Information, Knowledge, Intuition

[Guest guest]

We are living today in a culture of information. I use the

word "culture" in its anthropological sense; the information-culture

has in practice no place for cultural heritages of any kind. It

stimulates calculation but consistently discourages reflection. Thus

it substitutes information (and misinformation) for knowledge or

wisdom. This is alarming, yet it's a culture that sooner or later

will spin out of control; it will not endure.

 

Let us remember that knowledge, as distinct from information, always

allows for and reckons with the unknown. As bodies and disciplines

of knowledge extend, so does the extent of the unknown. Perhaps the

relative dimension of the two is a cultural constant. Yet the

frontiers between the two (the known and the unknown) are

continually being contested.

 

Forays are always being made into the unknown in the hope of adding

to our knowledge. Many forays are scientific, and other more

intuitive but no less important ones are made by mystics and

artists. When an insight brought back from an intuitive foray seems

to stand up, hold water, or prove its paces, we are in the face of

what can be properly termed an original work.

 

True originality is never something sought after or, as it were,

signed; rather it is a quality belonging to something touched in the

dark and brought back as a tentative question.

 

(By John Berger; Review. Harper's Magazine, December 2005)