Ignorance and Knowledge

It struck me this morning that at bottom major religious movements rest on the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. In the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, the human problem is produced by Ignorance, our mistaking the insubstantial mirage produced in this dimension by matter and all that is connected to it. Ignorance is bliss? No. In these faiths ignorance is suffering. The Gnostic faiths, which left a footprint in the century before and in the century after our current calendar changed from BC to AD, emphasize Knowledge as that which helps us to escape from this dimension of Ignorance. In Gnosticism this world of ours is the false creation of the Demiurge, spreading confusion and thus capturing the free beings that we are. The same “knowing” is rendered as Enlightenment by the Hindus and the Buddhists.

The Western religions (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) are based on the actions that center on The Fall. That story is incoherent unless taken as a parable of how human consciousness arose. In effect it says, When Consciousness arose among humans, the world fell. Incoherent? Yes. Eve took the forbidden fruit. But to disobey God in any meaningful sense, she had to have had “knowledge of good and evil” before she ate of the fruit. To emphasize this, to understand what “forbidden” means, one has to understand good and evil already. Yet that knowledge only came, supposedly, after eating the fruit.

East and West, therefore, it seems to me, take their religious insights at different points in human development. The Eastern view already assumes the presence of a conscious humanity, but one that still lacks a crucial insight—unlikely to be acquired except by suffering. The Biblical account records, and labels as disobedience, a point in time when the knowledge of good and evil actually arose. The higher insight, in the West, comes when consciousness is expanded by Revelation—and Revelation is unlikely to motivate humanity in the absence of—suffering.

Another way to see this is to say that the East emphasizes the power of cognition, the West the powers of the will. Both are powers of the human soul—alongside feeling, intuition, and imagination. All of these powers, however, are one. They cannot be teased apart in actual living. They are all present in all decisions—to act or not to act in certain ways. But religious faiths can, and have, laid their emphasis on one or the other of humanity’s supposedly different powers. In truth they are the same single power. And it works—if we work.

Intellectual Grasp, Absence of Knowledge

Someone reached this blog by using the following search phrase: “intellectually understand but don’t know.” He or she got my post titled Understanding and Intellectual Grasp. In that post I argue the exact opposite of that situation, namely that a kind of wordless understanding is frequently present before we understand a matter intellectually. So what is the situation my visitor had in mind? He or she had in mind, I think, those situations where someone has successfully explained something at the conceptual level—but after we have “got it” we still haven’t got it; we still don’t know a thing.

A good example of this might be the explanation by modern physics of the electron supposedly circling the atomic core. We are told that the electron is “everywhere but nowhere.” It is a wave of probability. At the same time, if we wish to locate the electron we can set up an experiment to do so, and when we do, we can detect the electron (say on a photosensitive film). And this detection is then explained as the “collapse of the probability wave.” This is the sort of explanation which is intellectual graspable, but it doesn’t produce the feeling of knowledge. All we can do is repeat it to others, but we don’t really understand what we are talking about. When we seek a deeper understanding, we will be given the wave equation for starters. It looks like this:

Much of physics is of this character. The experiential base consists of experimental instruments, dial readings, and points of light on photographic film. The explanation is mathematical, the math derived from instrument readings. There is here a major disconnect between intellectual grasp and knowledge as we experience it. Okay. It is useful knowledge. We can apply it in practice in the design of electronic circuits, etc. Those circuits, however, are no more knowable in the core, in the gut, than the probability wave.

Let me now present an equally arcane counterexample where experience is involved. Let us say that you were mad enough to read the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy—in a version yet where the Italian text is in one column, the English translation in the other. And you arrive, at last, on the point where Beatrice, Dante’s great love, dead these many years, reappears to Dante on the portals of Paradise. She wears a dress di fiamma viva (of living flame), a green mantle over it, veiled in white, crowned with olive branches. The image shocks Dante, and he says: E lo spirito mio…d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza—And my spirit…felt the great power of the old love.

Now in this case the reader—if ever that reader has experienced genuine love, the kind we fall into, the kind we cannot help but feel, the kind that makes us remember our first love with a kind of numb and inarticulate awe—a person like that will not be puzzled by this magical appearance, by the fantastical procession that comes first, nor by the seemingly inaccessible assertion that this takes place in earthly paradise. All those concepts were at least felt to a tiny degree in our own first encounter with the magic of love. This is understanding based on experience—and later translated into intellectual concepts. The story of the electron’s sudden flash-up as its probability wave collapses—why that is intellectual grasp without understanding—unless, by a little magical trickery, we imagine that the beautiful electron, perhaps, is alike to the beautiful Beatrice, and that the wave’s collapse is like love’s crashing arrival on our own arid, sandy beach.
--------------------
Wave equation courtesy of Wikipedia. Dante reference is to Purgatory, Canto XXX, 31-33 and 40-42, translation by Charles Williams.