It's time to review:
- We live, constantly, in the presence of mystery.
- All of our experience and knowledge are the result of our encounters with mystery and the world we create, in our heads, in response to mystery.
- We do this by drawing analogies between the various inputs of our senses, and by drawing further analogies between those analogies.
- This process produces three arenas of knowledge, which can be diagramed as follows:
Private knowledge is the stuff that only you can percieve. It is also the stuff connected to the word "me" in your brain. The pain in "my" foot. The fantasy in "my" head. The voice I hear in "my" brain, saying the words when I read a book.
Outside knowledge is the stuff that I can percieve in the outside world, or that I can deduce from what I perceive in the outsid world.
Cultural knowledge is knowledge of the agreements we have made about the contents of our inside worlds. I formulate a concept of "Superman" in my brain when I read a comic book that is analogous to the one in the brain of the writer. There is no Superman in the outside world to test this against. It is a matter of playing the same game for mutual benefit.
Sometimes we play the cultural game very seriously. We agree, not only to share a concept, but to believe in it—to take it just as seriously as we would if it were really part of the outside world, even if we know that it isn't. Ideas like justice, or democracy can fit into this category, as can ideas like the presidency or royalty.
Sometimes these ideas that we agree to believe in are attached to things in the outside world like the physical metal and paint of a stop sign, or the physical human, George Bush, to create a sort of hybrid.
Of course, we could refine this picture, or make further divisions, forever. But this is the basic layout.
We get our information about these different areas in different ways. This is particularly true of the difference between the outside sphere and the cultural sphere.
Our analogies and categories in the outside sphere tend to begin as an encounter with mystery. I need to make sense out of what my senses tell me, and I manufacture my categories to do that.
This is the normal methodology of babies, of adults presented with novel experiences, and of scientists fine-tuning their understanding of the world. Modern science is the result of our need to understand mystery, to take that which doesn't fit our current worldview, and restructure the worldview so that it does.
Cultural knowledge, on the other hand, tends to work the other way around. The knowledge is handed to us, full-blown, by tradition, and our job, most of the time is to make the facts fit.
If I am born in the U.S. I am expected to help make the fiction of the presidency work, by cooperating with the whole process it entails, by believing it.
If I was born in England, three hundred years ago, I would have been expected to help make the fiction of the monarchy work as well.
We are expected to make stop signs work by stopping when we see them. We are expected to make justice work by acting as though it were a reality.
We don't run into justice, the way one might walk into a steel post, and then modify our world-view to take it into account. Rather, we start with a concept of justice which has been given to us by our culture, and modify our behaviour to bring it into existence.
So in one way, cultural knowledge seems not to be an encounter with mystery at all. It owes little or nothing to the mystery of the outside world. But it is still an encounter with the mystery of culture, which, since it is formed from the agreement between all of our inside worlds, is in some ways an even deeper mystery.
