Hey Kevconman,
If I were to tell you that I understand how a can-opener works, in a sense, it’s obvious that I’m lying. Isn’t it?
Sure, I can explain how the serrated cutter is wedged into the top of the can. I could go further and explain the metallurgy of the iron-carbon relationship of the steels involved. And I could go even further and talk about the properties of the various elements having to do with their valence electrons. And then I could drone-on about the forces at work on the atomic scale. But there would come a link in the explanation, beyond which even the great, Richard Feynman, would have had to fall silent.
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagen
Even in a supposedly causal world, non-tautological statements of commonplace knowledge attest only to the last few causal links in the chain; a hypothetical chain of links that extends back to a mythical origin. I say, “mythical origin” because Leibniz’ so-called “Principle of Sufficient Reason” is, metaphysically speaking, theological. Causa finalis is a term introduced by the medieaval scholastics. The other end of this hypothetical, causal-chain linking the can-opener is ultimately left dangling. Theologians want to plug the dangling end into their God. What they misunderstand is that their God, at best, adds but one more link to the chain. In that case, it’s their God that gets left doing the dangling.
But let’s back away from this endless causal chain and make a few distinctions. Of course, there’s a distinction to be made between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” Obviously, knowing how to play the violin doesn’t imply a physical understanding of how horsehair elicits sound from catgut. But what am I saying when I tell you that I know how a can-opener works? Am I attesting to infinite understanding? Obviously not. Knowing is relational. The fact that I know how a can-opener works only stands in relation to a man who hasn’t a clue of how a can-opener works.
“Content requires contingency. To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities.” Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry, 1984
To set human knowledge in relation to theological omniscience is to commit a blunder. Derrida diagnosed the blunder as logocentricism. Knowledge is a salient riding not under a sea of certainty but upon a sea of ignorance. To view it the other way around is to peer through the wrong end of the telescope.
Music, analogously, doesn’t depend on the existence of some hypothetically perfect tune, instead, it’s set against a background of noise. Noise is less interesting than music because it’s less predictable. And yet obvious and predictable tunes are boring as hell. Music is a balance between the random and the obvious, rather than the random and the perfect.
Non-tautological knowledge doesn’t require some hypothetical, metaphysically warranted certitude. Knowledge consists in discarding exformation. There is necessarily more information in disorder than in order. Disorder is the complex sea of “noise” against which our simple knowledge is set. Non-tautological human knowledge is not placed between ignorance and certainty, rather, it’s between ignorance and the bounds of knowing.
I, having built a house, reject
The feud of eye and intellect,
And find in my experience proof,
One pleasure runs from root to roof,
One thrust along a streamline arches
The sudden star, the budding larches.
The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
And drives the bee to match at home,
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined.
An icy sweetness fills my mind,
A sense that under thing and wing,
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.
Jacob Bronowski, The Abacus and the Rose
Best,
Michael