Learning to unknow: reclaiming the transformative process of knowledge
Personal essay delivered at GCAS Summer Institute in Prague, 2023 (sorry mom)
My mother is an elementary school teacher, and when I was growing up, she taught me about the importance and value of education. This could have been the beginning of a heart-warming story, if not for the fact that learning, as it was presented to me by my mother, was always only a means to an end.
Little Ewa is called Ewusia, and Ewusia was told she needs to learn to get good grades. She needs to get good grades to go to a good high school, which will prepare her for final exams so that she can go to a good university. The main point of that university degree is to stand out as a graduate, so that she can finally land a so-called good job.
In the following years, whether trying my hand at painting, writing, or another creative pursuit, I was plagued with a nagging question "what's the point?" The fleeting joy of being immersed in the process would deflate rapidly after realizing that what I was doing was aimless somehow - simply pointless.
Initially, I wanted to tell you that what Ewusia was deprived of was learning things just for the sake of knowing them. But I think it goes further than that - what’s missing is acknowledging the value of the process itself. Treating learning as a process with a predefined destination risks missing out on the transformative property of knowledge, something that later on became my main driving force towards philosophy.
Even in the 90’s post-communist Poland, the teachers' thinking was already deeply colored by capitalist ideology. The education system quickly progressed towards turning students into customers, impatiently expecting their return on investment.
To recall Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Philosophers”: their pursuit of knowledge was often violently suppressed with aggressive police interventions. This violence, though, served as a mutual admission of an important truth: knowledge is dangerous. Students recognized knowledge as something powerful enough that it was worth fighting for, and the power apparatus saw it as threatening enough, that it had to be policed. Once the systemic change took hold, knowledge became more quietly neutralized and sanitized, with an invisible hand neatly packaging it as a commodity.
Albert Camus reportedly said: “The school prepares children to live in a world that does not exist”. In recent years, this quote has been frequently used to illustrate how the education system fails to be practical and prepare students for the so-called “real world”. This suggests that the future, and life, is something that just happens to us, something pre-determined that we must adapt to, rather than something we can envision and bring into existence. In this sense, I take the Camus’ quote to mean the opposite - the school prepares children to live in a world that does not yet exist - precisely because they will be the ones shaping and transforming it in unforeseen ways.
We’re not children anymore, but personally, I’m on the quest to reconnect with this transformative kernel of knowledge that has been neutralized in the Western education system. That’s why I turned to philosophy. When I first came across Lacan, his mathemes seemed cold and clinical to me. But later, I began feeling universal compassion for our shared failure arising from language. I speak, but the meaning is created in the place of the other. When I make an attempt to get closer, to know the world, and the other, failure is inevitably already inscribed into this attempt.
Alan Badieu once remarked that when the painter Degas set out to paint the reflection of sun rays hitting the water, he attempted an impossible task. The only way to capture it was through failing. When we appreciate his art, we're really in awe of this failure. This shows that failure is actually in some ways harder to accomplish than success, since it can never be reached by aiming directly at it. It hides in explorative meanderings, in aimlessness. The point is missing the point. It’s a glimpse of a new perspective we catch when we squint our eyes.
Today, it seems to me that overcoming the dread of the paralyzing demand: “what’s the point?” doesn’t lie in finally getting the right, or any, satisfying answer. It's about changing the question. How can I most fully witness what is? Or, how can I most fully participate in the inevitable failure of the present moment?
To reclaim the transformative properties of knowledge, I set out to do things without a point, being in rooms where I have no business being. My practical master degree from a few years ago was in Business Strategy. I have no business being here. I'm intimidated. Uncomfortable. So - how can I most fully participate in this inevitable failure - of trying to show up as a philosopher? In this context, this is exactly where I need to be. While I’m here to get my MA in Philosophy, I’m really also hoping for a minor in failure, aimlessness, and a merit in doing things that are none of my business.
My mother’s name is Sofia, which as we all know, means wisdom, and even forms the root of the word philosophy, meaning “love of wisdom”. And I will go as far as to say that filosofia is not only the love of wisdom, but the love of the process of finding out. It is not a love of the outcome – “the point” — but the love of the search. Which, consequently, also means the love of not knowing, the love of the failure of knowing - the fleeting moments just before you know. Through the improbable, unimaginable and unexpected, failure opens a path to transformation.
Arriving to knowledge, on the cusp of something, squinting our eyes in search of it… When doing philosophy, that’s the moment I will always allow myself to revel in for a little while longer. The moment of grasping on to the knowing but not quite letting go of the unknown. Preparing myself to live in a world that does not exist – yet.
