On the Fear of Not Knowing, Or “I Know What a Vein is”

My mum sent me a video recently of me as a 6-year-old visiting family in England.

It’s the end of the day and I need to get into my PJs and go to bed. My mum (who looks about 19 in the video, though she’s in her late twenties) is exhausted from a day visiting family.

I wish I could say that I’m cheerful and helpful in the video. I wish I could say that I’m pleasantly surprised at what I’m like as a little kid.

But I’m not. I’m incredibly unhelpful and difficult, and I clearly don’t want to go to bed.

My tired mum gets me to sit down and she takes my clothes off. I wail as I tell her she’s pulling the pants too hard. I scold her and tell her she’s left a mark on my leg.

She tries to distract me by showing me that it’s not a mark, but my blue veins showing through my pale, pale skin. She goes on to tell me that it’s called a vein and that it’s bringing blood to my heart to keep me alive.

I cut her off — “I know what a vein is”.

I can’t imagine that I knew about veins then. I mean even now, I’m asking myself if it’s called a vein if it’s pumping blood to or from the heart? I should know this stuff by now, right?

I show my partner the video and we now use the line “I know what a vein is” to tease each other whenever we feel underestimated.

I’m still as defensive now that I don’t know enough as I was then at six. I still feel the need to quiet the voice inside with its constant refrain that I’m an idiot who knows nothing.

I’m not saying I got a PhD in Philosophy to try to quiet that voice… but there might be some compelling evidence that shows I did.

My partner is a historian and knows a lot of facts about the world. I’m constantly in awe that he has an answer for so many of my mundane questions: tell me about this war, the history of this social policy, etc.

Studying philosophy is different. It’s not about the acquisition of facts (as though they were objects found in a dusty antiques shop), but about something else entirely.

At the beginning of every term, I have my introductory blurb about philosophy classes being the place where we enter with hidden common sensical assumptions about how the world is and leave with a bunch of unresolved questions. Philosophy takes the seemingly certain and renders it strange and often contradictory. We care more about the questioning than the answering. It’s not the knowing that’s important, it’s the asking.

I mean, if one of the founders of Western philosophy tells us that human knowledge amounts to the wisdom to understand that we know nothing, then can you blame us that we end up with fewer answers by the end of term (thanks a lot, Socrates)?

I remind myself of this whenever the voice that I know nothing gets too loud. “But that’s not the point! The point is to inquire about the process of inquiry… or something like that (tell them, Dewey).

So maybe that’s the story of a little girl who didn’t want to admit to her mother that she, in fact, did not know how veins and arteries work, and so ended up in a world that rejects the very need to answer questions about how things work.

Or maybe, I was being difficult because my parents had recently split up and my world was turned upside down, and I didn’t want to open up about all the things I didn’t know or couldn’t control.

Maybe it was too scary to ask about how the world worked because I knew that it wasn’t that stable to begin with…

Maybe it was easier to keep up the armour and just say, “I know what a vein is”.

Maybe. Who knows.