Lately I have been reading “The Master and His Emissary” by Iain McGilchrist, and it has been deeply illuminating. At its core is a detailed theory of the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and an exploration of the consequences of those differences. One of the striking ideas introduced fairly early on is that we experience two kinds of knowledge.
McGilchrist demonstrates the difference with the two German words for knowing (Kennen vs Wissen, also connaître vs savoir in French) and the different things they represent. For example, when we talk about knowing a person, we use Kennen/connaître, which refers to a knowledge from direct experience. Wissen/savoir implies a factual knowledge: I “know” that iron has an atomic mass of 55.845u, that Berlin is the capital of Germany, etc. There are some key facts to these kinds of knowledge:
- Wissen is transmissible, Kennen is not.
In McGilchrist’s framework, Wissen is the knowledge of the linguistic, analytic, piecewise left hemisphere, and Kennen is the knowledge of the embodied, relational, holistic right hemisphere. This leads to three other points:
- Wissen is abstract, Kennen is embodied and contextual.
- Wissen is explicit, Kennen is implicit.
- The relation between Wissen and Kennen is negative.
A good example of these points comes from painting. When people are learning to paint, colour mixing is frustrating. They will mix equal amounts of two colours and find that one completely disappears, unexpectedly turns pale or grey, or blooms into an apparently different hue entirely. This is raw Kennen. As you build experience, you will see the patterns and come to an understanding of each paint and how they relate to other paints. Many painters get to a implicit understanding of paint that is effective, but unstable and still a struggle. In “What Painting Is,” James Elkins describes some of Jean Dubuffet’s paintings this way, on the verge of—or fully—collapsing into mud.
On the other hand, say you had heard from an instructor that titanium white is actually blue tinted. This would be Wissen initially, explicit but disconnected. You’ll mix orange and white and when it stops being as vibrant, you’ll think “oh! This is the blue tint canceling the orange hue!” You will link the abstract Wissen to your experience, and your Kennen of painting will be satisfyingly enhanced.
Clearly there is an important interplay between the two kinds of knowledge. McGilchirst talks about the ideal process being right (embodied experience) > left (piecewise, linear analysis) > right (integration of analysis with experience, enriched experience). There are two ways this right > left > right process can break down. The simplest is the initial right > left transition: you don’t analyze your experience or learn from it, either because you’re not paying attention or you don’t think there’s anything to learn. The other is the transition back, where you test your reasoning against experience.
The hemispheres largely interact by mutual inhibition, and this is partly why I’m saying the relationship between the two types of knowledge is negative. In McGilchrist’s terms, the hemispheres don’t communicate by saying “yes”, but by not saying “no.” What we say “no” to will determine whether we have this right > left > right process or whether it breaks down. Having the bit of Wissen about titanium white doesn’t necessarily give a positive theory. Instead, it forecloses alternative theories—the paint is bad, you’re doing something wrong, it’s just a trick of the eyes. Conversely, if you had heard that titanium white was warm tinted and it made orange paler, your Kennen would contradict your Wissen and something would have to be thrown out. Scientifically, it would be the notion that titanium white was warm. Traumatically, it would be your experience.
- Their relationship is asymmetrical: Wissen can be derived from Kennen, no amount of Wissen can create Kennen.
Earlier, I mentioned that no amount of me telling you about a person you didn’t know would make you feel like you knew them, in the same way you would if you met them. On the other hand, me telling you about them is making Wissen from Kennen fairly effortlessly.
Similarly in the painting example, with direct experience of how paints work, you can derive facts about it fairly easily, and this is why teaching gives mastery. Questions from students force you to extract pieces of your Kennen into explicit knowledge that is tested against your own experience and that of your students applying it. Further, questions from students more directly address fundamentals than you might if you thought about it on your own. This is the function of pedagogy: a well thought-out method of description will produce more useful explicit knowledge. Without this, it can be difficult to determine what the fundamentals even are.
These lead to a final, fundamental point:
- Wissen and Kennen by themselves are both pretty dumb.
Painting is a strangely good example of the weakness of both kinds of knowledge individually, and of the ways they can be made to reinforce each other. A big part of this is because painting is already representation and tool use, both of which McGilchrist places in the realm of the explicit, Wissen focused left hemisphere: the right hemisphere presents the world, the left re-presents it.
When children make art, the division of explicit and implicit is clear. I want to paint a tree, which has two parts. There’s a trunk, which is a brown stick. I put my brush in the brown paint and I make a Y shape, or maybe a ᛉ. The other part is the leaves, which are green. I clean my brush, dip it in the green paint and make a ☁︎ shape. Bam, it’s a tree. The tree is on the ground, which has grass which is also green, and my brush already has green on it, so I make a thick line under the Y. And I want to be under the tree, so I’ll need a white square (I have a white shirt on) with a pink circle above and pink arm sticks. I can make a black n shape for my pants. And now the coup de grâce: two dots and a little U on the pink circle. It’s a very satisfying likeness.
All of these decisions are very logical, and pure Wissen. Leaves and grass are green, trunks are Y shaped, my pants are black. As I age, this gets less satisfying. I want to be more realistic, so I want to paint all of the leaves, but that turns into just different gestures to make a green blob that kind of looks the same. I’ve seen people paint really good trees, what’s wrong here? Well, I need shading, and shadows are black, so let’s put some black in the green. Oh no! That looks like crap! I get a book from the library called “How to Paint Trees,” and I realize this is going to be hard. I need to know what the different kinds of trees are? Whatever, I quit.
Wissen‘s weakness is that its detached nature makes it feel complete, even though it is necessarily reductive. Kennen does not generalize, and therefore doesn’t readily apply across contexts.
Why not ask the question, “are leaves really green?” There’s a spruce tree out my window, lit by the morning sun, so I can confirm it’s not that simple. In the neutrally lit areas, they’re a consistent pale green, but they’re lighter, greyer, and bluish towards the tips. The parts in the sun are a radiant lime green, with pale yellow highlights. The shadows range from olive to nearly navy. Seriously:
Eight-year-old me could see the same colours, but was also pretty confident that leaves are green. This is why it’s important to teach scientific thinking, in the broad sense of being curious, analyzing our experience, and making our theories subject to our experience instead of the reverse. That childish confidence is what leads to hubris.
I’m going to be writing about this for a while. In the next post, I will get Lacanian, and we’ll talk about the graph of desire, symbolization and objet petit a, the Real, jouissance, science, art, and spirituality.
Reid Orsten 
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