Knowingness

notes on an intellectual status game

1

Knowingness is the quality of appearing to know something. It’s also the basic move in a status game played by intellectuals. In this game, you want to appear to know the most. Please note: you want to appear to know the most.

2

I remember watching the initiation of a first year PhD student into the game of knowingness. He was standing nervously by the punch bowl at a reception, when one of my friends, a third year PhD student in philosophy, walked up and introduced herself.

“So what do you want to work on?” She asked.

He smiled and blurted out: “Aristotle!”

“Oh yeah? What about him?”

I saw the sudden shift in posture, felt my mirror neurons activating. She—and I, eavesdropping—leaned forward to await the poor guppy’s response. Cruel dark wings of knowingness unfolded satanically from our shoulders.

He sensed the vibe and gulped down a mouthful of punch. “Uh... I’m quite taken by his ethics?”

She smiled. “But don’t you find it impossible for his practical philosophy to speak to us until we sort out the problem of entelechy, and the larger difficulties of his metaphysical naturalism?”

Appalled, stricken, clutching his red plastic cup like it was a sign emblazoned with the words I DON’T BELONG HERE, the poor first year’s blood drained from his face. I knew how he felt; I’d been him.

But mostly I was admiring my friend’s move set. She hadn’t really studied Aristotle, as far as I knew, not past the basics we all had to drill for our comprehensive exams. As someone who had studied Aristotle a bit more than that, I knew her question didn’t make sense. It certainly didn’t constitute a good objection to somebody being interested in Aristotle’s ethics. That didn’t matter. She’d taken the measure of her victim. She’d correctly judged the right words to imply that she knew a whole lot more than he did.

Ultimately they became friends. What the newcomer had to learn was how to play the game, how to send the volley back. (”Have you read Hegel’s Science of Logic?” “Sure, but of course one can’t understand it without mastering Kant’s first critique.” “Oh, I agree, though Kant himself makes little sense until you’ve come to grips with the metaphysics of Christian Wolff.” “Perhaps, but don’t you find that Wolff is little more than a footnote to Leibniz?”) I’ve seen it over and over again: a quick exchange of knowingness that clears the air, establishes respect, and allows two people cloistered by their expertise to interact like normal human beings—like a summer thunderstorm that breaks the heat.

You might think my friend was being mean. She wasn’t. She was introducing a neophyte to the game. The game has problems: the game sucks, frankly. But he was gonna have to play it eventually, and he might as well learn how it feels in a low stakes environment with a stiff drink near to hand.

Many new graduate students complain of intense imposter syndrome. Sadly, they are mostly getting this feeling from a bunch of actual imposters, slightly older grad students who have mastered the techniques of knowingness.

3

I really hate this status game. But I was no better back then, and I still fall into it at the most unexpected moments.

For example, right here on Substack, not so long ago, I managed to dickishly agree with someone in their comments, falling into old habits of knowingness. I’ll share the transgression so that this essay doesn’t seem like a complaint merely about other people. My comment was on an essay by Naomi Kanakia about how Walter Ong is “this year’s guy”—meaning, the cultural theorist most ubiquitously discussed in the popular press. To her lovely post on this topic, I made a reply beginning with this preening preamble—:

It’s funny to me that Ong is this year’s guy, because he’s part of a line of academic research that has moved considerably beyond him. (But then, that was also true of Girard.) In my opinion, the bit of his work that remains interesting today is actually his excellent study of Peter Ramus. Still, I agree with you that he is this year’s guy: he keeps popping up in my reading too.

Here, I am transparently seeking to appear to know more than my audience. I do this by signaling how much I’ve read. Every single sentence implies a pile of books, and even my manner of agreeing with the thesis of the essay I’m responding to is remarkably condescending. It’s a gratuitous performance, having no bearing on the actual thought I had to share, which comes after it.

What function does knowingness serve? I don’t actually remember what was going through my head as I typed those words. But I do recognize the gesture. What I learned in grad school is that competitive knowingness serves for academics the function butt-sniffing serves for dogs. You establish rank, secure standing to share your own ideas, ward off potential aggression, and even signal a kind of friendliness.

