It’s been contested that water/food are more important to humans than knowledge: that without it we wouldn’t be able to know anything because we’d be dead. But how do we get water into our system if we don’t first know what and where it is? People have died, not because water/food wasn’t available, but because they didn’t know how to get to it; and people have also died because they didn’t know what they were doing would kill them. Thus, clearly, knowledge is a matter of life and death; but so is water/food. So which comes first? It appears to be a chicken/egg thing, two logical premises that expose the paradoxical nature of existence.
An infant will die if uncared for because it doesn’t yet know how to survive. To reply that an infant needs water/food first, in order to live long enough to gain the knowledge to survive—and that therefore water/food is first and knowledge second—is to confuse the requirement for knowledge (time) with the importance of knowledge (context). In making that distinction we realize, whether it’s first-hand knowledge on how to survive or second-hand knowledge of a parent suppling it—knowledge always comes first. So it’s not a chicken/egg thing, knowledge is supreme. And to those who point to Einstein’s comment that imagination is more important than knowledge, again we ask, how could he have developed E = mc2 if he didn’t first know what energy, mass, and light were? How could Picasso have painted Guernica if he didn’t first know what paint, canvas, and war were? Imagination requires knowledge to do what it is meant to do—make sense of things. In other words, imagination requires knowledge, knowledge does not require imagination (See? Even Einstein can be wrong.)
To those who say love comes first, we must remember that one has to first know who and what to love. Many people have loved things when it was not in their interests to do so, a harm which can cost much joy and happiness, or in some cases even death. Again, knowledge is supreme to us hairless little beings.
But what of the position that it’s love which gives us the desire to live, and that without it no amount of knowledge would drive us forward? That we wouldn’t keep making babies, building the human bridge into the future, without love. In that sense, for those with heart, take heart, and happily, that love, not knowledge, is first in importance if you think human existence is important. Love is to knowledge what knowledge is to the imagination: one principle relies on the other, while the first principle relies on nothing to be itself, it simply is.
Finally, truth is derived from knowledge, and while deceit often wears the mask of truth, truth never the mask of deceit. Truth is what it presents itself as and can’t be anything but what it is. In that sense we might surmise that it is truth and only truth which escapes the paradoxical nature of existence. And if that’s true, then knowing it and acting in accordance with it, is what helps us escape the paradox of existence as humans while at the same time vetting us as genuinely human—if one believes humans should operate on truth rather than deceit.
