Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online

fern—you end up agog in the lap of Kant. For in order to know anything for certain, we must first examine the mind’s own way of knowing. And how on earth do we propose to do that?
    This is a live issue in this country. John Dewey pointed out, quite intelligently, that philosophy progresses not by solving problems but by abandoning them. It simply loses interest. The question of “epistemology” is one which thinkers of this century have not yet abandoned. On the contrary, everybody seems to be working on it. So much interesting work is being done outside the field of philosophy proper, and outside philosophy’s terms, that it seems appropriate now to replace the term epistemology with a new term—such as cognition—to refer to this new wealth of related topics.
    Examining the structures of human thought and perception are recent thinkers like Paul Weiss and Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in systems theory, Gregory Bateson in information theory, Roman Jakobson and Thomas Sebeok in semiotics, Noam Chomsky in linguistics, John Eccles and Wilder Penfield in brain physiology, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas in anthropology, Ernst Gombrich in art criticism, and Jerome Bruner and Jean Piagetin psychology. They seek to understand the processes by which the mind imposes order. They seek to clarify the relationship between perceiving and thinking, between inventing and knowing. Microphysicists are interested in these matters too. Science as a whole, like philosophy, wants to proceed from a firm base. Interestingly, the human effort to locate that base, to set knowledge firmly upon the plinth of perception, seems repeatedly to result in everybody’s sinking at once. At any rate, I think the interest in cognition derives ultimately from a genuine interest in the world for its own sake. And I imagine that Western thought intended simply to get this little business out of the way, so it could proceed with its task of tracing quarks or analyzing texts; but no one has been able to get it out of the way. Instead, it just gets more interesting in its own right.
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    From the time of Greek science till now, Western culture has usually had a lively, unselfish, and intellectual interest in the phenomenal world for its own sake. Historians of culture think that this interest sprang originally from meeting cultures. In the port towns at the peripheries of major civilizations, people of varying cultures and religions met. They soon asked themselves (according to this theory) what could be true if men disagreed, and if one world view was apparently as workable as another. This innocent inquiry—an inquiry it would have been impossible to make from the middle of China, the middle of Egypt, or the middle of Mexico—led straight to the moon. It is, then, a very good question, and we have not stopped asking it. What is absolutely true? What can we know for certain? What is really here?
    In fact, we are asking these questions now with freshurgency. Of course, we in the West agree now that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or raise a baby, or help pain, or live. And no one is losing much sleep now over the idea that our tribal gods are not absolute. But we are having a slow century of it, digesting the information that our yardsticks are not absolute, our mathematics is not absolute.
    Science, that product of skepticism born of cultural diversity, is meant to deal in certainties, in data which anyone anywhere could verify. And for the most part it has. Our self-referential mathematics and wiggly yardsticks got us to the moon. I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes it is operating in midair. At any rate, the sciences are wondering again, as the earliest skeptics did, what could be a firm basis for knowledge. People in many of the sciences are looking at their feet. First Einstein, then Heisenberg, then Gödel, made a