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The Feeling of Knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’
Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019) proposes a new word for the feeling of knowing. Here are some insights from the introduction to the book.
A relatively recent word: ‘Epistemology’
Though the question of knowledge itself goes back at least to ancient Greek philosophy, the word to describe that intellectual concern is a relatively recent arrival to English. Ralph Cudworth’s treatise (written c. 1688, published 1731) suggested the related word “epistemonical, meaning something like ‘capable of being known’.” In Connor’s interpretation, a word like “epistemonical” begins to gesture toward our fantasy that something’s existence depends on our ability to know it “and not vice versa.” There doesn’t appear ever to have been a noun form, “epistemony,” for “the condition of knowability.”
“Epistemology” was coined in 1847 in the English Review as a translation of Fichte’s “Wissenschaftslehre.” That is used for theories of knowledge.
A new word: ‘Epistemopathy’
But what about “the feeling we have of knowing” and of “learning, thinking, arguing, doubting, wondering and forgetting”? What are these unpleasant feelings of “irritation, rage, envy, lust, misery, boredom and melancholy” plus the more positive ones of “satisfaction, assurance, excitement and triumph”? What do we feel “in the itinerant or suspensive conditions we call surmising, supposing, doubting or wondering”?
Connor proposes epistemopathy for our “complex states of feeling and imaginative projection” about what we know. It regards “the spectrum of feeling” about knowledge — the “idea,” “ambition,” and “fantasy” of knowledge. Where “epistemology” contains the word logos, “epistemopathy” contains the word pathos.
He proposes that “there is an epistemopathic payload within every epistemology, an excited yearning, for instance, to strive for a kind of self-realization and self-government in knowledge.” It’s what makes knowledge “matter” to us. Epistemopathy is “the rapturous attempt of knowledge to feel, fuel and feed its own powers of self-generation.” It is about the…
