When we say we know what something is, or know how to do something, or know why something is valuable or worthless we implicitly assume we understand what it means to know these things. But how sure can we be of this?

Are we sure we understand exhaustively what understanding is and can be? Are we sure we know what understanding does and can do? Without a full set of possibilities to consider, can we claim to have a clear sense of what it ought to be like to understand? And what if multiple distinct ways of knowing exist — ways that can be confused for one another, leading to misapplications, misunderstandings or even misnorms?

I will claim below that we have impoverished and unclear understandings of understanding. My claim is based, not on speculation or empty abstraction, but on personal experience working in the field of design, and it is this experience that gives the claim and its constituent concepts meaning and urgency. Over and over, I have found that misconceptions around understanding and knowledge to interfere with the work of improving understandings and producing more effective knowledge. This is an attempt to create and justify conceptual space for a wider range of intellectual functioning, including, most of all functioning that is palpably real, demonstrably effective (when permitted to act) but profoundly language-resistant:

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First, we tend to emphasize explicit knowledge that is readily articulated, operationalized and agreed upon. This is done, I believe, at the expense of tacit, primordial, intuitive understandings that invest explicit knowledge with meaning, that allow us to inhabit the knowledge and have real mastery of a field or subject or genre.

We assume that if someone can clearly explain a practice that they have demonstrated an expertise that can be applied in practice, and that if someone has difficulty explaining how they do something, they do not know what they are doing. In both is an implied belief that language is directing one’s activities. But what if the know-how of explaining is one thing and the know-how of doing is another? And what if the meaning of the explicit explanation is predicated entirely on a tacit know-how (or do-how?), one that is not some latently explicit knowledge that, with effort, can be brought to the surface, but rather as a primary source of competence, one that is supplemented or equipped by explicit, formal language (verbal, mathematical, geometrical or otherwise) but never dispensable?

The same is true of valuing, whether emotional, moral or aesthetic. Often we assume unconscious principles or logical processes are working behind the scene to produce our valuative responses. A person who can say what these principles are or produce arguments for applying them in some particular way, must have clearer discernment of value. But again, what if the valuative response — a know-why (or feel-why?) — is primary? What if value is perceived directly or not at all, and explanations, accounts and expressions are supplements to something preceding them that cannot be replaced with principles or logic, which alone give these supplemental forms meaning? In value, if you don’t actually experience the value, you do not know the value in the way value is known. With love, “to know is to love.”

Last, perhaps even conceptual knowledge is like practices and values in that it is rooted in some kind of tacit response that produces awareness of relationships? A sort of analogical intuition, a wordless recognition, underlies the ability to make any kind of abstract connection and to speak about it, or respond to it. This is a tacit form of know-what. It is entirely possible to detect relationships prior to applying categories or articulating criteria. Without this relating, all categorizing by criteria is a mechanical formalism. It is abstraction in the worst sense of the word — language games conducted in mid-air, uprooted from the wordless ground of meaning.

Perhaps “wordless ground of meaning” provides a clue to account for why experience is so hard to encapsulate directly. We have to indicate it indirectly by telling origin stories of life paths, or show what it has done and can do through lists of accomplishments, or we sense it in the liveliness, skillfulness or gravity of actions, words or works. When I use the word, experience, of course what I really mean is wisdom — a fund of tacit know-what, do-how, feel-why that invests words, actions and responses to life situations with immediate significance.

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Second, each of these kinds of understanding, these primary intuitions, ways of knowing, can take one another as objects, which makes them easy to confuse.

For the sake of comprehension I will call them intuition of What, How and Why.

(Unfortunately, this What-How-Why triad is already in prominent use elsewhere, but for different uses and in a different relation. This line of thought does not build on the other, and it will be necessary to at least temporarily forget the other system to understand this one. It does not build upon it, and might even be incommensurate with it, despite using the same three words. They’re the best words for the purpose, however, so I am using them.)

And for grammatical reasons I can’t explain or excuse, the “objects” are verbs… An intuition of What or How or Why can apply to whatness (as “is”), or to howness (as “can”) or to whyness (as “ought”), producing strange hybrids that are easily mistaken for one another. And to make it even worse, the hybrids can take other hybrids as objects, and produce long chains of associations. This is my explanation for the confusions I described above. Knowing how to speak about concepts describing how something is done (speaking expertly about expertise) is confused for the expertise itself. Mastering the vocabulary and rules of a language game is one thing, intuitively connecting the language to what it signifies is quite another, as many perplexed newly graduated scholars will tell you, if they’re honest.

Defining primary (What, How, Why) and secondary (What is, What can, What ought, How can, How ought, How is, Why ought, Why is, Why can) should at least create some distinctions to untangle what can and cannot be expected from the various forms of knowledge.

