Understanding and its limits.

Sitting in one of my favorite hidden cafés in Paris, (flex but they really do exist!) the warm server tentatively asks, ‘Are you okay?’ I flash a defeated smile. Almost three hours of reading and four failed attempts at my introduction, I tell her that I’m stuck on my philosophy paper. ‘Philosophy?’ she winces, ‘Yeah, I quit that a long time ago, messes with your head.’ I’ve been hearing this a little too often recently. 

I push away my paper and decide to pack up and leave. At the register, I thank her for her concern. It’s nice, when a stranger takes the time to check in. She asks me what my paper’s about. ‘To know the world, must one understand it?’ She blows out air through lightly sealed lips, feigning exhaustion. I laugh, ‘Funny thing is that I gave myself this question.’ 

Once in a while a professor would offer us the possibility of formulating our own mini-mémoire or research paper (to be validated of course.) I took this opportunity to attempt to answer something that has been bothering me for a long time. Namely, if there is a conflict between knowing and understanding. For if I said that I know something, it would not necessarily imply that I understand it and vice versa. Taking this idea further, I wondered about the relationship between the two. Are they complementary or conflictual? Does one come before or after the other? Or even if there exists no relation whatsoever. 

The fun and tedious task of philosophy is going back to what things mean, that is to go back to definitions. In daily life, words are interchangeable as we communicate not only through what is said, but also the context of that which something is said. This makes communication convenient but it also takes us further away from the true meaning of things. We use words as signifiers to signify specific objects or concepts. If these words are interchangeable, we lose the traces which delineate one object or concept from the next. This means one should really question what one knows and by extension, what is one’s relationship with reality (if you accept that reality is a shared composition of signifiers.)

This game that I am describing is what I applied to my question of how it is that we identify the world, specifically. I examine our approaches and I mainly critique our scientific approach. This paper really took a turn when I decided to incorporate the idea of the human condition, the tragedy of it, and how that gives way to an approach that does not limit itself to science nor to the actual world itself. 

This bilingual 10-page edition (of a 4-page paper that alternates between English and French, if you are interested in using this to work on your French) is primarily in the domain of epistemology but my current interest in phenomenology is definitely pronounced. 

I thank you for your support and I hope you find this paper as fun to discover as I did.

wn x

* As always my deepest appreciation for Joshua M. and Jordan O.

Here's the Introduction :)