In class the question was posed: “what does it mean to know.” To know something is to deconstruct it with reason, to scrutinize it against the rigors of logic and to be fully aware of its nature, to hold it before the mind’s eye and to see it bare in its true form; to know is to pierce through what is apparent and to discover the essential nature of a concept, object or emotion. Realizing what is true, to know rather than to have an opinion of something, goes to the heart of one of my favorite passages from book six of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays translation):
Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice., and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love – something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.
Perceptions like that – latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time – all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust- to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.
A man with true knowledge of things would find the notion of becoming upset over the destruction of his property to be silly – after all, if we look at things critically and cast away all pretenses of glit and glitter, we are really crying over chunks of metal, or stitched together cotton or perhaps wood nailed to stone. Marcus Aurelius speaks evident truth to this topic to such a degree that I feel as if I waste my efforts in attempting to match his keen insight. And this insight is a crucial one: most people do not live in the domain of knowledge but in opinion, a self-defeating shroud of insecurity and indecision trammeled by faulty judgments, wherein only the superficial surfaces of reality are appraised. A man who is overcome with turbulence upon seeing his car destroyed is one who is squandering his moments and causing himself undue grief. If such a man were to have a knowledge of what a car truly is, and how the cosmos will eventually reclaim all of his possessions in due time anyway, he would not be offended, and would be a more helpful member of the community.
The logic behind Marcus’ words fundamentally addresses what is within and without of our control as human beings: we can only claim control over our own desires, actions, beliefs, aversions and decisions, while we can claim no control over things external to us, such as the caprice of fate, chance, other people, disease and disaster. To know of what is in our control and what is not in our control allows us to reach our true potential as human beings, to know what the case is truly. All grief is caused by the opinion that we may control these things outside of our control, and by control it is also meant to expect certain behaviors of things outside of our control. We have no control over the injustices inflicted upon us by others, or the devastations of disease and natural disaster, nor the ability or inclination of another’s heart to love us, nor the behavior of bosses, parents and friends. Knowledge of this state of the world is necessary to live happily and through the ages up until the present we observe countless people futilely sticking to opinion and cursing the gods and others for their misfortune.
Returning to the topic at hand, it can be said that to know something is to be aware of what is truly the case as opposed to what is not the case. We can judge the truth of an idea by scrutinizing it with logic and reason (checking to see if it is free of fallacies and holds evidently true to all minds through a chain of argumentation) and the truth of reality and the nature of objects through scientific inquiry.