WELL, THANK YOU, MR. KNOW-IT-ALL I think it's important to say what you feel. When you face it squarely, it's easy to see that it's all we're really doing anyway. To claim that we're not saying how we feel, but what we know, is to posture as if we actually do know something. I hope that I have never given the impression that I am somehow privy to knowledge that others do not have. I make no such claims. I might be privy to perspectives that others don't have, but not knowledge. There is a difference. When it comes to the knowledge thing, I agree with Socrates, who believed very firmly that the only knowledge we have is that we haven't any. Socrates believed that he knew nothing. He also believed that no one else knew anything, in spite of all their posturing. The only difference between himself and all the other posers of his time was that he knew that he knew nothing. The knowledge of being without knowledge was his state of enlightenment. Knowledge is indeed a tricky thing. Ultimately, it's all wrapped up in self referencing, another one of my favorite sermons (right up there with Time). How could you know that you know? That is the question. By contrast, the question, How do you know that you feel? seems absurd. Feeling is our knowledge. We feel. We do not know. Now of course this doesn't apply to what we are so pleased to call knowledge in technical fields, or of history, or geography, or of the proper way to write and speak the language. I am not using the word knowledge in that sense. There is a difference between knowledge and information, which is primarily data. We say that a doctor knows how to remove an appendix because of his vast medical knowledge, but I think we misspeak when we talk this way. A doctor knows how to remove an appendix because of his specialized access to information, information he has acquired from textbooks, and time spent in classrooms and laboratories. While attending schools, we do not acquire knowledge so much as information. Proper Knowledge (with a capital K) extends itself to such high-minded things as Beauty and Truth and Justice (and yes, God). Yet even here we are in the realm of feelings. What is beautiful but what we feel to be so? What is true but the correspondence of one thing with another, a condition that we ourselves have defined? The more I think on it, the more I feel that Knowledge is like Time, only a word. We may claim to know something, but it is we who are making the claim. And that which we claim, if we look closely at it, has been pre-defined, something we arranged - with ourselves - beforehand, as if we had said, "If I come across such and such, it will be God, or Truth, or Beauty." It is we who are establishing these conditions. It is we who are thus making it so. We are creating worlds out of thin air. Which is fine. I am an unabashed great lover of fantasy. But then we turn around and claim that the world that we were merely fantasizing into existence was already there! We claim that we discovered a world of Truth and Beauty and God, somehow forgetting that we created the world ourselves by pre-defining its conditions. The thing itself (which we discovered) may not be beautiful (or true or God). It merely matches something we carried around in our head for a long time, something that we called (i.e., imagined as) beautiful, or true or God.
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