The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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I think it does. My favorite book on this subject is Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Knowledge and the Sacred. He speaks from a traditional point of view. To fill in the background, in the hundred years of the Gifford Lectures—the most prestigious humanities lecture series in the West—Nasr is the only non-Westerner ever to have been included. His thesis is that knowledge is not so much that which discloses the sacred as that which is sacred in itself for partaking in the knowing source from which intelligence derives. Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.
KANE So knowing and being are intimately related?
SMITH In the end they are identical. That probably holds for all positive attributes. The closer to their source we draw, the more we find them converging.
KANE I think it is a particularly important point that, in the West, the concept of knowledge is impersonal and detached. We take out being, and say it has no place. What you are saying here is that knowledge is imbued with being. It is a direct experience. Knowledge cannot be detached as such. Would you say that knowledge of that sort is what helps you on those days when you see the sacred in the everyday?
SMITH I am sure that is the case. To linger for a moment on this issue of detached, objective knowledge, writing—whatever its virtues, and I think there are some—is especially vulnerable to becoming detached, because writing can be disconnected from the writer. There it is in print, dead and frozen. Speech, on the other hand, is not only alive, it is life, because it cannot be separated from the living person in one mode of his or her own being. Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
KANE To quote Emerson once again, “To the wise, fact is true poetry.” Would poetry present the same dilemma?
SMITH No, because poetry is art, and we've already talked about that. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth-telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
KANE Would you say if someone has learned and has become inwardly active through learning, then the knowledge gained becomes part of his or her being? Would he or she be a different person than he or she was prior?
SMITH We have to differentiate between life-giving learning and kinds that deaden the mind. I think of a TV program around mid-century (there have doubtless been others since) that featured savants, essentially. They were amazing—veritable walking encyclopedias—
KANE—what was the day of the week for January 1, Year 1, that sort of thing?
SMITH Yes, and, Who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1952? I was living in St. Louis at the time, and the national champion in that particular series turned out to be a St. Louisan. People knew him. He was unemployed. Couldn't get a job as a postal clerk because he couldn't pass the civil service exam. So when we talk about knowledge and learning, we have to distinguish between useless kinds and kinds that are useful—practically useful, but more important, useful in raising the stature of our lives.
KANE Please forgive me if I ask you an unfair question: If we follow this through, is it possible that we educate whole generations of savants, just in the sense that you use the term?
SMITH More than possible, I suspect. And that's what turns off kids from learning, of course—when it seems like rote memory, and what's it for? We give them hoops to jump through, keeping the destination—the purpose and the point—clearly before them.
KANE Many educators have recognized the limitations of a positivistic model of knowledge. They know that rote learning no longer works, or perhaps that it never did. The new paradigm that drives education is based upon a computer analogue wherein we storehouse individual bits of knowledge, discrete and separable. These bits can then be put into motion, as it were, through a program in critical thinking, for example. It often seems to me that we are trying to put the pieces in motion artificially without, again, reference to the content itself, without reference to being. So you might say that readers of this interview could argue, “Well, the fact of the matter is that we are teaching children how to put ideas together, how to think.” But I wonder if that still doesn't miss the point.
SMITH I think it does. I've heard about this issue; I am not in close touch with what actually goes on, but I share your skepticism about teaching critical thinking in the abstract. It doesn't work because thinking never proceeds in a vacuum. So to be effective, thinking must adapt and be faithful to the context in which it works. My skepticism here ties in with my earlier skepticism about method in general. We always know more than we know how we know it, so we get farther by attending to the “what” than to the “how.” The trouble with trying to work out a method for knowing is that it will rule out resources that don't conform to it. Every method is, in ways, a straitjacket, a Procrustean bed. True, we all do have methods, and when we run into problems, it might be well to try to spot and revise if need be the course that brought us to the problem. But to put method first is putting the cart before the horse.
KANE If I am following you correctly, and tying it back to what you said before, it is being that animates knowledge. It is not the method that animates knowledge.
SMITH Yes. In the final analysis what we know derives from our entire being. Historians of knowledge are providing us with detailed examples of breakthroughs where frontier scientists, say, simply discarded oceans of evidence because something deep lying in them generated a “gut feeling” that the truth lay elsewhere. Had they toed the line of the so-called scientific method, the breakthroughs wouldn't have occurred.
KANE. A. Burt—
SMITH—he was a dear friend of mine.
KANE—in his classic work, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Scientists, maintained that if Copernicus had presented his thoughts to thoroughgoing empiricists, he would have been laughed out of court.
SMITH Exactly.
KANE I wonder if this might not be a good place to familiarize some of our readers with the modern Western mind-set that you've written about in a good many places. At this point in our discussion, you have begun to root out some of the assumptions that we make (one being relative to “method”) that might limit the knowledge that we gain, or perhaps again, our openness to being. What are some of the other assumptions that have characterized knowledge in the West and might keep us from cleansing those doors of perception?
SMITH Science works effectively on things that impact more complicated things—cancer cells devastating human bodies, for example. If we call this upward causation, science is good at that. What it's not good at is downward causation—the way the superior impacts the inferior—and when it comes to things that are superior to us, we human beings, it draws a total blank. Because the technological spin-offs from science are so impressive, we slip into assuming that upward causation, more from less, is the name of the game. The universe derives (exclusively) from a dense pellet. Life derives (exclusively) from inanimate elements. “Hydrogen is a ubiquitous substance which, given time, gives rise to intelligence,” as one scientist has put it. But as another scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, has pointed out—one wishes that in practice he paid more attention to his aphorism—“absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.” On balance, the wisdom traditions assure us, things proceed more by downward than upward causation. If science doesn't show this, it is because it is locked (as it should be, this being the key to its effectiveness) into a technically competent but metaphysically impoverished method—the issue of method again. The latest good book on this point is Bryan Appleyard's Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man.
KANE Does this approach to understanding create particular problems when we apply it to understanding human beings? In education, we work with children all the time, and we often have positivistic models of knowledge when we conceptualize who the children are in themselves. Do you think this is particularly problematic?
SMITH I think poor self-images cripple children—and adults as well,