“Philosopher’s Lamp” (Rene Magritte: 1936)

4

A key feature of knowingness is allusive unhelpfulness. Ideally, one implies highly specific knowledge but does not actually impart it. Knowingness works best when it’s specific enough to fend off doubt, but vague enough to fend off critique. And thus, knowingness often piggy-backs reaction. It’s easiest to be knowing in response to someone else’s assertion or question.

5

Knowingness can be categorized by what kind of knowledge is being signaled: familiarity with a body of expert discourse, the subtleties of fashionable taste, etc.

The grad school knowingness—as well as the knowingness of my cited comment—are of the first kind, peacocking familiarity with expert discourse.

In more literary circles, knowingness about fashionable taste is more common. It’s even harder to cope with (on the receiving end) than knowingness about expertise. A victim can’t simply bury themselves in a library and come out forearmed. You get fashionable taste only by hanging around and imitating the opinions of people who have it. By the time you’ve acquired it for yourself, bloodied by the gauntlet of knowingness, you’ll almost certainly have acquired, also, a taste for the same kind of sadism. Fashionable people are almost always knowing.

Just to keep things funky, in philosophy there’s also a special, refined form of knowingness in which you competitively exhibit your cutting Socratic ignorance. It’s intended to puncture someone else’s pretension to knowledge by a simple pin-prick of a question. Somebody gives their thoughtful, extended defense of theory X about topic Y, and the chin-stroking professional philosopher asks, “but what do you mean by Y? I myself have never understood the concept.” Real virtuosos know how to pivot from exhibiting their knowledge to exhibiting their strategic ignorance in a disconcerting way. You can’t compete, you can only bow.

6

As a new PhD student, I had unique vulnerabilities. I’d been homeschooled, and then I’d attended a bad religious college, so I was mostly ignorant of the canonical works and central categories of contemporary philosophy. Happily for me, I’d also—for the same reasons—acquired intimate knowledge of a number of recondite thinkers. I learned to refer to them in an unanswerable facade of knowingness. Any aggressors hadn’t a hope in hell of recognizing my references. I didn’t care about these thinkers myself, but they served and shielded me as I scrambled to catch up.

Then, one day, I had the bad luck to run into a genuinely erudite historian of philosophy, who expressed a knowledgeable interest in one of my obscure back-pocket philosophers. (The philosopher I was being knowing about was the Dutch law professor and metaphysician, Herman Dooyeweerd.) He enthusiastically engaged me on the topic, and I quickly realized this professor probably knew more about my guy than I did. But he wasn’t, himself, playing the game of knowingness. He just happened to know, and to be a pleasant, conversible sort of man.

You might expect this encounter would cure me of an encroaching reliance upon knowingness. Of course it didn’t! If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, knowingness is the tribute insecurity pays to knowledge.

“Two Philosophers” (José de Ribera: 1612)

7

Knowingness is powerful. You can build an entire career on it. Joseph Epstein once wrote: “What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.” While I actually like George Steiner quite a bit, it’s true that his essays are riddled with examples of knowingness. He could be knowing like nobody has been before or since. I mean:

The romantic vision of life is, at its core, non-tragic. It is anchored in the belief that the world is open to redemption, whether through the dialectic of Hegel, the secular messianism of Marx, or the mystical naturalism of Novalis and Schelling. From the Athenaeum fragments to the late poetry of Hugo, from Büchner’s Woyzeck to the mythic music-dramas of Wagner, the nineteenth century spent its energy attempting to transmute the absolute catastrophe of the Greeks into mere drama of pathography, education, or social reform.

On the one hand, this is great. On the other hand, after about three pages of this level of knowingness, you just have to let it wash over you, you’re not stopping to bone up on each allusion. Quite possibly Steiner knew everything he appeared to know—knowingness doesn’t exclude knowledge—but he was better at wearing his knowledge than sharing it.

