Overfishing Knowledge
Knowledge is said to be power. This may be true to a certain extent but do you really want to know when you die? Our greed for knowledge is presupposed by our human misery but anything overfished becomes empty. Mr. Know All loses his meaning and importance the day his knowledge goals are attained. Omniscience cannot even be a divine quality because this would devoid God of meaning. Achieving your aims takes away the challenge, enthusiasm and romance. Remember Great Gatsby was driven by romance but lost it when he was able to achieve it. Of course human beings are far from being knowledgeable. Thanks God nobody is perfect or as Germans put it: everybody needs water for cooking.

Disciplines fragment infinitely and indefinitely into sub-disciplines and sub-disciplines through specialization. New registers emerge which acquire new identities. Inter-disciplinaries or trans-disciplinaries again question those very identities. Remember even most popular identities are created by marketing. Those who find a market receive an identity which swelters the way it comes. In addition new registers create new borders and communities and make many a language only capable of everyday communication. Even now communication in science can primarily be done in English.

Furthermore, anything which is accomplished is doomed to destruction and is as ephemeral as life is. Restrictions put on us humans give back meaning to life. Being imprisoned physically, we are saved from the blind alley of knowledge. To err is human but not to err is being lost forever. Knowledge is indeed a dead end, after all sans meaning, sans truth.

Jamshid
Bremen, 5 July 2009

Comments

We are here and now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine. ~H.L. Mencken

In my mind, experiencing the beauty of the lake (of knowledge one is fishing in) and the multiplicity of life in and around it connect you with the whole universe. That's how everyone can attain knowledge. Intellectual knowledge involving the brain only is a perishable food. It's a single individual experience so it as little value.

True we can only be aware of a little moment in the so called present. The past turns to a phantom and the future lies in the dark. The lake meatphor is a beautiful one. Our experience, journey or our imagination is what counts and as Einstein put it: imagination is more important than knowledge. This was a purely hypothetical idea: "what would be if we had all the knowledge we needed?" built analogous to other achievements in our daily life. Setting targets is indeed helpful but the problem starts once they have been reached.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing