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.”
