The key to knowledge |
"There's the man who knows everything, but his wife doesn't listen to him." We recognize that there's "knowledge" and there's "knowledge". Which doesn't put knowledge into a box, nor into any number of boxes. Knowledge that fits into a box is worth something, as a pound of butter is worth something. If that pound of butter could swell out of the box and mutate into something else, different but the same, it would be worth more because it had more applications, or usefulness; and it would be definitely unknowable. How can you define what changes and changes? We say it is familiar, because it can be known, it can be determined, it can at a stage be exchanged as an identity of knowledge.
Words often sound like they mean something and don't. Words may be spoken that tease us with meaning. We understand what they say, but not in a way we could articulate. Mostly we understand words in a context and are satisfied to reuse them in that context. They are not ours to command. They are borrowed from someone else. Once upon a time every word was original. Thought up new. Coined, almost literally, made into currency, passed on, handed over, exchanged by representation as a thing of value, a property. The value changed, as all values do. Depending as they do on circumstances. They are inserted into a context, after all. Making it easier to understand them.
It may be possible to understand a word out of context. Could we apply it? If the man who knows everything can't apply his knowledge, what value does it hold on the market? It won't buy his wife potatoes.
Customers exist for goods that enjoy no value on the market. This lack of value can give them a magical allure. Even canny housewives can be beguiled and disenchanted. Many students of knowledge spend their lives enthralled by chimera, which they are sure hold a positive existence. They would call it rational. These chimera slide between context and context: There it is!... No, there it is! If it only had a tail to grab or a leg to stand on! How wonderful! And how mundane! Dexterous and artful professionals learn how to juggle these words like fruit or indian clubs, now you see them, now you don't, never exposed in a plain context. Or if they do, it's by hearsay (quotation upon authority) or anecdote. The sell the reputation of a good, not its value.
The above seems to suggest that we cannot truly understand knowledge -- that is, anything. Depends on what we mean by "truly", doesn't it? The canny housewife will tell you she understands her husband. He in turn will assure you he doesn't understand his wife. They both understand how to manipulate the toaster and exclaim with vexation when burnt toast proves they don't. So it's mundane knowledge. Does that make it less valuable? A good mechanic can often tell you what's wrong with your car engine by listening to it. Well, nowadays they rely on diagnostic tools. Whether an improvement or not, i leave you to judge. Sophistication ruins simplicity and takes technical knowledge off the common market. Fewer and fewer people know less and less about what they are doing.
Including me, you might say with justification. Isn't that the point? Try as we might to keep up with knowledge, to make sure we do understand what we hear, read and talk about, we find to our frustration that the gaps in the vistas widen. Surely there's a bottom to all this knowledge, a place to ground things, a comprehensible core, something to tie it together, or show a light on the dark places? Figures of speech. Alluding to other experiences in order to suggest insights, widening our possible knowledge.
"All cases of true tropism are cases of response to stimuli."
Quoted in O.E.D.
Sorry to intrude with a reference to a major authority. I am not selling the reputation of a good, i hope to place its value on the market. Tropes, indicators of context. Insights into knowledge. Instead of blundering around in the dark trying to pin a tail on the donkey we use that extra sense, comparison, which hinges on the effect of how things not related are related, shaking us out of our condition of inertia that we either know nothing or know it all. Comparison by incongruity.
Humour does this. Takes a subject out of context and elucidates by incongruity. From one context to another. A blinding light we later consider the light of common day, familiar, mundane. Ah, but it was once original. Original as in the beginning, and original where you supply the context. A light blooms we call knowledge. Not in a box. Not in an ordinary box. A jack-in-the-box if you like. Surprise, surprise!
Webster:"Archeology is made up entirely of anomalies," said Terence, "rearranged to make them fit in a fluky pattern. There'd be no system to it otherwise."
"Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit," said Robert Derby.R.A. Lafferty "Continued on Next Rock" P.137
inc. in World's Best S.F. 1971 Ace Books
Anomalies were brought to the forefront of attention by the discoveries of physical science. Planets had irregular orbits. How disturbing! The Grand Designer was not perfect in the science of design. The rock and anchor of human knowledge warped.
Webster:The word "anomaly" has been warped out of its original shape. Instead of being anchored firmly to substantial earth, as, say, a church on its literal foundations, analogy rocks the boat and anchors it in perilous waters. We shrug our shoulders. Tough luck! Ah but what about our foundations, aren't they settling like Venice into the slough of yesteryear?
Patterns help set our thoughts (and our words) straight. Warp and woof. Nets. Lattices. Matrices. A net* is not set to catch an anomaly. If it does so, it may wreck the net. The net must be adapted to what it wants to catch, not vice versa.
Simple. Rules are meant to account for regularity. We make special rules for exceptions. When or if we recognize them as exceptions. To declare the odd one out standard could be an act of brutality; not the act of an intelligent mind.
