Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

what’s knowable?

What can we know without a shadow of a doubt? We can’t trust the past to our memory or history books. We can only imagine the future. We can’t really know an object such as a pencil or a tree. That’s because we perceive objects with our senses. That same object such as a tree is a totally different experience to an ant or a bacterium. So what is a tree then? We see it as a separate object but the ant probably ‘sees’ it as an extension of the soil…

Emerson, in this quote, talks about a posture of ‘not-knowing’ and equates it to ‘knowledge’. Such a posture is very powerful because only from such a perspective, the one of ‘not-knowing‘, can we truly know the only thing that is knowable.