Webb Chapel Talk
Jeff Edmonds
Life? Knowledge? Honor?: Living Questions
Having been off at philosophy graduate school, I’ll indulge you by
beginning with a philosophical question: “What is knowledge?” This sort of
question generally produces varied reactions, depending on the temperament of
the audience. Some of you mystically minded folk will lean forward in their
chairs, eager for the opportunity to hear something true. The more practically
minded of you will tune out from the beginning, roll your eyes, and get ready
to endure a few wasted minutes of abstract talk before you can get back to work.
Others of you will perhaps ready themselves for a debate—looking sharply for
holes in argumentation, failures in logic, mistaken assumptions.
Strangely, though, however you react to the question “What is
knowledge?” already suggests that you have an idea about how to answer this
question. You mystics think that knowledge is knowledge of the truth found by
immediate intuition of “what is.” You more practically minded folks believes that knowledge helps you get things done. And
you debaters out there think that knowledge is found by logical, rational
argumentation from clear, self-evident principles.
So, whether you want to or not, by your reaction to this question, “What
is knowledge,” you are already giving a sort of answer to the question. Even
not reacting—ignoring this worthless question that can’t be answered anyway—is
a certain sort of reaction. So, you’ve been tricked, duped, and forced to deal
with a question that you didn’t want to ask—perhaps your only option left to
avoid the philosophical question is to walk out of the room. And then everyone
would know exactly what you think about the question: “What is knowledge?”—that
it’s not worth much. Maybe not.
I, myself, believe that the question is impossible to answer—how could
we possibly know what knowledge is? In order to know that we know what it is,
we would already have to know what knowing is, which begs the question again:
What is knowledge? I can hear you practically minded folks fidgeting right now—there
are copies to be made, tests to be taken—knowledge to be demonstrated and
dispensed. Why are we wasting our time with impossible questions?
On the other hand Webb’s main concern as an institution of learning is
with knowledge—but who here is certain they know what
knowledge is? Perhaps Mr. Frere can give us some answers to this question:
maybe he knows what knowledge is. He’s the head of the school, right? I’m sure
he has some good ideas, but I haven’t come across his name on the reading lists
at Vanderbilt as having answered this historically great philosophical
question. Mine’s not there yet either.
Yet, despite all this uncertainty and resistance with respect to a
question that lies at the heart of education, here we all are, getting ready to
head off to class, presumably to learn some knowledge, or even to teach some
knowledge. Maybe some of you even have tests today on which you will be
required to demonstrate the knowledge you presumably know. But if you don’t
know what counts as knowledge, how can you claim to know anything at all? Perhaps
all of us students and teachers might as well just go jump in Wartrace Creek and spend the day swimming instead of going
back to the classroom to engage in all this uncertainty…
Before we go swimming, I want to say that just because a question is
impossible doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. If you want to find out what
someone thinks the meaning of life is, the last thing to do is ask them what
they think. They’ll probably give you some sort of vague and unsatisfying
answer. Instead, watch how they live—the question is unavoidable, unanswerable,
but our actions betray our answers to it at every moment.
And, in the classroom, our actions answer this impossible philosophical
question about knowledge every day. It’s actually only impossible theoretically
or abstractly, practically it’s easy: to know in physics means to be able to
predict the behavior of physical objects within a certain degree of accuracy.
To know in history means to be able to put a date to a place and a story to an
event. To know in Spanish means to be able to understand the question, “
So, I take the impossibility of the question “What is knowledge?” to
indicate at least three things. First, no one can claim that they have
exclusive rights to knowledge (which includes me—even these hypotheses are
subject to change). Second, knowing a lot about something doesn’t necessarily
mean you understand much about something else. And third, our ideas about what
counts as knowledge are subject to the passing of time.
So, the impossibility of the question doesn’t mean that there is no such
thing as knowledge—it just means that knowledge takes multiple forms, and that
(unfortunately for us old folks) what counts for knowledge now might not be
worth too much 10 or 20 years down the road. Knowledge is not an answer; it is
a beginning that opens up a perspective on things that one perhaps never
considered. All of the different disciplines you study at Webb are different
ways of treating the world—they are different activities of thinking and
seeing. Each does not merely describe the world, but instead creates a window
on the world—this chapel seen from the perspective of a quantum physicist with
its vibrating atoms and whizzing particles is very different from this chapel
seen from the perspective of a political scientist, analyzing relations of
power between a lecturer and his captive audience. To ask the question of which
chapel we are actually sitting in is kind of strange…which chapel is it? It is
400 chapels; it’s different for each and every one of us sitting here.
