Love, Language, & the Disclosure of Reality
There is one primary definition of knowledge that the modern western world ascribes to: phenomenon-based facts and information that can be objectively observed over time, and quantified in some way. Some call this an ‘empirical’ definition of knowledge inasmuch as it is equated with what is ‘real.’ The sky is blue, there are 365 days in a year, two plus two equals four. This is all well and good and necessary as a definition of knowledge. Though I’ve come to believe this is an insufficient definition of knowledge for understanding the richness of human experience, the spectrum of human faculty, and the plane of imagination from which our collective future perpetually unfolds. Here I’ll invoke the words of the philosopher Esther Meek:
“We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, ‘content,’ true statements–true statements justified by other true statements… We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information. It has a lot of appeal, because it is quantifiable, measurable, assessable, and commodifiable. It offers power and control. But the knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness. It gets in the way of good knowing. We distinguish knowledge from belief, facts from values, reason from faith, application from theory, thought from emotion, mind from body, objective from subjective, science from art. Epistemological dualism cuts us as knowers down into disconnected compartments unable to work together–information here, body there, emotions in a third place. It depersonalizes us at the moment of one of our greatest opportunities for personhood–coming to know. It dispels any sense of adventure.”
So what is knowledge then? Meek has written volumes unpacking this, but I’ll summarize for brevity. Knowledge is purely what is loved. Things that are known are so because we have deemed them worth knowing. An invitation to the yet-to-be-known was extended. Desire was acted upon. A commitment, a pledge, or a covenant was made. Reality discloses itself to us through the commitment that we make to it. This is a definition of knowledge that creates space for experience, intuition, and imagination. In painting the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci pledged himself to the yet-to-be-known. The painting didn’t exist yet, it had not revealed itself. Only through the dutiful love of da Vinci did the Mona Lisa come to be known. First to him, then to the rest of the world. To this day we are getting to know the Mona Lisa. Likewise, Einstein’s love of the forces which govern our material universe made quantum physics ‘known.’ The world will never be the same because of what was made known through the love of Walt Disney. It’s astonishing.
It follows then that loving and learning go hand in hand. While the world of learning theory is rich and fascinating, there is one common presupposition — the human capacity to ascribe meaning. Meaning is inextricable from learning. We are an interpretive species, one whose existence is perpetual interpretation — the ascription of meaning to experience. As the philosopher John Caputo says “interpretation is not something we do, it is something we are.” There is one primary tool (among many) that we use to interpret the phenomenon of existence and ascribe meaning — language. In the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, my brilliant friend Kyle Isaacson said it this way:
“We understand ourselves and the world primarily by means of language. This means that we present the world to ourselves linguistically, and our attempts to make sense of lived experience play out within a vocabulary that both enables and constrains meaning. In regard to this, the primacy of language holds together the infinite and finite. Language both discloses and conceals. The meanings available to us expand with the possibilities of language, in the same way that no word is bound to any single concrete use of it.”
Understanding. Sense of self. Interpreting experience. Meaning. There is a linguistic character to all of it. So perhaps to acquire knowledge is give language to the thing being known. We come to know through naming the phenomenon of our existence. In love we gift the world with words, and the world reciprocates through self disclosure.
This is why words matter, and why language is so powerful. This is why writing is hard and reading is so fundamental — words are the artifact of love, and love always requires you give of yourself. In this case, there is something sacramental about knowing and learning through language. Perhaps this is what the poet Pablo Neruda was sensing when he said “nothing remains except that which was written with blood to be listened to by blood.”
And yet, there are unwordable words – experience and meaning that is pre-verbal. Loving, knowing, and learning don’t stop at the horizon of language, they go far beyond it. But that is for another post.