Know-how and unlearning

November 6, 2024

Dear Luc,

            It was very good to hear from you today, if only briefly. This month marks the ninth anniversary of Humanities Watch. As you and I have discussed, nine is a number marking a climacteric year, a major change, and so I find myself testing that notion — the notion of change — in an anniversary mood. And nine is also a yang number, a number of expansion, forward movement, a number associated with the dragon in our Year of the Yang Wood Dragon.

            Anniversaries are two-faced: they look backwards and forwards, reflect and anticipate, and when I think retrospectively I come upon these lines that captured my attention in the spring. They are verses of Chuang Tzu in Thomas Merton’s free translation. The lines are entitled “Wholeness”:

“How does the true man of Tao
Walk through walls without obstruction,
Stand in fire without being burnt?”
Not because of cunning
Or daring;
Not because he has learned,
But because he has unlearned.

            Perhaps the title of these lines returned it in memory, since it has become clear to me, especially this past year, that the humanities offer us, above all, an experience of wholeness or integration. Yes, I have written on this theme before, but now, in the months-long mania for AI, this thought surfaces again with greater clarity.

            But what does wholeness have to do with these lines? Why did Merton, that able, adroit, meditative mediator of Chuang-Tzu, apply it to them? For the lines appear to draw distinctions: not cunning, not daring, not for having learned, but for having unlearned. How does one conceive wholeness out of distinguishing and separating?

            There is yet another problem or question I hear you raising: what does any of this have to do with the climacteric, or the anniversary, or the site’s attempt to set the humanities in relation to STEM, healthcare, and business, those “energy centers,” as I like to call them?

            To answer the first question is to answer the second, I think. For if the humanities have wholeness in their care, if they are, as I have said, the guardians of language as the vehicle, means, and modality of their care, then they must provide the way to integrate, with language, these energy centers into a whole.

            But to return to the lines of Merton / Chuang Tzu, and to strive to find an answer to the first question: the lines begin with a question of their own. To “walk through walls without obstruction” means to overcome division and separation; to “stand in fire without being burnt” means to become one across polarity, without being consumed by one side or the other. This is a genuine Daoist agility, a feat of acrobatic balance even in the metaphorical sense as I understand it — perhaps especially in the metaphorical sense.

            But then we come to the “nots”: the distinctions that paradoxically answer the question about wholeness:

            “Not because of cunning / Or daring; / Not because he has learned, / But because he has unlearned.”

The challenge of these lines is, to my understanding, that “cunning,” daring,” and “having learned” are traits and strategies of division: they aim to separate, not integrate; they build walls and set things aflame. In this sense, the true man of Tao has “unlearned.”: he can walk through walls and stand in fire because he sees the whole beyond the cunning and daring and learning around him.

            Yet I hear you saying, well and good. How does any of this pertain to the anniversary, the turning of nine years, the energy centers in which you have so often seen the future of the humanities: “the future of the humanities lies not in the humanities,” you have said. But now you are talking about wholeness, integration, as if to contradict your own categories of humanities, STEM, and so forth.

            Here’s my reply, as we keep the whole in view. Let me put forward another thought in this light: “the crisis of the humanities will not be solved by intellectuals; because intellectuals are always in crisis.” What this means is that science, technology, academic research (Wissenschaft), as means of producing knowledge, do not overcome the divisions, but instead foster and perpetuate them. Know-how — in the Greek, techné — is a way to create “breakthroughs” (on this we can recall Chargaff’s skepticism), new discoveries, advancing the field, and so forth. But do they lead us back to what is fundamental, if forgotten: an experience of integration, connection to what is larger than ourselves, or should I say deeper within ourselves?

            In this way, the lines of Merton and Chuang Tzu foster the thought that academic humanities too often race toward know-how, if not knowledge, and so, like STEM and the sciences, become a source of division, separation, even alienation. The “two cultures” look at and against one another, often in mutual suspicion. But they share common ground, as Einstein and others have said; they are branches of the same tree. But what is the tree, what are its roots? Heidegger reminds us that the tree is not a biological specimen; nor is it an art-historical symbol we can identify as belonging to a certain “culture” or “intellectual milieu.”

            These are ways of keeping our distance — of objectifying the tree as a matter to be analyzed and studies. With what? Know-how and knowledge. We keep the tree at a distance, and offer it as an object for others to consider. We are, with our know-how or science or techné, divided from it.

            The humanities, however, understood and experience in the lines of “Wholeness,” would transform our awareness to the point of placing us in the same field. What is the field? Not a field of knowledge, but a field of experience. We are with the tree, we change as it changes; it responds to us, and we are responsive to it. It becomes part of our responsibility, in a field of care.

            For “care” I am drawn to another Greek word, meléte. This, as you know, is the word (melétema) that Socrates uses, in his final dialogue, to describe the care or practice of the pursuit of wisdom (philosophy). So the humanities are less a study than a practice, less an acquisition of knowledge than an experience, through meditation, care, and practice, of heightened awareness, of transformed perception of wholeness.

            Now “transformative” is one of the words that, like a debased coin, has lost its value. But I would contrast the transformative experience of wholeness, of interconnectedness, with the increasing transactional character of know-how and knowledge. You learn know-how and gain knowledge as a means to an end, as an exchange for another stage of knowledge, or rank, or reputation. You can build another room on your house, and take pride in your accomplishment. Rightfully so! But each room has walls, every addition implies a subtraction. It is a linear, and often quantitative progression, like another line on your resume or another certificate.

But the transformative experience of the humanities recognizes a thinking, or awareness beyond knowledge. If our ego would rest on our knowledge and expertise, our acumen of know-how (techné), our psyche revolves in a deeper world, both within and without us, one that encompasses this knowledge and transcends it. It ‘unlearns’ what it has learned, moving us back to wonder and away from fragile self-assertion. Here techné / know-how itself can bring us back, return us to what we are missing, the original sense of the humanities as meléte, care and contemplation, through practice.

            Nine is the dragon’s number, and the dragon itself exists in three planes: air, water, and earth. It can fly, swim, and walk. These three dragons correspond to our spiritual, energetic, and physical selves. May the dragon of the humanities lead us through the new year!

            Write back soon, Tim