Every human being is an anomaly. Isn't that how we got here as a species? If we are a species in a hierarchy; and not an anomaly as theological assumption had it. Flukes, sports, rogues, mutations, tangents, varying by chance, design or serendipity from the common run, the standard, the normal, the regular, the anointed of generality. Because generality is the net we set to catch things in. Singularity is too much trouble. It provokes, like a sore thumb. We want to settle its hash and fit it into the package neatly. Do i warp my analogies indecently? There may be intelligence running through the solecisms. Through unpleasantness we may find succour. You get my drift?
Nature, or the Grand Designer, favours anomalies. Positively encourages anomalies. Throws them out indiscriminately (as we see it -- and what else, located as we are at a disadvantaged viewpoint?). Every human being is an anomaly. First. Thereafter patterned. Woven into the warp. The social net. The environmental net. Nets of all kinds. Nets we do not fit. Nets we adapt to. Nets we escape through. Nets we break. And don't forget, we throw our own nets, binding others to us, people and things. Rationality breaks down when confronted with this abomination of nets. Inconceivable! Generalities can't tolerate an overload of generalities. See my meaning? Impossible to conceive.
Shakespeare did more than stretch the bounds of the English language. He freed us from the grasp of literality. We could develop our own idiom, our own tongue. I mean individually. Like remaking the purlieus of the Royal Forest. Using a word originally. In a novel context. We could explore by means of intuition as well as reason. All very well to mark out lines no a plane, a grid, and lay it over the Royal Forest, but on foot we can get the feel of the land, choose what suits us. We make sense of the thickets and the coverts that before were no man's land, out of bounds. Language became more of the common individual's prerogative. Sense could be extended by acquiescence. We could admit what before was inconceivable, tangents to language. On the spot! Overnight. Some withered, some flourished. We got flexibility. We could express our feelings, our passions, our insights: the spirit of the age. In science, in religion, in knowledge. And not be punished for our impertinence. For pertinence had a new meaning: everyone was an explorer, frontiers could be investigated and declared open.
What is reason to make of this? Royal Reason. The crown of the intelligence.
Didn't we rule that Reason was akin to godliness: perfect, organized into standard generalities, categories that pyramid so as to include the individual groupings in a universal framework? A grand monument to homo sap. (as it is now) or man (as it was). But the foundations of everything are composed of individuals. Everything real sits squarely on anomalies. Exceptions that rub shoulders. Jostle. Strive to exist as they are at present. Reason assigns the patterns. Intuition questions them.
As Samuel Butler would point out: a higgling and haggling of the market. Rhythms, resonances are set up so that things flow sympathetically together. Substance, things-in- themselves made known by representations, determined by us to exist, doesn't sit still, caught and held, substance becomes fluid, energized translated into motion. There is no substance, except as we define it for our convenience: that oak tree, Jack Spratt, the mind. Our words for things must reflect the changes they go through and among those changes lies the determination called our individuality.
The things we are conscious of as sense-perceptions seem substantial. We can reach out and touch them. Yet what we are conscious of is an impression that our minds collect into a determination. Yonder stands a tree. We don't perceive the whole of the tree as it is because that is more than inconvenient, it is impossible. We take from it what we want, what we need and call it a tree. Certain points of interest that appear to be tree. A representation, as a photograph of a tree is a representation. Look at that photo closely. Myriad points make up what resembles tree to us. A generality. Another photo of the same tree would include other points, eliminate some, reproduce a different version, both because it is a second look and because the tree has changed.
The solution to the problem is a moving picture. A solution. What the eye does, in effect. Catches the expression of something. [The "eye" and the impression moving. As a set of frames in a film does.]
Rational judgments in the form of categorical generalities are not that flexible. Yes, the living body has been expressed in stone: what we supply is the imagination, an accord with the artist who carved the stone. The sympathetic motions. Pygmalion illustrates how we can imbue substance with life, with vitality, with grace, with individuality. A symbol for what we already know, in our recollections of things perceived and things felt.
When we like something we warp* it. When we hate something we warp it. We warp the representation, which for us is it. We warp our image of it.
Societies want people to be alike because they can be more easily controlled. Differences can make us uneasy. People that exhibit obvious difference may be discouraged out of their difference. They may be looked down upon. They may be ignored. Push them out of sight! So with other differences.
Regular. Irregular. Standard. Non-standard. Normal. Abnormal. Common. Uncommon. Anomalies that do not fit into our generalizations. Courts deal in precedents. Exceptions that alter cases. But see how long it takes to get them written into law. and when substantiated every case becomes tested by the exception. The rule has to be proved. Over and over. The reason? Reason itself. Rationality. Based on judgments. Nets are made out of words and sent to catch violators. Every hole in the net is a possible loophole.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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