On the pleasure of knowing that someone knows or In praise of Wikipedia for its 20th birthday (series: notes to myself)

Too much has been said about the love for knowledge, a beautiful lie spread by our wonderful Greeks (Aristotle, Metaphysics, first line: "all men by nature desire to know". As if...).  

There is some truth in the pleasure to know, this much is safe to assume. Not only for its own sake, in the sense that the pleasure to know would be the same even if you were the only person left on earth, like the pleasure of eating chocolate, undiminished even by a third world war and our own self-annihilation. But also in terms of reassurance, as when you know why something has happened, or what is going to happen. 

However, there is another pleasure, concerning knowledge, which I believe may have escaped the Epicurean's attention, the hedonist's sensitivity, or the libertine's desire. It is the pleasure to know that someone knows, even if you don't.

Dates, facts, and formulae; equations, events, battles, and experiments; poems and their interpreters; the deeds of forgotten soldiers and the toils of ancient musicians; dead languages and artificial codes; lands that I will never visit, stars I have never seen, and the length of every river; the name of each butterfly and of all those who died in the Iliad; biographies and hagiographies, topographies and taxonomies, geographies and cartographies, bibliographies and catalogues; physics and metaphysics; the names of the species and their eating habits; the atom, the bit, the neuron, and their mysterious interactions;  the archives, the libraries, the museums and all their preserved contents; the exchange rates of any currency, the price of any object, the cost of every purchase; the prayers of disappeared religions and the architecture of their temples; all buildings with their addresses, small cities and their water supplies; each invention, each discovery, and every human effort behind them; the policies and the schemes, the laws and the rules, the monarchs and the parliaments; every text, every recording, every picture, every drawing, every sound, every video, every word, every symbol, every trace, every track, every map; the whys and the becauses; the ifs and the thens; the known known, and the known unknown...   of all this, and of boundlessly much more, I know nothing. 

And yet, the depth of my insipience (not of ignorance, please, because that is unaware of itself) is a mirror of the immensity of humanity's knowledge and its constant growth. And so I know that other humans, like me, have known, know, and will know what I do not know. And this is comforting. It redeems my emptiness. It kills the Faustian hubris. Knowledge is participation and the pleasure to know can only be altruistic. 

This delicate pleasure is epistemically ancillary, but it is not immorally voyeuristic. It is not some sort of ersatz intellectual delight or a degraded gratification of the mind. It is the participatory pleasure that the supporter enjoys in seeing his team winning, even if he hasn't got a clue about how to play, indeed even if he may never be able to play. 

It is, I imagine, Prospero's pleasure. Do you recall Miranda, when she sees the shipwreck? “O, I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer!” she says (Tempest I.ii.5–6). I imagine her father had similar sensitivity and that, when he was in his library, he might have uttered “O, I have relished / With those that I saw relish!” the knowledge he did not have.

They say that philosophy begins by knowing that one does not know. This much is true and common knowledge itself. What they seem to forget is that philosophy continues by being delighted that someone else does.

(photo of the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, courtesy of Matthew Waring through Unsplash)