What It's Like to Know It All

1500 words; 8 minute read

When I was 25 years old, I knew pretty much everything there was to know… and I still do! (Just ask my long-suffering spouse!)

More precisely, I knew almost everything I needed to know. (Who needs Latin, or Trig, right?) Sure, there were important holes and considerable elaboration was still required but it felt as though what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me…and it still seems that way to me today.

Of course, most of the socially conditioned propositions I accepted eagerly c. 1970 turned out to be false. I have replaced them with a new set of eagerly accepted, socially conditioned propositions. 

The content of my gnosis has changed (doxa) radically but the structure (Aletheia) has not…with one exception: I now know something I didn’t know 50 years ago. I now know that I didn’t know sh*t in 1970.  

Therefore, symmetry requires me to be at least open to the possibility that what I think I know now may be no more accurate or exhaustive, objectively speaking, than what I thought I knew 50 years ago. (Intuitively, I’m sure that’s true!)

Let’s get clear: most of what I thought I knew at 25 was wrong – partly because of my own shortcomings but mostly because of the ‘primitive’ state of global knowledge c. 1970, compared to now.

Compared with everything that is available to be known, objectively, it is likely that the sum total of everything that is known is infinitesimal. Put another way, the gap between what is known or knowable (at any point in time) and what is actual at that time may be infinite. 

Sometimes called the ‘Negative Way’ by philosophers and theologians, this approach was ‘popularized’ by Nicholas of Cusa (15th century CE): the most we can ever hope to know about God is that we know and can know nothing!

That is not to say that knowledge is useless. It has enormous importance, but that importance is limited to local regions of spacetime and specific human projects. There is no such thing as a universal algorithm or problem solving technique. (Godel)

What I know I know in relation to a specific undertaking in a specific region of spacetime. Shift my situs or my focus and you change my gnosis. 

Speaking simplistically, every actual entity, every event, every undertaking is concerned with knowledge at three levels: (1) what is actual, (2) what is knowable, (3) what is known.

By ‘actual’ I mean an exhaustively detailed account of the event itself. By ‘known’ I refer to the sum total of true propositions I entertain relative to the event. By ‘knowable’ I mean the universe of true propositions, relevant to the event, that lie within my universe of discourse. 

A newborn does not know that she does not know the structure of the solar system. Not her fault. It’s just not in her universe of discourse. So we don’t say that her intuitive model is ‘wrong’ – she can’t be expected to know what she can’t even imagine.

In order for X to be knowable, it is necessary that I be able to form propositions related to X. That requires something akin to a language, though it need not be verbal. Musical chords, for example, work just as well. Rhythms in jazz. Rhyme in poetry. How about olfactory layers in haute cuisine? Or the interplay of light and shadow in fine art?

My friend is an oenophile – he can’t drink a glass of house wine without detecting hints of leather and cassis. Me, I just wait for the buzz. My friend can taste the wine same as me, but he can’t ‘know’ the wine until he is able to place it in a conceptual matrix populated by ‘cigar, must, and fruit’. 

Me, I don’t know what I don’t know about wine. I barely know that there is something to know beyond the obvious. My friend’s detailed knowledge vastly exceeds mine, but it is likely that I know as much, in proportion to what we each know to be knowable, as my friend does. 

So let’s return to the opening sentence: “When I was 25 years old, I knew pretty much everything there was to know…and I still do!” I might have more accurately have said, “When I was 25 years old, I knew a healthy portion of everything I knew to be knowable…and 50 years later, I still know that same ‘healthy portion’, although what I know is radically different.”

To be clear, the propositions that I entertained as true in 1970 have almost all disappeared or changed, replaced by new, unanticipated factoids. But the ratio of what’s known to what’s knowable is unchanged. 

This phenomenon strikes me whenever I read Genesis. The authors had no telescopes, microscopes, or particle accelerators. They knew nothing about genetics (DNA, gene mutation, evolution, etc.). Yet they produced a work that probably contains as large a portion of what was available to be known - in these disciplines at that time - as any textbook today.

So which is more true, Genesis’ creation story or Hoyle’s steady state model of the universe; the question is inherently undecidable and therefore meaningless.

In business, I often heard it said, “There are 3 kinds of lies – white lies, damn lies, and statistics.” In that spirit I would say that there are 3 ways something may be knowable: (A) it may be objectively knowable, i.e. it’s available to be known, (B) it may be subjectively knowable, i.e. it’s available for me to know it, and (C) it may actually be known, i.e. I know it. 

Gnosis is fractal! In proportion to what is subjectively available to be known by me, my level of actual knowledge is always more or less constant…as is yours…regardless of scale, regardless of topic, even if we have little else in common.

So let’s draw some conclusions. Depending on your model, what is objectively knowable (A, above) is either unimaginably vast…or infinite. If it is the latter, then whatever is subjectively knowable (B, above) is effectively zero relative to A. In any case it is miniscule.

So you get no ‘extra credit’ for your grotesquely inflated universe of discourse (B); in the end, we’re all drowning in the same sea (A). Likewise, we’re all in the same boat when we compare what we actually know (C) relative to what is available to us to be known (B). 

So what? Well, Sheldon over there explains things using an impenetrably complex model derived from cutting edge mathematical physics. Missy on the other hand imagines God as an emaciated version of Santa Claus – a kindly old man (sic) with twinkling blue eyes and a flowing white beard, sporting Joseph’s technicolor dream coat.

Who’s right? Both…and neither. But needless to say, Sheldon is cruelly dismissive of Missy’s metaphysics…and indeed, of Missy herself. How ‘stupid’ of her not to know what he knows!

Is Sheldon right, or at least justified? No way! Missy knows the same proportion of what’s subjectively knowable to her as Sheldon knows of what’s subjectively knowable to him. Plus what’s knowable to each is the same proportion of what is available to be known. 

Sheldon, of course, wants to add another dimension of comparison. He wants to weigh his knowledge (C) against Missy’s (C’), but there is no warrant for doing so. The proposition itself is meaningless.

C compares with C’ only if there is an absolute, transcendent standard to serve as the metric of comparison; but there is not. The model we’re presenting  makes no provision for any such Platonic mysticism. What is objectively knowable is ill-defined and constantly in flux. 

The Roman Catholic liturgy offers a useful paradigm. It is more or less the same everywhere on earth, and as far back as the first century CE, and yet if you scratch 10  congregants, you’ll find 10 different cosmologies, theologies, and eschatologies. 

So who’s right? They all are…and no one is. They all know the same proportion of what is subjectively available to them to be known (B). But the temptation to compare actual knowns (C) can be overwhelming. What percentage of life’s acrimony boils down to I’m right and you’re wrong? How different would life be if we eliminated this dimension of conflict!

Note: This is neither skepticism nor relativism. Each of us has an obligation to know as much as we can within our universes of discourse and to expand those universes, our conceptual vocabularies, as far as possible.

We are not, however, obligated, or even allowed, to evaluate what we know relative to what others know. What others know can only be evaluated relative to what is subjectively knowable within their universes of discourse and we have no direct, independent access to that information.

Two corollaries: (1) There is no room in philosophy or science for intellectual pride, and (2) we can learn from everyone’s models because all such models represent good faith efforts to express the ineffable.

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Stadia I (2004) by Julie Mehretu is a large abstract painting in ink and acrylic that uses layered architectural lines, flags, and geometric forms to evoke the dynamic, chaotic energy of stadium spaces and other large‑scale public arenas. The composition’s complex interplay of marks and colors reflects Mehretu’s interest in how collective environments, movement, and social structures intersect in contemporary urban life.