Personal Knowledge: Summary

Personal Knowledge is a simple book with a simple plan. The whole is this, understanding the world is a practical endeavor. As such, we need to practice the art of understanding the world. And as practice, understanding the world is neither a skill nor knowledge we can understand through the mere reading of books.

He describes this view of the world through the history and psychology of science. And to the end of this world-description, the book has a very natural four-fold plan. (1) We note that skillful knowing is present in even the most objective of sciences. (2) This note spurs our considering the relationship between objective articulated knowledge and our subjective tacit skill in knowing. (3) These meditations now beg the question, How can we be confident in our knowledge, seeing that it relies on our temporary finite and error prone selves? And (4) our answers point us to an understanding of all of life, which shows the same process of personal knowledge. This understanding is reflected upon and gives us direction in understanding how we must relate to other knowing selves and what our relations say about our place in the universe.

Because we are discussing the nature of knowledge and our place as knowing agents, it is natural to look at all aspects of our lives, from science, to politics, to religion. And these diverse reflections bolster and support and help us understand the main idea: knowledge is personal, communal, and essential for the fullness of life.

Experience and Its Modes :: Introduction

Never have I liked the term "Nerd." In its own right, the image of a prototypical nerd is repulsive. A nerd is a pocket-protector-wearing, glasses-pushing, nasal, winy, weakling who knows all the book facts, but knows nothing of sometimes-stupid, in-the-moment fun of actually living. At a party, or during work, or inside the church, the nerd breaths his athematic breath neurotically and obsessively classifying things in a thin mutter, "this, not that. A not B." His frail being has no relevance, no gravity, and he is a wisp, the ghost all men wish to avoid becoming. Ghosts don't leave a mark on the world, and those with asthma are neither feared nor respected. They don't do the world good, except indirectly, a la silicon valley. And so even to think of the nerd is unpleasant.

Who are the nerds? Every university professor who actually does his work. Every science-lover. Every historian. Everyone with the least bit academic bent, and everyone who dares to enjoy what he finds in a book as a form of art.

But the application of "nerd," this is where my real dislike comes in. It's an irritating word because it is useful. It describes our situation, what exists in our collective imagination, our collective unconscious. Where is there a man who knows a lot and isn't a nerd? Not near and hard to stumble across. And it is difficult to think of an actual scholar living in the popular imagination who is not really a nerd. Only in myth do intellectual non-nerds find our respect: Aristotle or Indiana Jones. But! These men live respected only in the imagination of the nerds!

I read Michael Oakeshott's Experience and It's Modes as a restoration of the intellectual in the life of the world. Oakeshott gets at what really drives everyone crazy about the nerds, what causes us to deride the nerds, and what tempts us to flee the love of knowledge which would make us a nerd. This is what Oakeshott says, There is a place for the nerd to be a nerd, and there is a place for the doer of things to be a practical man. We can live harmoniously if we learn to appreciate the differences of living like a nerd means against that of living like a liver of life. If we don't appreciate these differences, nerds' egos will tempt them that their bookish knowledge means they are qualified to be a liver of life, and so they will boss everyone around like know-it-alls; this will cause resentment by practical men, because they actually know how to do things and to live life. Thus practical men will be tempted to think there is nothing to books and learning. This is clearly a bad situation. All to often this is our situation.

Experience and It's Modes says that such distinctions in our outlook exist, and if we don't recognize them, we get into trouble, because we are confused. This book, which I will outline in a few posts, is a clearing away of basic confusions like these.

How Language is Objective

"I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."
- Burnt Norton

The other day I listened to Radiohead's Kid A, digesting it's meaning.

What's confusing about the album, and a lot of contemporary music, is that it's very hard to delineate meaning. By their own admission, Radiohead cut up lyrics, put them in a hat, and drew them out randomly to what what formed Kid A. In a similar way, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland is a jumpy mess; what had a coherent structure, was thrown into random pieces by Ezra Pound. He told Eliot that it did the poem better. Eliot agreed.

An aim of music and poetry is to convey mood. At their hight, music and poetry needles you with a very sharp point, striking the heart with a very refined, cutting meaning. But just because the meaning is very clear to feeling, it doesn't follow that it's easy to communicate. Observe the volumes written on Eliot's poetry, look at youTube commenters on Yorke's lyrics. People are in awe, they return to a definite mood trying to understand an experience they count as significant.

What is cause for wonder is that language can convey significant meaning that can't easily be analyzable, if at all. But no one who has had this experience can tell you that the poetry means nothing for being hard or impossible to dissect.

Now what's fashionable in American philosophy is seeking knowledge through clear reasoning, where propositions can be lined up like dominos, ready for the mind to follow the chain to a certain and well defined effect. This certainty is taken to be the surest vehicle to arrive at truth. If all men are mortal, and if Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. Not even Socrates could doubt that chain of logic! Right?

But if we were to be given something like Radiohead's lyrics,

"Red wine and sleeping pills 

Help me get back to your arms
Cheap sex and sad films
Help me get back where I belong

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

Stop sending letters
Letters always get burned
It's not like the movies
They fed us on little white lies

I think you're crazy, maybe
I think you're crazy, maybe

I will see you in the next life." 

- Motion Picture Soundtrack

Or Eliots,

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air. 

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth. 

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire

 - Little Gidding

Or the Bible's,

"The day you eat of it you will surely die."

we're left knowing what death is and believing not only that we will die, but that we do die, and are already dead(!); whereas, if we know Socrates at all, he doesn't believe that all men die, and will contest premises upon premises till he's blue in the face.
But we're told that the more poetic stuff is not clear; since it hits our subjective self in a way that isn't easily put into propositions, we're left without a very clear way of arbitrating mis-interpretation. We might be lead astray by our private whims into error.
But for anyone who has read a particularly forceful piece of writing, he is sure that the understanding he perceives is correct; though not completely specifiable. Since the meaning he perceived is not completely known to himself, he is also open to other's thoughts to add to his comprehension; however, he knows what is true and false, what goes and what doesn't.
What's going on is that readers are perceiving a meaning. And this meaning is real and objective to anyone who has experienced it.
Now let's look at those who insist on precise argumentation. Their motivation is to find a way of arriving at truth that is completely objective, through a series of formal propositions. It's perfectly clean and incontestable. And surely there are ways of being formal and precise in language that's more organized and easier to follow. However! Nothing will ever convince someone of the truth in language who either does not want to experience it.
So even though language is intensely subjective, it also has objective meaning. And we should be comfortable with any sentence that conveys our point, poetic or prosy. Those who insist on complete objectivity find themselves defining their terms without end (a la Socrates), and falling into complete skepticism (a la Socrates).