Excerpt from Chapter seven of Book ‘BEYOND SCIENCE’ on first and second-hand knowledge by Robert Priddy

ON FIRST- & SECOND-HAND KNOWLEDGE

What is the surest safeguard against falling under the sway of wrong theories, false doctrines or of being taken in by persuasive politicians, demagogues and religious, ideological, techno-scientific or other fanatics? Philosophers through the centuries, when faced with a confusion of knowledge systems and competing theories, have tried to start afresh from their own personal intuition. Socrates, Augustine, Descartes, Locke and Husserl provide some well-known examples. All of these most influential thinkers’ writings are based on and describe methods of some kind of contemplation by which they derived insight at first-hand.

The value of speaking from experience, or at least from oneself, is something almost everyone will accept at times and often try to follow. Those who theorise about how human understanding is or may be verified never lay weight on this basic fact of life: personal experience is unavoidably everywhere a crucial key to all authentic understanding. Abstract theory does not amount to understanding, but remains general and insubstantial wherever it is not made meaningful through personal experience and the useful or purposive nature it receives thereby.

A book or a computer does not understand the information it carries. Only the living human being can benefit from it at all. Understanding is not a quantity that can be located anywhere else than in each and every human mind and heart. A philosopher is not simply a scholar or vice-versa. According to the Socratic vision he is one who lives out truth in speech and action as this is dictated by his inner self or voice. There have been many, and in my experience still are, formally uneducated persons with great understanding of life and the cosmos.

The mind lives on direct experience and yet it can come to feed more and more on secondary or vicarious thoughts. The ideal of Western culture, inculcated in us from school to the highest education, is information, generalities, theory and civilised opinion. The generalisations and abstractions of science fit this bill of personally insubstantial fare.

Since all but a fraction of this ‘knowledge’ is obtained at second hand, personal experience and the practice of knowledge in life can usually only come after the end of education, if then. Understanding can only be derived in small part from books, even then books only tend to express or reinforce - possibly extend somewhat- what has already been understood through other experience. Scholarship is chiefly of aid in developing the expression of one’s understanding, usually in written forms for specific contexts (such as for scientific, educational and political purposes). That book knowledge cannot be a substitute for the richness and fullness of personal experience is obvious even to common sense, no more than a map can give the fullness of actually having seen a terrain from all levels. The map is an aid to preparing for a journey, or of reviewing the ground covered afterwards. It cannot ever be a substitute for the actual experiences of knowing by being there. Further, beyond the sphere of our worldly lives, too, there is a fullness of being that thought can neither capture nor fully comprehend.

We originally learn everything from our environment and do not usually understand much of significance independently of others until, at best, after a long process of decades of maturing. Learning acquired vicariously is not itself very fulfilling, or not for long, unless it can be applied and tested in experience or met with in real life. Ideas have to be put into practice or tested through personal trial and error. The vital meaning of many true judgements are seldom clear until we see at first hand where and how they arise and apply. By finding out for ourselves, knowledge can become relevant and existentially meaningful to us and finds its proper place as part of the whole project of understanding oneself, others and our presence and purpose in the cosmos. One need obviously not become an intellectual to undertake this project, for there are many ways, though this social and historical fact still seems to go almost wholly unrecognised in the academic and scientific ‘world’.

From an individual’s viewpoint, merely to collect, analyse and compare facts and theories in the mind is only a preliminary. If they remain undigested through never being verified in personal observation, they alienate and cut off from real experience rather than inform and re-form anyone. Teachers who have only learned from books are not as inspiring or motivating as those with first-hand experience, just as the preacher who does not actually understand or practice what he advises is a parody of spirituality. That large numbers of persons in modern industrial civilisation somehow get by in such an alienated condition and can even go through life registered and paid as professionals, does not disprove it. The quality of understanding is most likely not itself much raised by budgeting, higher technical standards or formal education if the ‘human material’ is of doubtful quality as regards character, aspiration, concern, commitment, genuine solidarity with others and all such good qualities that go to form and truly raise minds.

The greater the embrace of one’s interest, the more important that one has broad and sound personal experience upon which to found it. The ways of obtaining this are many and as varied as the ways we go about finding out anything. No single set formula can be applied in all understanding. Within a formalised discipline, such as archaeology or physics, rules for deciding on the verification or falsification of hypotheses are obviously applicable. As soon as the mind moves beyond any strictly systematised subject or practical discipline, its considerations are so varied and many that it can only rely on personal judgement. This applies even to deciding on the quality and truth of testimony.

Testimony is just about as important to the sciences in actual practice as to the common man or to the detective, the politician or perhaps even the local plumber. No scientist can personally observe all the facts upon which most important work relies, unless perhaps under quite limited laboratory conditions. In many types of subject, especially the historical and psychological disciplines, one must often rely on almost nothing but testimony. Because of this, the collective judgement of experts is mostly made the decisive factor.

A person’s own evaluation is still always of prime importance in the question of understanding in life. Conceptions which have somehow been tested by, derived from or are meaningfully related to some level of individual personal experience can provide authentic understanding. This depends on both the head and heart of the individual. By ‘the heart’ I refer to each persons’ storehouse of noble human qualities from awareness of values, friendliness, sympathy, understanding of others, truthfulness, altruism, good humour, chivalry, emotional honesty, shared wit, non-aggressivity and all in us that moves deeply the best in us… or in short, the love of our fellow human beings.