8

You can’t just condemn knowingness. After all, shouldn’t someone who really knows have the appearance of knowing? An erudite person committed to avoiding knowingness puts themselves in a false position. What’s more, they cut themselves off from the most wonderful social possibilities of knowledge!

Knowingness can lead to something beautiful, because it’s the pass code to a certain level of discussion. Yes, it’s a way for young intellectuals to fake it until they make it, a dangerous game in a sufficiently competitive environment, but when your knowingness is grounded on true knowledge, and your partner rises to the occasion, it can transcend a duel of appearances to become the kind of witty, allusive, wide-ranging conversation you once dreamed about as a baby aspiring intellectual.

There’s a touching scene in the mid-century film The Corn Is Green, about a schoolteacher who finds a very gifted boy among impoverished Welsh miners. She coaches him to the point where he can apply for a scholarship to Oxford. He’s returned from the scholarship exam; they’re discussing his chances; and then:

MISS MOFFAT [the teacher]
I’ve never heard you talk so much since I’ve known you.
MORGAN [the young man]
That is just it! I can talk, now! The three days I have been there, I have been talking my head off!
MISS MOFFAT
Ha! If three days at Oxford can do that to you, what would you be like at the end of three years?
MORGAN
That’s just it again. It would be everything I need, everything! Starling and I spent three hours one night discussin’ the law — Starling, you know, the brilliant one. . . . The words came pouring out of me — all the words that I had learnt and written down and never spoken. I suppose I was talking nonsense, but I was at least holding a conversation! I suddenly realized that I had never done it before — I had never been able to do it. (With a strong Welsh accent) “How are you, Morgan? Nice day, Mr. Jones! Not bad for the harvest.” A vocabulary of twenty words; all the thoughts that you have given to me were being stored away as if they were always going to be useless — locked up and rotting away — a lot of questions with nobody to answer them, a lot of statements with nobody to contradict them. . . And there I was with Starling, nineteen to the dozen.

This is the ideal outcome of knowingness: at a certain point, in a certain context, the status game shimmers and transforms. Two people who faced each other in an almost antagonistic stance realize they are equally interested in a third thing. Without their mutual knowingness, they would never have realized this. And suddenly they are shoulder to shoulder, focused together on that third thing, engrossed in one of the highest pleasures of the mind: true, deep intellectual conversation.

Several of my relationships from graduate school, which began in the traditional contest of knowingness became ecstatic friendships of intellectual communion. For these friendships, the posture of knowingness was a necessary preparation. If we hadn’t played the game, we would never have won the prize.

9

Another outcome is possible. If you play the game long enough, and never transcend it, you come to a bad end. Knowingness can become a shroud for the death of reason.

One of the saddest spectacles in my graduate school was an elderly philosopher, once the social center of a thriving philosophical community. He’d become mentally exhausted. He didn’t keep up with the new ideas, and his grasp on old ones had grown tenuous. Still, his self-worth clearly depended upon his academic social prowess. He had devised a clever strategy of near-senile knowingness. He had associated a private anecdote with every philosophical name and an obscure reading recommendation with every philosophical topic. It was a flawless, invincible exoskeleton of knowingness. But everybody eventually noticed what he was doing, when they saw him responding like a robot to the same cues from different people. In my case, after the third or fourth time I read an entire book he’d recommended just because I’d uttered a keyword in his presence—and realized his recommendations bore no relation to what I had been talking about—it dawned on me that he was not teaching me what he knew, but fending me off with his knowingness. Somehow knowingness had become his entire and only personality.

Actually knowing something differs from appearing to know it, even if appearing to know naturally follows from actually knowing. And therefore the status game involving knowingness—like any status game—tends to fall afoul of Goodhart’s Law. If you play too long or too hard, the measure becomes the target: mastering the attitude of knowingness becomes more important than knowing. Like the light from a dead star, the facade of knowingness can remain visible to distant eyes long after knowledge has vanished from your soul.

---