On Not Knowing

“The ancient Masters

didn’t try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don’t know,

people can find their own way.”

     —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 65; trans. Stephen Mitchell

“All that I know is that I know nothing.”

     —attributed to Socrates.

     It is easy to fall in to a trap in teaching, and that trap is thinking that we have to know everything. After all, education is part of the “knowledge economy.” Knowledge is what we have acquired in graduate school, through hours and hours of reading and research. Knowledge is what we disseminate through writing. Knowledge is what makes up the various “disciplines” in which we are nominally experts. And knowledge is a great deal of what we claim to impart to our students. In a less lofty vein, I’m reminded of some of the earliest advice I received as a graduate teaching assistant: “Oh, just stay a week or two ahead of the students in the readings.” In other words: stay ahead in knowledge.

     It all easily adds up to the vision of the teacher as “the sage on the stage,” as the saying goes, the one holding forth and dispensing important content and/or analysis to an audience of the less informed. The work of teaching then becomes to organize all that knowledge in an easily-communicable way. And the work of preparation becomes amassing that knowledge, to be ready in case any questions come up. The sage on the stage – the expert – must know it all.

     Except that Lao Tzu, was a sage, too. But he actively shunned stages, and, as above, advocated “not-knowing.” Likewise Socrates, who loved a good holding-forth to an audience as much as anyone, is famously said to have declared just how little he knew.

     Perhaps these two are showing us another way.

     What might it look like if we framed teaching as an exercise in not knowing?

     I have written on this site before about the formative experience of having one of my graduate school mentors publicly not-know along with us his students: “I don’t know that,” he said when asked a question about a text. “Why don’t we find it out together?” I was floored and I was invigorated and I filed it away for future reference: a teacher can do that. And of course in the long view I realize I thought no less of him for that at the time – but rather have come to think more and more of him for it as I have moved through my own teaching career. On the most basic level, not-knowing in teaching is simply a matter of honesty; it is the courage to own up to our limits in front of our students. We cannot be ready for every question. We can never know it all. No one can. This in itself is a quality lesson.

     On another level, however, not-knowing in teaching is the courage to own up to the limits of knowledge, period – and to own up to how much those limits inform what we do. I would suggest that if, as academics and instructors, we are experts in “lifelong learning” for ourselves and others, that what we are really experts in is not-knowing. I would suggest that the “disciplines” we learn can be understood as the practices of not-knowing constructively about the content they embrace. What is research driven by, after all, except for our not-knowing about something…and our desire to not know about it somewhat less?

     There is an old story about a professor who visits a Zen master, and begins holding forth, glad to have found an astute dialogue partner. On and on he goes about how he has studied enlightenment in many faiths and is so happy to visit the master and hear his opinion, expert to expert. The master says nothing, but pours the scholar a cup of tea…and keeps on pouring, as the tea spills over the top and all over the table. 

     “Stop, stop!” cries the professor. “Are you crazy? What are you doing??”

     “You, sir,” says the master, “are like this cup. Full to overflowing of what you know. How can I add any more to an overfilled cup?”

     And the scholar shuts up.

     The Zen master here reminds us that not-knowing is a matter of leaving space. And mental space is the drive behind curiosity. There are things we do not know. So we seek to know them. If we run out of the space created by not-knowing, like the talkative professor with his tea, we run out of the ability to learn. 

     What would it look like to tell our students that we are here to “kindly teach them to not-know?” I think a first result might be to relieve all of us of more than a little pressure. Perhaps none of us would feel as much drive to cram our heads with as much content as possible to head off questions, and instead we would consciously leave space exactly for questions. And a second, and related, result might be an awareness that the generation of questions is as valuable as the generation of answers. Can you imagine assignments based around demonstrating what you do not know, instead of what you do? What could that look like? How might you encourage your students to empty some space in their cups? How might you start a class by emptying some space in your own cup?

     This is not to say that there will never be a time for holding forth and dispensing information or analysis. Even Zen masters and Taoist sages told stories and wrote poems and books. It is rather to say that there is something to be gained by turning the usual trope of amassing knowledge on its head. Mystics refer to this sort of thing as the apophatic path to the divine – getting closer to God by contemplating how little God can be known, often by cataloging things God is not. The point is to strip away a sense of false security – to empty one’s cup, as it were – and aim for a direct experience of the divine with an uncluttered mind. This path exists beside the cataphatic path – which contemplates instead all the things the divine is. Different mystics wrote about both; both have value and both lead practitioners closer to the Truth. We may not be aiming for any sort of mystical experience in our classrooms – but we can learn from the mystics that sometimes there is something divine about not-knowing.