On not knowing and paying attention: how to walk in a possible world

Timothy Ingold

doi:10.1177/07916035221088546

On not knowing and paying attention: how to walk in a possible world

Timothy Ingold^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

Knowledge and wisdom often operate at cross-purposes. In particular, wisdom means turning towards the world, paying attention to the things we find there, while with knowledge we turn our backs on them. Knowledge thrives on certainty and predictability. But in a certain world, where everything is joined up, nothing could live or grow. If a world of life is necessarily uncertain, it also opens up to pure possibility. To arrive at such possibility, however, we have to rethink the relation between doing and undergoing, or between intentional and attentional models of action. I show how attention cuts a road longitudinally through the transverse connections between intentions and their objects. Where intention is predictive, attention is anticipatory. And if the other side of prediction is the failure of ignorance, the other side of anticipation is the possibility of not knowing. The idea that predictive knowledge demands explication perpetuates the equation of not-knowing with ignorance. Education, science and the state are powerful machines for the production of ignorance. I argue, however, that ignorance and not-knowing are entirely different things. In a world of life, not-knowing betokens not ignorance but the wisdom that lies in attending to things.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	20-36
Number of pages	17
Journal	Irish Journal of Sociology
Volume	31
Issue number	1
Early online date	17 Mar 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/07916035221088546
Publication status	Published - 1 Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Open Access via the Sage R&P Agreement
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to the organisers of the workshop Walking Conversations: The Art of Paying Attention, or, Non-Procedural Methodologies – Maggie O’Neill, Ger Mullally, Arpad Szakolczai, Deirdre de Bhailis, Maggie Breen, Elaine Ni Loinsigh and Brendan Tuohy – for the opportunity to present the keynote address. This text is composed of fragments, some of which are extracted from previously published works, most notably my books The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018) and Imagining for Real (2022).
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Keywords

attention
generations
knowledge
possibility
wisdom

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10.1177/07916035221088546Licence: CC BY

Ingold_IJS_On_Not_Knowing_VoR
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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Cite this

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abstract = "Knowledge and wisdom often operate at cross-purposes. In particular, wisdom means turning towards the world, paying attention to the things we find there, while with knowledge we turn our backs on them. Knowledge thrives on certainty and predictability. But in a certain world, where everything is joined up, nothing could live or grow. If a world of life is necessarily uncertain, it also opens up to pure possibility. To arrive at such possibility, however, we have to rethink the relation between doing and undergoing, or between intentional and attentional models of action. I show how attention cuts a road longitudinally through the transverse connections between intentions and their objects. Where intention is predictive, attention is anticipatory. And if the other side of prediction is the failure of ignorance, the other side of anticipation is the possibility of not knowing. The idea that predictive knowledge demands explication perpetuates the equation of not-knowing with ignorance. Education, science and the state are powerful machines for the production of ignorance. I argue, however, that ignorance and not-knowing are entirely different things. In a world of life, not-knowing betokens not ignorance but the wisdom that lies in attending to things.",

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On not knowing and paying attention: how to walk in a possible world

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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