So, fortunately, “What is knowledge?” cannot be answered in any final
way—we’ll never be able to have final knowledge of what this chapel is. I
prefer the idea that this space is 400 different experiential spaces,
transforming and multiplying each moment that passes over the idea that it is
just “the chapel.” How well do those words “the chapel” capture all that’s
going on here—all the hearts beating, the common air being breathed, the wandering
thoughts and dreams and emotions of folks sitting here? Education is a word
like chapel—it’s not a single thing, but a word that covers different 400
purposes, 400 activities. What is
This is the world we live in today, whether we want to or not: we run up
against people, cultures, things that we don’t understand. We don’t even
understand ourselves. Knowledge in any ultimate sense seems impossible. I think
it is. But life continues: and this means negotiation between differences. This
means participation in ways of life that we don’t understand. This means
uncertainty, risk, exposure, doubt, loss.
It seems to me that our only hope in the face of all this wild uncertainty
is our willingness to be able to say: I don’t understand, to work humbly
towards limited knowledge, to listen and to try to imagine how the world might
appear to someone else. This means that good education is active exposure to
many different forms of knowledge and many different ways of life. It should be
clear by now that knowledge is not something outside of who we are or what we
do—it makes us who we are and helps us with what we do. What you learn here at
Webb and in all of the things you do outside of Webb is who you are—and the
most dangerous thing would be to think that the process could be completed,
that when we get our high school diploma, our college degree, our first job,
etc. that we finally know something about the world. Life is activity,
ceaseless, uncertain, strange, joyful,--and as soon as we say: aha! I know what
life is: it’s this one thing! all we have to do is
look around, to open our eyes and see that it is so much more than that, filled
with things that we don’t understand.
All of this is to say: go out and learn. Acquiring knowledge is
acquiring many different lives, many different ways to experience the world: through
art, math, English, history, science, language, music.
But if you look at what you know as something separate and disconnected from
how you live, if you say there is only one kind of truth, and I know it;
or—what amounts to the same thing—that there is no truth and no one knows it, then
you risk cutting yourself off from the surprises and adventures and risks that
form life as a moral, ethical, aesthetic activity. Life is not a fill in the
blank test. Class isn’t over when you hand it in, and homework is just the work
we do at home. We have this tendency to break our lives up into these small
compartments, but we forget that life goes on when we walk through the door of
the classroom or to our jobs—why don’t we hold that part of our life to the
same standard of excellence as we hold on the athletic field, or on a high
mountain trail or while performing a play?
The challenge of education today is thus the same as it has always been:
to give ourselves tools to continue to learn in all areas of life, which means
never to answer finally and certainly the answer to the question: “What is knowledge?”
We have to think of our understanding as an opportunity for further
learning—not as an end to be achieved. Our knowledge is always limited, perspectival, uncertain. The
question becomes: how will I deal with this uncertainty? With fear and retreat
to dogma and the opinions of those around me or with a courageous embrace and
studied attention of the unknown? This is the ethical question, the question of
honor today: not so much how can I act according to the principles that I know
for sure: we already know all too well how to find excuses and ways around the
old principles of lying, cheating, stealing. I’ll put the same question a
different way. It is a question that lies at the heart of the golden rule: How
will I act in the face of what I do not understand—with fear, violence, and
rejection, or with curiosity, engagement, and love? The point of life today has
changed and stayed the same—it’s not a quest for total knowledge or
understanding. Instead, it is an encounter with things beyond the limits of our
knowledge: with strangers, foreigners, Yankees, Mexicans, Iraqis, Frenchies, your next door neighbor—how will you negotiate
that encounter—how will you articulate what it is that you don’t know?
This is a question that will never be answered by philosophers,
teachers, scholars, or mathematicians. Pablo Neruda
once wrote, “I did not come to solve anything. / I came here to sing / and for
you to sing with me.” Life is sort like a question that never dies, that keeps singing
itself in different and strange forms: What will I do when I encounter
something or someone that I do not understand? How will I react?—as if I know
the answer already? or as if I’m familiar with the
notion of life as a question, as a song? It turns out that the golden rule is
not a rule at all—it’s an activity, a search, a
curiosity…a question. Who knows what will happen next?—the future is open and sings
out as a question, and it’s up to us to live it.