AGNOTOLOGY: the art of not knowing
Whether I am happy? You’re asking me a question there. Do I need to know? Answer it now? What do you mean by happiness, anyway? Do I know enough about it to have a ready-made judgment about it? Or did luck only come around in the time when luck was still very common? No other questions than, is it a fledgling love in the spring? Or can you, if you are lucky, win the lottery that per ounce is traded in a paper bag like powdered sugar or marzipan used to be at the confectioner’s? By which you can also speak of favorable fate or free chance. Or does luck as a field of inquiry for science evade market forces despite or precisely because of the hordes after—and boosters of—what everyone expects without the outcome being fixed. Verifiable. While everyone believes they are entitled to it, but what presents itself as fate rarely does. And then often unsolicited and unexpected, almost spontaneously, like a heart as a thief at night.
Am I happy because I live without worry? Am I happy because, as an aspiring writer on paper, I share my worries with everyone? Or am I intensely happy because the worries I have about my health, social position, or marital status, for example, do not keep me from sleeping. I don’t know what unimaginable things await me and hardly torment me because of that. On the contrary, they even give me a sound sleep, because I fall from one dream into another as if I were traveling timelessly and reduced to the core of my nature in an immense black hole. Isn’t happiness and knowledge of it at the same time a form of self-deception? Or is lack of knowledge on the hallowed ground of science a phase in mourning that we describe as denial? Another phenomenon about which, as a definition, there is little further knowledge. Denial, the neurosis of knowing but not wanting to know. A cycle that teases us with the question: does knowing everything also make us forgive everything? This is because we simply have to forget it lacking sufficient memory space, apart from whether everything of death, the endless and desireless void, can ever belong to the domain of knowledge of man in his lost paradise. Or whether it creates its own mathematical domain of a numerically infinite not knowing. His own agnotologie. The knowledge of not-knowing. Which opens up the paradoxical possibility of not being and yet living. Eternal even according to Christian lore. Does this not make death and the knowledge we lack about it beyond our comprehension as normal human beings? What makes all of us in the face of death, so poor, idiotic, blind, lame, and deaf. With that, only at long last everyone at the end of their rope has become each other’s equal. Which, democratically speaking, does include the vote. Although as long as the corpse is still above the earth, there is still a difference in treatment and approach between rich and poor. Not everyone is for taxes and the environment going up in smoke .
But am I happy or not? By nature I am not much of a worrier either. I have never been either, which in turn has the advantage that I rarely care much about the opinions of others. Of which my independent salsa style is a telling and swinging example. Not that I want to accuse myself of lacking empathy. Not towards others nor towards myself. Which fortunately leaves me in a kind of state of equilibrium on the slack tightrope of self-interest. A state that the utopian Ayn Rand was still concerned about to realize her model of society. It is rather that my self-interest does not really bother me because it does not dominate me. I am and always remain aware of the interest I share with another. Which leads to another more perfect freedom than the free market and the principle of laisez faire will guarantee me.
Ludo
