Sometime in the 330s BC, in a grove outside Athens, Aristotle set out to count the
ways a mind arrives at truth. He found five. Some knowledge is of what cannot be
otherwise: the demonstrable, the general, the true whether or not anyone is
watching. He called it episteme. Some belongs to the potter and the
shipwright, and its proof is simply that the pot holds water and the ship comes
home. That is techne.
The third he warned was the hard one. Phronesis is knowing what this
situation, this person, this particular afternoon actually calls for. It cannot be
handed over as a rule, because rules are general and situations never are. The young
can be brilliant geometers, Aristotle observed, and are almost never wise, because
wisdom is made of particulars, and particulars take a life to gather.
Beneath all of it he placed nous, the grasp of the first principles that
nothing can prove for you, because a proof has to start somewhere. Above it he
placed sophia, the highest, which he defined as nous and episteme held
together: not merely knowing what is true, but knowing what is worth knowing.
Technology has inherited all five and kept them in separate rooms. It has built
beautiful things that knew nothing. It has encoded what was generally true into
systems nobody could stand to use. It has learned, lately, to attend to the
particular person, and spent that gift on choosing which advertisement to show them.
None of the five has ever been scarce. Their convergence has.
Our mark has six faces, and they do not close. The gaps between them are the point.
Five of the faces carry these virtues. The sixth is aporia: a-poros, without passage, the impasse. The recognition that you cannot yet get through.
Aristotle never counted it among the states by which the soul arrives at truth,
because it is not one of them. It is the condition of all of them. Metaphysics Book
Beta is little more than a catalogue of aporiai, and he says there that whoever
inquires without first laying out the puzzles is like a man who does not know where
he ought to be going. The five are what comes out. Aporia is where you have to be
standing first.
Techne, episteme, phronesis, nous, sophia. Five ways of knowing, and the gap they all
begin in. We are here to hold all six.