It is very common to talk about there being several kinds of knowledge, two important categories being 'knowing that' and 'knowing how to'. The former, 'knowing that', is also described as propositional knowledge and it constitutes awareness of facts of various kinds. The latter, 'knowing how to', is different. The much quoted example is knowing how to ride a bike. This doesn't involve knowing any facts (or just a few basic ones, anyway). It is much more to do with experience, with an ability to make judgements during the flow of events, with the body and its response to particular situations. Now, as I understand it - and this is something Johan will know much more about than I do - wisdom has more to do with 'knowing how to' than 'knowing that'. What distinguishes a wise person is not so much knowing lots of facts (although such a person may, in fact, be knowledgeable in this sense too). At the core of wisdom is a responsive capacity - an ability to make judgements by drawing on experience or practice, a capacity that may even feel as if it is held within the body in some sense.
Wisdom as a term has both ethical and epistemological dimensions. It is 'ethical' in the sense that it names a capacity to live well - to follow the 'good life', perhaps. And the term is also epistemological in the sense that it assumes this capacity to be something that arises from experience or self-cultivation, something responsive, practical, and so thoroughly assimilated that it seems instinctive and even embodied.
What strikes me again and again as I read is that wisdom and fishing stand in at least two different relationships and I want to hang on to that point.
(1) Because skill in fishing arises from experience, application, an acquired ability to read the river, to respond to present conditions, to make observations, fishing forms a useful METAPHOR for the process of cultivating wisdom. Some writers use images of fishing to talk about the getting of wisdom because the activity models the process of cultivating experience, judgement, patience, and insight so well. In short, the development of the skill of fishing mirrors the coming 'to know how' that we think of as wisdom.
(2) But there is another way to look at it, which is that fishing itself can be productive of wisdom. That is, it can be seen not just as a metaphor but as a possible concrete element in the process of becoming wise. The endless hours exercising patience, gazing at the water, visualising the world beneath the surface can be seen as contemplative exercises in their own right. Read like this, fishing has a METONYMIC rather than a metaphorical relationship with wisdom - an indexical relationship rather than a purely symbolic one.
When I write this, I am not suggesting that we need to choose which of these is the 'right' relationship. I think different texts use fishing in different ways.
I think I'll draw to a close soon but a couple of other points occur to me. First, the idea that an ethical quality like wisdom could be rooted in experience and self-training has not seemed entirely right to everyone. There is a sort of counter-argument that a skill acquired through experience cannot be as valuable as a well-worked out body of rationally derived principles. And so the practicality and responsive character of wisdom as I have sketched it in here has seemed to need some defence. Second, it is (I think) relatively unusual to hear the term 'skill' applied to ethics but, actually, one place where that happens is in the Buddhist tradition, where conduct in line with the Buddha's ethical teachings is seen as 'skillful' rather than 'good' or 'bad'. This is because it constitutes one of the techniques that are used to acquire insight.
Now I really shall stop. As I say, please read charitably. These are just my thoughts this morning...
(Photo: I, Mike Cline [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
I went to an exhibition at Buxton museum on Saturday which was called "Enlightenment" the heritage lottery had given the museum 200,000 quid to buy objects which I suppose if we are been posh materialized enlightenment. There were quite a few paintings of landscapes which had fishermen in them and a wooden carving called "The fishermen" I wondered around and took pictures of the fishermen close up with my iphone in an attempt to extract them from the landscape. I thought this would be a good little project to snatch the fisherman from the landscape and then I wondered if the fisherman had some strange significance in terms of the enlightenment or whether it was just something to do with a current noticing of anything fishy in anything due to the fishing project. I keep thinking about Johan saying that the fish are been born from the water - when you catch them - a tench or a big carp- they are slippery beasties and you try not to hurt then so you wrap them in a blanket - I even think I wrapped one in a blanket I stole from the hospital when one of my children were born but I've probably made that up. I really like your post today and it got me thinking. My comment was more about the idea of criteria for success for fishing and hunting- I recon that at the times of the stories the key was to catch for the table so success was not about enjoyment or contemplation it was perhaps measured in fish caught. If the aim of fishing is to find a space of contemplation then perhaps different types of wisdom can develop. I think that in fishing for some people who practice it the two come together. I don't know why but I keep thinking of Walden and Henry David Thoreau I don't know how much he wrote about fishing but the return to the wilds - to cast off the day to day I think fishing can offer this in if it's possible sanitized small doses. Well my comments are far less coherent than your post which I thought was very good- but its late and I'm not going to alter them the main thing I suppose is that when we apply the idea of skill to fishing it is a activity which requires so many different levels of engagement that it perhaps touches on wisdom.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Steve - just a brief comment written in haste but, funnily enough, I've been reading *Walden* recently. Not for this project. I just picked it off the shelf. Will blog about it at some point.
ReplyDeleteI liked reading this a lot. I particularly liked the bit about ethics. It was also interesting thinking about the different kinds of knowledge that fishing brings. In Rotherham Library I was struck by the clearly popular (from the date stamps on the books) selection of books on Angling but also the literary nature of these books. It occurred to me that fishing manuals are also places where one is allowed to be literary, as an 'ordinary' person. The literary text is clearly important to the fisherman. I am currently reading a section on 'Carp' in a book called 'A Dream of Jewelled Fishes' and the literary quip at the start is 'This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last' from The importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde.
ReplyDeleteThis post has reminded me of something I read in Kress - Multimodality about how 'knowing that' and 'knowing how' are enshrined in language:
ReplyDelete'In a debate, Germans can talk about ‘Wissen’ (‘knowing that’) and ‘Koennen’ (‘knowing how’): when the discussion moves to translating ‘knowledge’ from English to German (or Swedish) it is not straightforward to know which of these to choose. Or, another example: in English there are the two words ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, verbs with an implied directionality of authority, in which ‘teachers’ have ‘knowledge’ and ‘learners’ have (or used to be assumed to have) the duty to acquire this knowledge. Vast theoretical and practical edifices and industries can and have been erected on such distinctions. Yet in many languages the same lexical root is used for this social domain: in German (as in Swedish) for instance, ‘lehren’ and ‘lernen’ are morphological inflections – ‘alterations’ – of the one lexemic stem – ‘learn’ in English. That makes it likely that German and Swedish societies might develop quite different theories around ‘Education’ to English society; and articulate them in their languages and their institutions. In each case it is the ‘accident of lexis’ – not of course an accident but the expression of a history of non-accidental social differences – which leads to such ontological wild goose chases.' (Kress 2010: 8)