Knowledge

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Socrates, Aristotle and Einstein all realised this. And it's a statement worth unpicking. First of all, what do we mean by to 'know'?

Einstein — boy to man.

There's a world of seemingly incontrovertible facts and figures out there, things which by and large are not a matter of opinion. The moon spins round the earth. The earth spins round the sun. Trump and Clinton are the USA's presidential candidates. The capital of Venezuela is Caracas. The kind of bald truths churned out in question and answer form on the innumerable quiz shows which plague the media in the guise of entertainment.

Then there's the wealth of information and misinformation grounded in hearsay, gossip, prejudice, conjecture, supposition, intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) guesswork, propaganda, and religious, political and economic belief. Jesus married Mary Magdalene. Marlowe and others co-wrote many of Shakespeare's plays. Eating cheese increases your chance of a heart attack. Allah is the one true God. The Labour party is the best. Communism is dead.

A few things we can be completely sure about, i.e. mathematical formulations, such as one plus one equals two, and syllogisms, such as 'All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal'. These rather uninteresting truths are true for all time and are what philosophers call a priori truths. Most other truths are empirical truths — whether 99.9% certainties (the sun will rise tomorrow) or highly dubious beliefs which are advocated by some but disparaged by others (wearing a copper bracelet will help the arthritis in your wrist). There's a vast spectrum of truths and beliefs, ranging from unassailable logical truth to absolute falsehood, with many shades of truth, half-truth and untruth in-between.

If we consider the whole of history, how many things can we be utterly sure of? The accuracy of some dates and the reality of some personages and events, certainly. But many things remain in obscurity or semi-obscurity. What was the actual cause of the First World War? What was Rasputin's true character? Why do we think the Greeks invented democracy when their empire was built on slavery? Did Atlantis really exist?        

Science seeks and often uncovers the truth (cigarette smoking is likely to cause lung cancer), but this may only be a relative truth (Galileo and Einstein turned astronomy and physics upside down), dependent on the historical timeline.

The point of all this is to say quite simply that truth is a tricky business — and we haven't even begun to consider emotional truth, imaginative truth or artistic truth.

The reason I'm trying to sort out my feelings about truth and knowledge at the moment is that I feel I'm being bombarded with incredible amounts of information — from the Internet, from social media, from TV and radio, from politicians, economists, new-age gurus and other pundits, from salespersons, from books and magazines, from just about everyone and everywhere. And this flow of information ever increases. But to whose benefit? Do we really want to know all those facts about celebrity and sport and TV shows regurgitated by the blotting-paper brains of quiz show contestants? Do we really need to fill our minds with pro-and-contra arguments about every conceivable subject? Are we really going to be made to feel inadequate because we haven't mastered this or that skill or learnt this or that fact in order to increase our kudos in the eyes of contemporary society?

Faced with this onslaught of undifferentiated, often trivial information, we have the ability, thank goodness, to select, discriminate and shut out the bits we want to shut out. I refuse to be jealous of those with apparently huge mental reservoirs of facts and figures, of arguments and opinions, who are able to recall them and rehearse them at will. I refuse to be intimidated by the pressurised demands of the noisy and instant information age. I want to read and watch and hear and learn and digest the things which I myself decide I want to know, and to hell with the rest. 

For I know that, despite all we know, we know very little, and, anyhow, knowledge is quite a different beast from wisdom. I read a great deal, but I know I'll never read all the books I want to read, and I don't care. (Or I tell myself I don't care.) Often it's far more rewarding to know one thing in depth rather than many things superficially. And knowledge itself, as we've found, is a slippery creature. For instance, take our own mind and body. They are our two constant and intimate companions — but do we really know them? I would hazard barely at all. Take a random subject — China, say, or geophysics, or Mediterranean flowers, or phenomenology, or a million others. Unless we happen to be a specialist in that particular area, do we really know very much about any of them? (I'm not saying that we should do — a small amount of knowledge may well be all that is necessary for our sanity, despite the saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing.)   

I come back to this. I know that the more you know, the more you don't know — as Socrates, Aristotle and Einstein once said. Actually, in the end, that's quite a comforting notion.

Knowledge

The field of knowledge is vast, limitless.

A book I'm reading at the moment is Jon Thompson's How to Read a Modern Painting. Among many other artists he features Monet, Manet, Seurat, Van Gogh — all people we've heard of, of course. But he also mentions Charles Gleyre, Frédéric Bazille, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson. Have you come across them? Me neither. But they were all well-known painters of their day. It's just the leading innovators and charismatic celebrities whose names survive in the common consciousness and crop up in quiz questions and factual digests. But beneath this top tier of artists who outwitted obscurity and became eternal (Van Gogh after death), there's another bigger tier of tireless practitioners who peaked in their time but whose names have now faded from view; and beneath that an even bigger tier of talent never popular when alive, still unknown now, and perhaps never destined to be recognised; and beneath that thousands upon thousands of striving creators, some struck (stuck?) with genius, others merely amateur followers of their craft . . .

Our knowledge of art — and of all things — is usually confined to the top of the pyramid, the tip of the iceberg of knowledge (unless we happen to be a specialist in that subject — and, even then, our specialism may cover only one deeply-worked seam of the whole mine).

We can never know everything; indeed, we can only ever know a small proportion of all there is to know. And even if we knew everything, there are still all those things which remain to be discovered, and there's also that huge and barely-explored realm of universal space-time knowledge and spiritual God-knowledge which is normally beyond the grasp of our comprehension.

And to go back to Monet, Manet and Seurat: to be honest, how much do we really know about them? Not a lot, if we're truthful — perhaps a few picture reproductions and potted biographies and soundbites. It all depends on what we're interested in, what our specialities are, how much time we've got, the condition of our memories, and so on.

Speaking for myself, I'm a generalist at heart, and like to think I know a little about a lot. I'm under no illusion, however, that I'll ever know all the fascinating things there are to know. In fact, I realise that I'll only ever know a tiny fraction of all these things, only ever nibble away at one corner of the enormous loaf of knowledge, and this only imperfectly and often half-heartedly, leaving undigested crumbs in my wake. With every book I read I'm only too aware that the list of books I want to read extends daily. With every journey I make and every place I visit I'm only too aware that the number of journeys I'd like to make and the number of places I'd like to visit is infinite.

The key here, I think, is to adopt a Zen-like calm and acceptance about this complex, brain-numbing affair of knowledge and experience. We can only ever know and experience a few things, so let's try to ensure we know and experience them as profoundly and as radiantly as we can. Let's explore depth and quality rather than surface and quantity.

As HUGH OF ST VICTOR (c. 1096-1141) wrote:

Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.

Whatever we know or don't know, do or don't do, have experienced or have not experienced, it doesn't matter; the important thing is to live one's life as beautifully, as resonantly and as meaningfully as one can. 

Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? . . . What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that . . . The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have . . . Live!

HENRY JAMES The Ambassadors