyond its basic structures.

All this goes to say that there is something Relational about Knowledge, even its most basic of forms. I say Relational because when we are faced with another Person, say one’s wife or husband, or a friend or brother, with whom we are well acquainted, we can easily say “I Know Such-and-Such.” In the parlance of the Hebrew Old Testament, we observe that the Hebrew yada’ is used to connote the intimate relationships of man and wife, so that the statement “I Know My Wife” implies a fundamental, sexual level intimacy. Yet – whether we are discussing general or sexual relationships – we all understand that to Know another Person is to come face-to-face with Mystery. After all, however much of their Person they have disclosed to us, their real natures are always hidden. We see their faces, we see their body language, and in the case of sexual intercourse a Person literally experiences the other Person, yet there is a fundamental part of their nature that is utterly hidden from us.

It would be foolish, in my opinion, to assert that this lack of Knowledge implies something of an agnostic relationship with that person. A nihilistic view on this regard, such as the solipsism of Walter Pater, says that we can never truly Know another Person. Experience tells us differently on this regard. Sure, there are some people who are so dynamic or so unsettled or so random that they can be hard to pin down – but there are just as many, if not more, people in our lives with whom we regularly enjoy company and with whom we can give account of their characters and persons to others. “So-and-So is a kind soul who enjoys movies and is one of the best listeners I know.”

This is not false Knowledge, nor is it deception. There are claims here that might not be temporally bound, of course: So-and-So might grow out movies later on in his or her life, or maybe they will become a grumpy curmudgeon in their old age and cease to be an effective listener. There are claims here that I might be mistaken on: maybe So-and-So has been lying to me this whole time. But, actually, since So-and-So here is built on a real Person that I personally really Know, I can confess that doubting So-and-So’s character in this way is not only ungracious to that Person, but also not the way that we implicitly engage with people. But “How do we ‘Know for sure’ that So-and-So is this way?” Maybe the right phrase is to say that “We take it on Faith that he or she is this way.” If I follow the term “Faith” in its proper Greek origins – as the term is used as a translation of Paul’s pistis – then this word means something like, or like unto, “Trust.”

The problem of Knowledge that we are navigating here can also be unfolded through the helpful aid of pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno. Zeno’s most famous paradox, of course, is that well-known story of Achilles running, and the impossibility of Achilles to reach his end-destination due to the ever-decreasing halves that he has to overcome to reach the end. “Before Achilles can reach point 1, he first has to reach point ½, but before he can reach ½, he must first reach ¼.” And so forth and so on.

We could say that there is a similar phenomenon when we discuss Knowledge in the ways that we have been discussing Knowledge. One could view Knowledge in the gross general fashion: “I Know 50% of the facts regarding X, Y, and Z, and that is what makes me somewhat Knowledgeable about the topic.” (Of course, good luck in defining what makes a singular “fact” so one can do the calculation there.) The reality of this version of the theory of Knowledge is that it falls into Zeno’s paradox: “Before I can really Know something, I first must Know these things; but before I can Know those things, I first must Know these things…”

Yet, we all Know, implicitly, that Achilles has no problem with running. (There is a problem in his heel, but that’s another story…) Actually, we Know, by experience, that Zeno’s whole algorithm is nonsensical. You and I have no problem crossing to a particular point. And, at this point in history, we Know, by mathematics, that there is a way to calculate the whole circuit based on these subdivisions (re: integrals). What Zeno teaches us is that we Know how to walk even though we don’t Know how walking really works. The pianist does not “Know X% of the Available Knowledge of the Piano,” but “Knows the Piano,” in a way that is not too distant or distinct from the way a Person might say “I Know So-and-So,” or I might say “I Know My Wife.”

Thus, the modern way of describing Knowledge in terms of “acquisition” or “having” or “getting” does not make sense in light of the lived experience of Knowledge. This is not to say that there are not deceptions. Since this present study is an attempt to describe something of the character of Knowledge, there is an implicit connection between this writing and the historical conversation on the topic of epistemology. Without diving too much into what previous thinkers have said about Knowledge – and they have said a lot – I think it’s worthwhile to observe the ways in which the fear of deception, the fear of being “taken in,” affects epistemology. René Descartes, famously, having “read the book of the world,” fled to his cottage to find Knowledge. While I have much I could say about Descartes, it is his idea that he could find Knowledge in isolation, removed from the world, removed from the Other, with implicit trust in his own self-reflections that seems to me more deceptive than the possible deception of the world or the Other.

There are deceptions, of course, and these are deeply problematic, especially in the modern world of social media, false information, or what has been recently dubbed “post-truth” (which seems faulty, given the long-term existence of “post-truth” sorts of thinking). Yet the search for Knowledge cannot be found in its antithesis: the flight from deception. There’s a logic argument to be made there: to find Knowledge, one must search for Knowledge not for not-not-Knowledge.

Another, perhaps more convincing, argument against the sort of epistemological program that I have been circling about is the one made by Jean-Paul Sartre in which he describes how the human being acts and believes in “Bad Faith” with himself. That is, we are all self-deceived, and if we are all self-deceived, then how can we put any stock in the experiential Knowledge that I have been providing throughout this argument as “trustworthy”? I won’t tackle that argument for now, but I will say that as a Christian I find Sartre’s claim of self-deception more winsome than Descartes’ radical doubt and resultant self-knowledge. Descartes’ answer to the Delphic Oracle is “I think, that is how I know myself,” but Sartre’s is “I think I know myself, but in reality I lie to myself.” The latter is, surprisingly enough, the more Christian answer.

So, the discussion up to this point can be summed up like this: that Knowledge is more a Relationship with a Mystery than it is a quantifiable substance; that to Know something or someone does not require utter mastery in common parlance nor does it require absolute Knowledge; that the request to Know “in an objective way” is built on a false premise of intellectual distance; and, yet, that there is a problem, which I have not yet addressed, regarding the trustworthiness of our faculties regarding Knowledge. The answer to deception provided by Descartes falls flat for us because it does not edit out Descartes himself from the process (as he professes!).

One vitally important going forward from here, then, is the term of “Faith.” When I say “I Know you,” I take it on Faith that you are not lying to me, that you are not deceptive, that you are, in fact, the sort of Person that I take you to be, as you have revealed your character thusfar in our Relationship. If I truly “Know you,” actually, then this Faith in your character is not simply sufficient for me to say “I have a sense of who he or she is,” but is actually wholly sufficient for me to say “I am absolutely confident that their character implies X, Y, and Z.” For the people that I Know well, those with whom I confide my closest secrets and values, the term of Faith here does not imply a “blind following” or “uncritical belief,” but, instead, implies a deeply-true trust in their nature, that they are who they say they are.

In other words, since it is clear – and modern epistemologists agree on this – that the Objective view of Knowledge is unsustainable, then we are left with something more akin to a “Subjective” view of Knowledge, where to Know is to put oneself into some sort of (yet undefined) Relationship with some sort of (yet unclear) Mystery. Descartes’ worry about Deception undoubtedly follows us: “How do you really Know?” Meanwhile, Sartre contends that our Knowing is a self-manufactured falsehood. In order for this conversation to proceed, then, we must find the ways in which Faith, the term that undergirds our Relationship to Mysteries, overcomes Deception in a sure manner. That will be our next topic.