Reflecting on Tom Murray's "Knowing and Unknowing Reality"

[WillCameron]

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

Facing the Cloud of Unknowing

Tom Murray’s paper is best exemplified in Thomas Lawrence, the protagonist of the movie Conclave. Thomas’ greatest strength is his willingness to face doubt and uncertainty. That doesn’t necessarily mean he enjoys the process. In fact, the virtue of his doubt is the pain he’s willing to wrestle with. The gift of this virtue is captured in the 14th century book, The Cloud of Unknowing:

“I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.”

While it could be easy to read this as religious dogma’s attack on knowledge, science, and reason, I think it is far better to read it as call for epistemic humility. Murray defines epistemic humility as:

“the blunt confrontation with how, when it comes down to it, the certainty that one holds for much of one’s beliefs and knowledge is bewilderingly undeserved.”

To face the cloud is to become conscious of how the way in which we construct knowledge defines how we relate to our own ignorance. This leads Murray to a deep analysis of different stages of development that humans go through.

For example, if we’re a Conformist, then we construct knowledge in a way deeply influenced by our culture. As such, we’re likely to fear our ignorance most when we risk ostracism and to feel most certain when what we’re saying aligns with our group.

Epistemic humility is possible for any stage of development, but so is epistemic arrogance. Development happens within the cloud, at the edge of our knowledge and understanding. One must love oneself not despite one’s ignorance, but precisely because one has discovered one’s ignorance. As difficult as it can be, especially at first, you want to cultivate a love for unknowing.

Here, unknowing is not simply knowing that we do not know, but learning to shed beliefs that are wrong or unfairly certain. Murray writes the following:

“Negative capability […] includes the ‘informed and active humility’ […], in which the sources of indeterminacy are better understood so that knowledge can be more adaptive and resilient. It is not enough to acknowledge that ‘the map is not the territory’ […], but we must understand as precisely as we can how/where/when/why our maps differ from the territory”

When we’ve come to love unknowing enough to walk willingly into the cloud, we find ourselves in a quiet place to rest.

What is this paper for?

This paper not only serves as a good introduction to developmental psychology, but gives you many ways to look at how stages actually work. It covers paradoxes, biases, and virtues that stages experience in a way that is incredibly actionable. Development takes time no matter what. The process of moving from one stage to the next is a multi-year endeavour. With this paper you can at least understand better where you are, where you’re going, and how you can take the first steps.

That said, development is something that must happen through living your life and speaking with people. It’s easy to get stuck in an ivory tower built atop the judgment of others. That is a way we use dev-psych to limit our own development. We cultivate a deeper love for ourselves through cultivating a deeper love for others. We do that by meeting them in the marketplace as the flawed human beings we all are.

How does this fit into my project?

Developmental psychology is one of the pillars of my work and, if you’ve been reading my other essays, you’ve likely grown weary of my continual call for us to face the open horizon of romantic possibility.

Put concretely, the fact that the manosphere settled on evolutionary rather than developmental psychology was one of the worst tragedies of post-patriarchal masculinity. I’m certainly not against evo-psych. I think there are very real biological constraints and affordances that must be accounted for. However, dev-psych is not only a way that we can understand what lies on the open horizon, but how we make sense and meaning about the horizon itself.

Understanding why evo-psych has been so limiting for the manosphere requires a complex enough perspective to see how we’ve reified, perhaps even deified, the primordial man. Murray’s very project is to deconstruct and reconstruct such reifications in an iterative process that converts them into the tools we use to carve new paths toward better selves that make better futures that make better selves. He and I invite you to walk with us on that journey.

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