on not knowing
not knowing is ok. not knowing is important. some of my favourite thinkers have written around the edge of this rabbithole, each circling the same quiet centre: not knowing is a powerful and beautiful thing.
fernand deligny ↗ refused to interpret or explain away the lives of the children he lived alongside; in his essay the arachnean ↗, instead of seeking meaning, he sketched a way of attending to without capturing, by simply mapping the wander lines of non-verbal children rather than imposing meaning on their actions and lives.
rené daumal ↗ treated conscious ignorance as a discipline; in his unfinished novel mount analogue ↗ to ascend mount analogue can only commence once one admits not already knowing what the mountain is. he wrote:
so what's the point? only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. while climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. during the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.
ivan illich ↗ dismantled the authority of institutional expertise; in deschooling society ↗ he questions the assumption that learning must be managed by those who claim superior knowledge. he believed that ignorance, not knowing something, should not be demonised but instead embraced.
gustavo esteva ↗ and madhu s. prakash treated development and schooling as forms of epistemic control; in escaping education: living as learning within grassroots cultures ↗ they argue that communities already possess ways of knowing and not knowing that do not need to be formalised or corrected by a colonial authority.
simone weil ↗ understood attention as an emptying of the self; in waiting for god ↗ she believed that real attention suspends certainty so that something true may enter. on attention she wrote about waiting for and not seeking knowledge and truth:
attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached: empty and ready to be penetrated by the object … our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.
all together these thinkers suggest that when knowledge hardens into authority it begins to dominate, and that a disciplined unknowing: patient, attentive, and relational, keeps perception alive. embracing not knowing allows us to slow down, it is no longer important to consume information at speed. we are able to rest assured that maybe some day we will know, or maybe we won't ... let's not judge or push any authority upon any who know and those who don't. celebrate your unknowing as much as your knowing.
i'll close this log with this plate of tasty brain burgers 🧠🍔🍔:
there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. we also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. but there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
donald rumsfeld ↗