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Expertise is Knowing How to Survive
Even when there’s no feeling of knowing
There is survival knowledge. This is separate from the feeling of certainty that we know what to do to survive. Even without reflecting on whether we’re certain that we know it, we may still know it.
Knowledge for Survival
The origin story of the first medicine man, as Terese Marie Mailhot tells it in her memoir Heart Berries, was the dream-advice of a bear: “I can’t unearth this medicine and give you power unless you give your life to this.” She, the bear, “put her claws into a strawberry patch,” and the man “started to plant and show others what he learned.”
Expertise serves a practical purpose. “We do not live to think,” said José Ortega y Gasset, “but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine said in the 1995 edition of Judaism Beyond God:
“If human beings will not take charge of their own happiness, the indifferent forces of the universe may arrange for human suffering. Reason and dignity are not built into the structure of the world. They are difficult human achievements.”
Knowing That We Know
When you’re an expert, your “knowing seems simply to pop up just at the point at which it is needed,” says Steven Connor in The Madness of Knowledge. There may not be a feeling associated with knowing a particular object. The activity of knowing (whatever it is that may be known) may not carry a feeling either. Epistemology seeks certainty, Connor says, about what’s knowable and what’s known. But what we want is a shortcut to that certainty, since “‘being sure’ presumably means not having to check every time.”
It’d be good if it were easy to know that we know.
It’d be better to put more energy into knowing what we know. That is expertise. That is the work of survival.
