Roads to Understanding

I try to know and - perhaps even more importantly so- understand the world. In this I approached the world as something apart from me, but I am part of the world, it is the world that enables me to experience the world. My attempt of knowing the world is a kind of reflexive awareness, where the world turns its gaze upon itself in an attempt to know itself. For what else is there to look at? What else is there to know?

I should ask myself what my relation to the word is, who I am and what or who the world is to be able to adequately start my quest of understanding the world. Yet the irony is that these are also the questions I think get me the answers to understand the world, so they are my end goal, while also required to start off properly. Because to understand the world I need to have knowledge about the world; but what is knowledge; how do I get knowledge - or we; is knowledge a communal or a personal thing? - and what, on a more fundamental level, enables us to have knowledge in the first place?

We often, at least in our modern times, have the tendency to see ourselves as different from the world. We are distinct from it. The world is one thing and we are another and as such we try to understand what we are looking at. But to know the world we have to know ourselves, for it is through us that we get to experience the world and to know the stars we have to know the telescope. The glasses we look through shape the thing we see, so to see the thing clearly, as it truly is, we need to be aware of the glasses and understand how they influence our view, so as to be able to filter it away. Otherwise we are misguided and confused for we take the image to be the object. So a quest of knowledge starts with a quest of discovery of the self.

But there is something more fundamentally wrong with this view as well, for we are not as distinct from the world as we let ourselves believe. We are part of the world, a product of the world, we aren't looking at it from a far away distance, but from within it. And this should greatly shape the way we think about the world, about knowing the world and our relation to the world. Because to be able to say anything about how we get to know the world, we of course have to talk about how we relate to the world.

Seeing the world as distinct from us, as something outside ourselves can be traced back to Augustine. He has been rather important in this matter when he poses the opposition between the inner and outer man. It might very well be because of him that I now think in terms of myself as inner and the world as outer. But it detaches us from it. Weakens the connection we have with it and it is this that partly enabled the destructive attitude we have towards the world. By relating to it as the other we alienated ourselves from it. We stopped caring, the link of empathy grew weak for we couldn’t relate anymore. It is time we start relating ourselves more again to the world around us; to other humans, to animals, to plants and stones, to the earth itself.

We have to discuss our place within the whole and redetermine our relation to it, not just how we think we belong, but also how we want to belong, how we want to relate. But as might be clear, this is a huge project, that reaches far far further than epistemology and modes of knowing; it touches upon metaphysics, ethics, politics and ideas of virtue. I will try to let that go aside for now and try to find a focus point on knowledge and keep the circle of overlapping topics to a minimum. I might get to turn towards the other related topics at a later moment.