Knowledge

Knowledge, of course, is what is known.  To know something is to understand it.  To understand it is to perceive something about it or within it so that it has meaning.

We, or more accurately I, can take some examples.  I know some Spanish. My vocabulary is sufficient to put together sentences, and I can often express what I want to say when I am in a Spanish speaking country.  However, my knowledge of Spanish is not such that I can understand two Spanish speakers engaging in a conversation.  If I didn't understand any Spanish, what I would hear would be a plethora of usually indistinguishable syllables.  My level of comprehension is sufficient for me to pick up a word here and a phrase there.  The remainder is this plethora that my cats probably hear.   Thus, there are different levels of knowing and different levels of understanding.  When we know a language well, what we hear is not a jumble of syllables but utterances that have meaning.  The entire character of the experience is changed.   And we feel more at ease as we understand what is being said. Since I don't understand most of what is said, I feel a certain lack of comfort in Spanish speaking countries, which would explain why I would like to learn more Spanish. Through this example we see how knowledge involves a relationship with something, a connectedness with something, that allows us to see, to derive meaning.   Knowing a language does not increase our familiarity with rocks and animals or the laws of physics.  It does increase our familiarity with certain sounds, and if sounds are things, we can say that knowledge increases our familiarity with part of the world (i.e. things in the world.)   It goes without saying that the meanings we have decided to ascribe to words is entirely arbitrary.  There is no logical reason that the word "the" should mean "the" rather than "of" or "dog".

The act of learning involves the most intense unity between the learner and the learned, a revealing that peels aware the barrier between the two.  (It should go without saying that the "and" is operative here.   Knowledge is what follows the act of learning.  The unity may be less intense, but there is a comfort, a dwelling, a sense of contentment that results from knowledge.   What was previously drivel is now understood.

We crave the act of revealing, the moving away of barriers, and the comfort, the dwelling that comes with knowledge. It is partly a kind of insecurity that motivates the desire to learn and understand. I am in a Spanish speaking country and don't understand anything that is being said around me.   I have some interest in physics because I believe I will feel more comfortable with the world if I know something about how things work.  (Of course, there are various other reasons why we learn, the most obvious being that we are forced to by our parents, guardians and teachers.  Education succeeds when we are done with its compulsory aspect and still wish to learn.)

And this, in part, is what motivates the desire to learn.  But the desire to learn is also motivated by a desire to control, to gain power and autonomy over what is learned.  To solve a problem, whether it be a difficult equation or to learn a language is to conquer it, to gain mastery over it, to subsume it.  Once again, the "and" is involved in this merging.  And this conquest, while resulting in an immediate sensation of exhilaration, is also what causes the sense of comfort alluded to earlier.

(We are not dealing here with the notion of knowledge as "enlightenment" or "wisdom".  Those who see it in those terms are generally unable to explain what it is and resort to the rationalization that it somehow transcends definition.  That's fine. We won't talk about it.

Still, you may say, "Is knowledge of a language really knowledge?"  My answer is simple. "Try saying that to a linguist." To say that one type of knowledge is less worthy than another is, quite frankly, elitist.  Language is the filter through which we view the world, and viewing it through different filters undoubtedly broadens our aspect of reality.  Over the last 120 or so years, others have written about this subject at great length, and I will not burden the record further. )