Do You Know Something?

“There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” – Aristotle

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

I like Aristotle’s work and I expect that I always will - the idea that the starting point for knowledge is invariably the real world always seemed so sensible. Conversely that filthy Hellenic ingrate continues to ignore me – would it kill him to return my calls or answer the letters so lovingly burned in my backyard goat-shrine? Same goes for Katie Couric – she has become very distant since realizing she sucks at being a news anchor.

When I first started studying philosophy (yes, I accept your barely hidden mockery…) the amount of rhetorical nonsense that flew around me was staggering. Everyone spoke in coded analogies about how you could never really know something for sure:

“Knowledge is like driving a car through the desert and then getting out of that car to understand how the hitch-hiker sees the cactus differently than you see the steering wheel of your car…you can’t know his cactus and he can’t know your steering wheel – that’s what I’m saying“

I wish I could say that I had built that paragraph from scratch.

Relativism and subjectivism ultimately teach us that unless we know virtually everything, we can’t really know much of anything. Also, if you can never ‘know his cactus’, you can hardly say that it’s a bad cactus, can you? The unknowable cacti of the world could be committing genocide or encouraging people to watch professional hockey and you can’t say anything because you have never known, and can never know another man’s cactus (I’m tempted to get that put on a tee shirt).

I didn’t need to spend any time or money on higher education in order to not know things. I came up with much better excuses as to why I didn’t know something than I ever heard from the great mass of ‘whatever’ relativists who were inhaling my tuition and my oxygen. Many of these excuses involved Jack Daniels or accidentally burning off my mandatory (grad student uniform code) university beard with a cigar, but they were convincing works of misdirection all the same and did not require the accreditation of a major university.

David Hume, by comparison weakly claimed that just because something appeared to cause an event ninety-nine times we could never be entirely sure that it would cause the same event on the one-hundredth time. Hume said that we invented an ironclad relationship when all we really did was learn to anticipate something that felt like a relationship. In other words, you can never directly witness cause and effect but you can predict it.

If I ever get to meet David Hume, I will swing an axe into his groin. If he fears the bifurcation of his pubic arrangement, he will attempt to dodge me (-3 modifier on d20 since he is dead and a Scot). This is because your anticipation of my axe splitting your kindling does not need to be one hundred percent. Ninety or ninety-five percent will be plenty for you to form the habit of not getting jabbed in the biscuit if you can avoid it.

To be fair, I’d get the hell out of the way for about one-in-a hundred.

We are what we do and we decide what to do because we accept that “it might be possible” is not enough for us to risk getting our naughty bits twinned. We dodge because we know, and we know because we perceive and then think about it — amazing, eh?
Now, I know what you’re thinking; “Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?”

No, I am not. But every day, I drive to work in my car – yes, yes now you get it!

You don’t? Oh…

Every morning I rise as late as I possibly can and only after a lot of bitching and moaning (Pardon me — link war…) I drag my big, Sinister butt to work. My commute lasts almost exactly twenty-five minutes and covers precisely the same forty-five kilometers of highway every day. Every day I smoke two cigarettes on this drive and drink about half of my giant, palpitation-inducing travel mug of coffee. Taking into account the accidental variations of the seasons, and the occasional moose, I see basically the same thing every day, and perform essentially the same actions.

…and so would you…

Where I see a small church with a badly degraded parking lot, you would not see guitar demigod Mark Knopfler breaking into that really great solo from the end of Telegraph Road. Nor would you see something more regular like a gas station or a coffee shop in place of that little, white church.

Or if you did, you’d be wrong – and we could prove it.

You could claim that it really is Mark Knopfler and that it’s just possible that we are both viewing the same thing and coming up with different results because of pure subjectivity. We could ask passers-by, nearby residents and as each replied “church, dumb ass” we could make your option of seeing Mr. Knopfler ever more remote.

You could still claim that ‘it’s always possible’ and technically, you’d be right. However, the possibility you’re banking on is so unlikely as to make it effectively useless. The church would be a church, Mark Knopfler would be nowhere in the area and you would just be wrong – there would be no mystery of epistemology or ontology, you would just be wrong.

But well before we got this far, I’d be forced to get my axe…and you *would* try to avoid it.

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