“For there are some who long to know for the sole purpose of knowing, and that is shameful curiosity; others who long to know in order to become known, and that is shameful vanity. To such as these we may apply the words of the Satirist: ‘Your knowledge counts for nothing unless your friends know you have it’. There are others still who long for knowledge in order to sell its fruits for money or honors, and this is shameful profiteering; others again who long to know in order to be of service, and this is charity. Finally there are those who long to know in order to benefit themselves, and this is prudence.” (Bernard de Clairvaux)
Why seek knowledge? What knowledge do we seek? Knowledge as power? But power for what? Power as capacity for what end? Power as mask of ignorance of ends? Knowledge as mask of ignorance? As a power to conceal an absence, a nakedness? Knowledge as camouflage, as pretense, as trick to “cover up” an inadequacy—even a radical one—vis-à-vis a perfection of knowing-being, (where knowledge is no addition or acquisition)? Knowledge as compensation for lack of a divine identity (coincidentia) of content and form?
The search for knowledge-as-power exposes itself—and us as seekers—to seeking as a problem, even as a “front” for an underlying perfection of being and knowledge.
We can know only “with our mind”—as St. Paul suggests in Romans—remaining ignorant in the flesh: for we are finite or determinate beings. Our determination is our death, our ignorance. So we know only promises (tokens of what is to come), even as our promises expose our mortality to what is immortal. Hence the essentially or primordially poetic character of our knowledge. What we know truly—our true knowledge—exposes our death to eternal life.
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