I have been cursed with a desire for knowledge and at first, that might seem better than other, more controversial desires. Aristotle would certainly agree, he says that knowledge is our highest good. I don’t deny that some objects of desire are better than others, and in fact, I agree with Aristotle that knowledge is the best thing to want. This seems quite satisfactory and reasonable under the circumstances because after all, that is the very curse I just mentioned.
The problem is, all desires are the same in that they are never entirely satisfied. If I fulfill a desire, I will only achieve a vague disappointment because things are never as complete as our expectations. There's always something missing, even if we don't quite know what it is.
And there’s something a bit shabby about real things when they are forced into a comparison with our hopes. Plus there are never enough of those shabby things to cover the shortfall, as if that were even possible. Real things, unlike ideas, are often victimized by chewing gum needing a place to go, paint worn off corners, an unexpected aroma, or they simply might not do the things we didn't realize we wanted them to do until we got them.
The cause of our desire is only partially found in the object desired and this is the root of our disappointment. And this makes perfect sense of course, when we consider the fact that we are not fully acquainted with an object until we have it in our possession. But besides that, not all of our expectations are possible. When the desired object becomes ours, there remains this odd uncomfortable feeling that there must have been a mistake somewhere. It can be very frustrating that the desire was perhaps better than its fulfillment and that once it has been fulfilled, it cannot be re-desired. It’s disheartening that we can only desire what we don’t have.
But on the other hand, if I do not fulfill a desire, the frustration can be just as bothersome because we do not yet have that peculiar disappointed feeling that would help us see that the fulfillment of a desire is no big deal anyway. It is better to take pleasure in the process of desire rather than wait for its inevitable conclusion. This truth is revealed in Oscar Wilde’s praise of tobacco as a good thing because it is never satisfying. The Book of Ecclesiastes gives the same advice: All is vanity therefore we should eat, drink and take pleasure in our toil.
My desire for knowledge is sometimes distressing to me. There is so much to know and I will never know enough. I console myself with the fact that Wittgenstein never read Aristotle and if such an intelligent, knowledgeable person never found time for a writer of Aristotle’s importance, then I can stop worrying about all the marvellous things I have been unable to get to.
I happen to know though, that Wittgenstein missed a good read in Aristotle. Aristotle seems to be a nice fellow, a thorough and methodical thinker who seems so real even in his translated words. And the realness mostly comes from his heartwarming stubbornness to try to solve every problem by reason alone. My favourite is his desire for existence to be a quality of a thing like its colour or position. I can almost feel Aristotle’s breath as we both hunch over the same thought. Our shared frailties seem to be the draw.
Perhaps this is how I do take pleasure in my toil. I understand that my desire is for something that can never be concluded and given what was said above, an unfulfillable desire is by far the best kind of desire to have. There’s no sorrow or disappointment, and like foreplay, just a sweet yearning with inklings of a beautiful future.
It says in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 18, “He who increases knowledge increases sorrow”. This is a strange and terrible thought. Some knowledge gives us a hopeful desire for more, but more only produces the hopeless wish for a different universe. Some knowledge brings righteous determination about the things we can change, but more knowledge brings a sadness about the things we can’t change. Knowing which is which is apparently wisdom, and I think this is the wall my good friend Arthur Schopenhauer encountered. The Will, as he understood it in The World as Will and Representation is a terrible and relentless thing. The violence of survival is inescapable. Food dies for the sake of the living. What of our fancy moralities under these circumstances?
Iamblichus, the neoPlatonist, (he was a pupil of Porphyry who was in turn a pupil of Plotinus) said that wisdom alone is good, and ignorance alone is evil. This is a strange and peaceful idea, and in fact, it is consonant with the official position of the Catholic Church: Evil does not exist, it is merely the absence of good. But it is difficult to reconcile the truths of Ecclesiastes and Iamblichus unless of course we add that goodness is somewhat sad, that knowledge is the root of sorrow, and that wisdom alone is good. Jesus wept after all.
It would be helpful if there were a distinction between knowledge and wisdom that hasn’t come through consistently in translations from ancient languages. And perhaps there is: Plato distinguishes between knowledge of intelligibles, which Plotinus expanded in his description of the clear light, and knowledge that can be defined in terms of opinions, or as A. J. Ayer put it, knowledge is true opinion with sufficient reason. Ayer’s kind of knowledge is the unsatisfying one, but the knowledge of intelligibles is the wisdom that is good according to Iamblichus. But still, it would be prudent to recall W. V. Quine’s observation in Quiddities, about “ale” and “beer”, that the users of a language dislike redundancy and try very hard to find subtle ways to distinguish synonyms.
I would say that rational thought is the ability to gain conditional knowledge while wisdom, or the lack thereof, is the attitude one has towards that knowledge. I confess that I feel a bit trapped here, Quine may be right. But let's get back to desire, that being the point: I desire a fundamental agreement between the Platonists and the Bible, not to mention a general agreement on fundamentals within all the world’s wisdom literature.
I suppose at bottom, I want this agreement to be a demonstration that there is an escape from the isolated world of my thoughts. This gives me the hope for a meaningful unity of the world. I don’t find this agreement to be an unreasonable possibility, but I may be too selective in my comparisons to ever actually know for sure. And that is frustrating because such a reconciliation would be very good knowledge indeed. I don’t doubt that I could reconcile Rumi, the Book of Job, the Vedas, and the I Ching on certain points, but I can never know for sure whether I am taking them out of context.
Even though I fear death, and also experience the occasional spasm of wisdom, the road to religious belief remains blocked. I must settle for reason and aesthetic nostalgia for big ideas. Ideas that go too far are really quite beautiful. At one time I was planning an anthology called Big Ideas: orgone, synchronicity, non-dualism, Pre-Socratic atomism, and that sort of thing. I haven't got to it yet, and at this point I don't think I ever will. The experiences of life have given me the wisdom to spend less time with the near-misses of knowledge. Even an aesthetic take on metaphysical claims is becoming a pale satisfaction because it remains little more than a strategic retreat to my personal, particular experiences. The attachments that the Buddhists warn us about have not been withdrawn. I hope too much from things.
I would be better off if I stood aloof, watching my toil without judgment, fully knowing my desires and works are not terribly important. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question.” * Sadly, I don't feel capable of that well-mixed sturdiness. It may well be a nostalgia for a condition that never was, or at least never was for humans with all their complicated worries. I don’t know.
We should not live to compare with our hopes, we should live to experience.