Experience, Understanding, and Understanding Experience
by There is living, and there is life lived in the search for something worth living for. An exploration of the meaning of a meaningful life.
“Que sçais-je?”
(”What do I know?”)
The Motto of Michel de Montaigne
Do I know the significance of my own experiences? Perhaps I know I am having experiences, and perhaps I can recount them more or less accurately, at least to myself and my own satisfaction, but does this mean I have the least understanding of their meaning?
Hardly.
These are two things, experience and understanding – related, to be certain, but not the same beasts and not captured and maintained in the same manner. It is easy to mistake the one for the other – how often might we understand something in essence or principle, and yet have little experience of it?
Celibate saints wrote reams on the subjects of lust and the wiles of the flesh and of marriage and adultery, yet had not a moment, or more than a few moments of sheer experience of these. I am not willing to dispose of all they had to say on these grounds – some of them may very well have glimpsed from a distance an accurate image of these things; there may be some profit to be had in their speech.
And the rest of us wretches, sinful and human as we are – how many of us have actually lived the life of flesh and lust and intense desire, and yet haven’t any understanding of what it is we do or have done? No, that understanding is something we may have after the fact, and only then after performing the requisite contemplations, the laborious process of thought spurred on by an unquenchable ache… the hope that we might know something about what has happened.
Few of us go that extra step. It is arduous, it is troublesome, it is odd, and above all it is inconvenient and all out of fashion. Montaigne, the inventor of the essay – the essai, the “trials” of one’s own mind in the presence of this or that subject – put himself to the test to discover the answer to that question “Que sçais-je?” because he strongly suspected that the proper response is always, “Nothing,” or “Not very much,” as Socrates had grasped in his own day.
By losing the false complacency born of the fantasy that one knows more than one actually does, a miraculous thing is born: A lack of fear in the face of the unknown. The unknown becomes ever-present, not quite commonplace but a constant companion; not an occasion for terrors and anxieties, but an opportunity for the advent of wonder and questions born of wonder. One becomes unafraid of experience; one become unafraid of the audacity required to question the shadowy opinions that pass for indubitable truths in the homes, the streets, the houses of government and the business offices and churches of the world.
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