In Which I Learn A New Word: Knowingness

 I saw the title Our big problem is not misinformation; it’s knowingness from Aeon and curiosity got the better of me. What is knowingness? Jonathan Malesici explains:

Accounts of this crisis of knowledge, however, overlook how its differing elements arise from a common source. Our problem concerns not just the way we generate knowledge but our attitude toward knowledge, how we present ourselves to each other as knowers. Beneath the epistemological crisis is a deeper psychological one: the problem of knowingness. Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along.

I do not think I have seen the word, and the idea is a new one. My mother had a saying, tell me what I do not know. I do not see that as being knowingness. She did know and we were duplicating her knowledge and she wanted to get to what was new, what she did not know. I like to think I know how to do this - or have learned the talent again. There was a time when I thought I had seen everything and was worn out by what I knew. Turns out there was much I did not know, that there were interpretations taught me by experience not imagination.

Because it cuts off further investigation into the unknown, knowingness can have catastrophic results. Lear’s paragon of this attitude is Oedipus, the tyrant of Thebes in Sophocles’ eponymous play. Oedipus’ problems, Lear argues, are not ‘oedipal’. His tragic downfall does not result from a lust to kill his father or have sex with his mother. Rather, Oedipus’ fatal flaw is that, at every turn, he refuses to accept new information, because he always assumes he already knows what he needs to know. ‘What he misses completely,’ Lear writes, ‘is the thought that his “knowingness” lies at the heart of his troubles: what he doesn’t know is that he doesn’t know.’

If we stop inquiring we will all become what I once was - sunk in depression believing there was nothing but rot and death for a future. That came close to being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The essay proposes a mthod which accords with my own experieince:

In his openness to what the culture has to offer, Lear exhibits the virtues not only of the good analyst but of the good essayist. The masters of this genre – Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith – write in ways that are exploratory, tentative, eager to know more. ‘I put forward formless and unresolved notions,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘not to establish the truth but to seek it.’ Essayists in this tradition build conviction slowly, then deploy their insights to reveal something fresh about the world. They aim to win over the public – with evidence and sound logic, to be sure, but also with good humour and sensitivity to what readers might want.

The essayist adopts a posture, too. But it’s one of not-yet-knowing, of being open to the wonders, horrors and curiosities of our vast, shared world.

Those who have not read Montaigne, please go here. Those who have read him, re-read him. My own copies have disappeared since my arrest, still I will take my own advice and make up for my tardiness.

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