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Finally, there exist some vivid experiences that occur when we lack an understanding and are unable to use a counterfeit. These experiences also need names. I call an incapacity to intuit What perplexity, and incapacity to intuit How faltering, and incapacity to intuit Why indifference. These, too, should aid in sorting out what kind of understanding is operative and inoperative in any given situation.

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The above could serve as an explanation of my obscure as hell trefoil diagram and its attendant prose poem delucidations from my Geometric Meditations pamphlet, formerly known as The 10,000 Everythings.

“If one wishes to undertake an archaeological analysis of knowledge itself, it is not these celebrated controversies that ought to be used as the guidelines and articulation of such a project. One must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.”

I like to mis-etymologize “archaeology” to mean, not the study of the archaic roots of knowledge, but rather the study of the arche of intellect. What is it, behind our thinking, that moves our thoughts to the only set of conclusions we can reach, given our variable tastes and interests?

Our episteme — not mysterious chthonic drives and biases within the psyche, our very own scientistic demons — is what channels our thoughts into their dogmatic ruts in pristine ignorance of alternative analyses.

The pop-episteme of our times limits the politically conceivable to identitarianism.

Once I thought if I didn’t respect something that was because it was not respectable.

Then I thought if something was respectable that meant I was obligated to respect it.

Now I think that I should respect what I experience as respectable, while acknowledging the sphere of respectable things is greater than my own sphere of respect. Just because a thing is respectable does not mean I must respect it. Just because I don’t respect something that does not mean it is not respectable.

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I am unimportant enough to be arrogant; if I were more important I would have to be humbler.

I’ve been working on my pamphlet again. I’ve been using a different method. I’m revising the last version by hand, writing my changes onto it, instead of editing it directly.

The good news is that the core diagrams and verses seem to have stabilized. It has been a long time since I’ve wanted to change them. The explanatory facing pages are the problematic part, now. Writing them longhand seems better.

I need to get this pamphlet stabilized and printed soon. I may do offset for early editions and save the letterpress for whatever version proves itself by staying satisfactory for a few years.

I’ve got to get it out, though. I really do use these diagrams constantly in forming my understandings of things.

One thing I might change, though is complicating my diagrams to make them nicer to look at. The Sagmeister lecture on beauty I attended last week has made me reconsider my minimalist choices.

A person who is too busy, too stressed or too knowing — or all at once — cannot hear anything outside their immediate understanding. In other words, they cannot philosophize, and will not permit philosophy to happen in their presence. Their world is a world of expertise.

I define philosophy as Wittgenstein did: “the structure of a philosophical problem is ‘here I do not know how to move around.'” Philosophy is attempting to think the unthinkable. Expertise is the efficient application of established thought.

If you essentialize a particular culture’s ethnomethods/ethos/ethic and begin to view them as self-evident moral truths, it becomes completely reasonable to enforce newly established principles retroactively.

Of course, in a court of law, where violations are heard, tried, judged and punished within defined legal procedures and boundaries, ex post facto law is forbidden — but such formalities do not hold in the court of public opinion, where guilt is assigned and punishments dealt ad hoc and without measure.

Foucault, from The Order of Things:

Once similitude and signs are sundered from each other, two experiences can be established and two characters appear face to face. The madman, understood not as one who is sick but as an established and maintained deviant, as an indispensable cultural function, has become, in Western experience, the man of primitive resemblances. This character, as he is depicted in the novels or plays of the Baroque age, and as he was gradually institutionalized right up to the advent of nineteenth-century psychiatry, is the man who is alienated in analogy. He is the disordered player of the Same and the Other. He takes things for what they are not, and people one for another; he cuts his friends and recognizes complete strangers; he thinks he is unmasking when, in fact, he is putting on a mask. He inverts all values and all proportions, because he is constantly under the impression that he is deciphering signs: for him, the crown makes the king. In the cultural perception of the madman that prevailed up to the end of the eighteenth century, he is Different only in so far as he is unaware of Difference; he sees nothing but resemblances and signs of resemblance everywhere; for him all signs resemble one another, and all resemblances have the value of signs. At the other end of the cultural area, but brought close by symmetry, the poet is he who, beneath the named, constantly expected differences, rediscovers the buried kinships between things, their scattered resemblances. Beneath the established signs, and in spite of them, he hears another, deeper, discourse, which recalls the time when words glittered in the universal resemblance of things; in the language of the poet, the Sovereignty of the Same, so difficult to express, eclipses, the distinction existing between signs.

In times that despise receptivity, it takes considerable intellectual independence to perceive the value of receptivity and to value and honor it.

That kind of intellectual independence will come least of all from the most receptive people — who will, in conformance with the expectations of the times will obediently perform the role of the bravest, strongest, most independent individual, because that’s what is expected, and failure to play the role would compel automatic self-contempt.