Knowledge

Thanks to Perplexity and Claude for the new desire paths.

I recently had an idea that I’ve written about before, but can’t seem to find again. It’s about something fundamental: I present a topic, paint, so to speak, a landscape of thoughts and experiences—and then, afterwards, the AI comes along, surveys this landscape and says: a famous figure X already said this, we know this from the work of Y, this resembles Z. Suddenly, what felt original becomes a kind of repetition, a reference, an echo of something that already existed.

This raises an interesting question: the acquisition of knowledge follows different paths. One of them runs through books, texts, inherited thought. We read what others have thought, we study their conclusions, their errors, their breakthroughs. But the other path is experience itself—the immediate encounter, standing in the landscape before it is measured. Both are true, both are necessary, and yet there is a strange tension between them.

The ridge between these two paths is narrow. On one side lurks monetisation: knowledge becomes a commodity, something memorised, something quotable, something you can present like a collection of trophies. References are accumulated, sorted, made tradable. Knowledge dries out, loses its wind, its scent, its living disorder. On the other side lies the god complex: believing one has understood life, grasped the great truth, while overlooking that it is merely one’s own sequence, one’s own arrangement. Just because you think you have understood life doesn’t really mean anything at first. Your insight, however deep it may feel, is not necessarily universal. It may only fit your landscape, your specific moment of understanding.

Here lies the paradox: two different sides that are simultaneously true. Experience is singular, embodied, chaotic. It squeaks, it resists smooth order. No book can replace the actual wind you feel when you are standing in a situation. No theory replaces the dizziness, the hesitation, the raw immediacy of the moment. And yet books, references, the accumulated thinking of others, are indispensable. They filter the chaos, make patterns visible, connect the singular with the general. They give us language for what we experience.

Perhaps knowledge really needs both. It needs the dry books in long rows in libraries, the ordered, catalogued, measured thinking of centuries. These books stand there, neatly aligned, spine to spine—a collective memory of paper and ink. They wait. They are reference, possibility, stored thought. Without them, we would start again and again from scratch, each generation blind to what the previous one has already thought through, suffered through, lived through.

But then comes the other moment: you take a book in your hand. Perhaps by chance, perhaps deliberately. You open it, read, and suddenly it touches you. Either you gain a new insight—something you hadn’t seen before, a perspective that opens like a window. Or you feel seen, because what the book says aligns with what you already think, what you already feel, but have never been able to put into words. In that moment, the book stops being dry. It becomes alive; it breathes with you. The long row in the library has fulfilled its function: it preserved this one book for this one moment in which it reaches you.

Knowledge therefore needs both distance and closeness. The books must be there—ordered, waiting—even if no one reads them. But they also need the hand that opens them, the experience that brings them to life. Without the rows, knowledge would be lost. Without the moment of touch, it would remain dead. Your sequence is yours, and it doesn’t have to be universal in order to be true. But it emerges in conversation with what others have thought before you. The wind in your hands was yours. The book that puts it into words belongs to all of us.

And perhaps this exists as well: that a certain attitude, a certain way of seeing, arrives at an author even without knowing them. You think something, develop a perspective, perhaps believe it to be entirely your own—and then you encounter someone who has already thought it, written it, worked it through. That devalues neither the author nor the self. It merely shows that free thinking may still contain its share of desire paths. That is human. We do not think in a vacuum, but on paths that have already been walked, even if we step onto them for the first time.

We cannot think ourselves entirely—at least not completely. We can only truly accept ourselves when we are mirrored. When someone else, perhaps in another century, with different words but the same wind, says: yes, I felt that too. Then our own thinking does not become smaller, but larger. It finds its place within a greater context without losing its uniqueness.

This mirroring does not happen only in books. It happens just as much in social interaction, in conversation, in the presence of another person. Among other reasons, this is why we are social beings: because we cannot think ourselves alone. We need the outside. We need the gaze of the other who sees us, who nods or contradicts, who takes up our thoughts and throws them back, altered or affirmed. Only in this movement between inside and outside, between one’s own thinking and the resonance of the other, does something like a self emerge. Without this echo, we remain incomplete, trapped in a perspective that cannot see itself. The book is one form of this mirroring, frozen in time. Conversation is another—more alive, more immediate—but both fulfil the same function: they give us the possibility of recognising ourselves by being recognised.

Written on 30 January 2026 at 16:30. © 2026 Whisper7. All rights reserved.