All posts by anomalogue
Faust
“I’ll explain it, again.” he said. “All I love is held hostage, and the ransom is my capacity to love.”
Worldviews
A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.
What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.
“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”
The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)
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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)
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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.
The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.
In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.
Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.
- Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
- Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
- Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.
Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.
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- Note to nerds:
What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.
Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.
Protected: “No.”
Migraine
I had a big migraine yesterday.
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For each of us, in the beginning, there is chaos and the potential of articulation.
What is chaos? It is raw being, pure all-there-is, void of finitude, void of category, void of recurrence, void of quantity, void of quality — but it is not empty. It is too full. Because it lacks finitude, it is infinite. It overwhelms.
What is articulation? Literally, articulation means “to divide into a joint”. Articulation introduces entities to raw being; it puts a contrasting “something” against all-there-is everything; it defines a finite something against infinity, as an exception to all.
Articulation is recognition. The first recognition is of twice, or thrice, or myriad times. Recurrence retroactively creates the occurrence of once.
With recurrence, what comprises the recurrence also recurs: the recurrant’s essential qualities. And in the gaps, the times the entity with its constituent qualities do not recur, they are now not there, and there as a shadow of lack, as a possibility not actualized, as empty absence of the entity, a soothing zero.
But even as innumerable finite entities are articulated, the chaos is still there, and infinity is not diminished. We are surrounded on all sides, above and below, by chaos where even (and especially) zero is nonexistent. And when we look closely at what we think we have, what feels solid in our hands, we find chaos, there, too. And most of all when we approach one another, we discover chaos right before our own eyes — but not only in the other, but in the world, and in ourselves.
When we hate, it is this chaos we hate: darkless, zeroless, nothingness that surrounds and permeates our familiar cloud-world of category-things.
Chaos hides everywhere in plain sight, like blind-spots in our eyes which are not even dark, nonexistent visitors from beyond our peripheral vision.
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Conviction displaces faith. Conviction believes in beliefs, and it calls these beliefs “faith”, for it knows no alternative. To conviction, faith is nonexistent, which means it is not even missing. Faith is filled in like a blind-spot with “faith” in beliefs.
Conviction prefers explanations to that which it explains, and it fails to question one fundamental(ist) assumption, that the explanation causes what it explains rather than describes. And conviction fears the refutation of its explanation and the dispelling of the condition it explains. The believer thinks the planks constituting his boat-bottom will vanish from beneath his feet and he will sink into chaos and drown there.
Faith plants its feet on what is. We stand here and we do not sink. We can ask why in myriad ways, and we can consider any answer, and all at once. Explanations that accurately describe what is are true as far as they succeed in describing, and describing accurately. But faith does not attribute to explanations any magical causality.
Faith is free, but conviction is enslaved to its idol, knowledge.
Actors and poets
Some people talk about things, but what they talk about is secondary — merely an opportunity to speak. The object of the speech remains in the old light, while the speaker is illuminated by his manner of speech and choice of words.
Other people talk about things and concentrate on them entirely. The object of the speech is illuminated in a new, revealing light, but nonetheless the speaker is also known, but differently — as illumination.
Other strange hybrids illuminate their object in revealing light, but their object of choice is themselves, and there are still others who pose as illumination.
Etymologies
The most abstract words are rooted in concrete concepts. Break down the etymologies and you find simple actions like pushing, throwing, pulling, taking, placing, climbing, looking, going, and coming and simple relationships like over, under, back, across, together, apart, away, toward. All this simple roots converge as words like twisted filaments in continuous strands of thread, which also converge as the fabric of sentences, paragraphs, texts, canons. This fabric is draped over chaotic and formless experience and drawn tight to give life tangibility, form and continuity.
I like to think mythically about the roots of words as corresponding to simple, chaotic animal impulses of the spirit, which are drawn out, twisted and spun into coarse and fine strands of intelligence, which form the cloth of culture as the threads are interwoven, unraveled, combed out, knitted and knotted, torn, sliced, ripped, stitched, patched over, braided, embroidered and embroidered upon. And the articulate threads are only the weft, woven into a warp of colorful, unspeakable feelings and tacit actions waiting on the loom as the background of language and ourselves.
We often confuse formless and chaotic experience with our own tacit forms of response, and fail to notice that intellectual order and verbal articulation are not identical.
Inconceivable dimension
Last week I had an unusual number of conversations with artists about the nature of art. I want to try to summarize what I understand about the being of a (romantic) artist, based on what I took from these conversations.
For a variety of reason, artists today are necessarily romantic artists. Romantic artists attempt to create outside of what already is, as opposed to affirming or revitalizing the culture to which they belong as members. There is no vital high culture left to preserve in our time. Even so-called conservatives invent by reanimating formal corpses with newish notions through the black magic of revisionism.There is just flat, sea-level philistinism: discrete, mutually exclusive working hard and playing hard. Nobody’s going to exert for anything that won’t earn him a dollar.
Romantic artists are cultural mutants. They have mutated individuality; they developed differently as individuals and have a different conception of what individuality is. They do individualism differently. Certainly this mutated individuality/individualism can give them a conspicuously different appearance (which is all most people perceive) but the more essential difference is imperceptible: Artists inhabit mutated worlds. And they inhabit these worlds partially or entirely alone.
So far, what I’ve described includes romantic artists, but it also includes visionaries of all kinds. A romantic artist is a visionary who responds to his vision by creating cultural artifacts that affirm and reinforce his vision. This occurs both through the practice of creative activity (by which he lives differently), and through the artifact (by which he establishes a more meaningfully-orienting environment). What is lacking at the start, — with genuine romantic artists, invariably — which philistines are incapable of imagining, is what it is like to be the solitary member of a culture. Cultures are shared. An unshared culture is a psychic vacuum, and that vacuum is the profoundest loneliness, which crushes proportionally to its difference, and threatens the survival of the mutant. Very, very few cultural mutants survive, much less reproduce their vision, much less change the nature of human-being.
Regarding mere survival: everything that threatens the continuous activity of the artist (that is imposes displacing, depressing and exhausting alien tasks) or imposes environmental disorientation on the artist threatens his particular cultural existence, if not his biological existence. And since an artist identifies more with his particular cultural existence than even with his biological being, this threat reaches beyond individual death to the extinction of one’s own species.
I am assuming what I mean by “inhabiting a world” (as opposed to perceiving the world) is pretty obvious to anyone for whom this line of thought is relevant. In case it isn’t, here is a mythical evolutionary analogy. Imagine the first appearance of eyes in an eyeless species. That first eyed mutant probably looked pretty strange, not that anything else was around to see it. But what was much stranger was what happened to its existence as a result of the acquisition of the faculty of sight. This organism lived a visual existence in a visible world unlike that of anything that preceded it. Its world deepened in an extra inconceivable dimension.
* Adolescent rant…
Not-seeings
The uncanniness of the visual blind spot: nothing is missing.
If you imagine what a blind spot is, you will likely conceive it in terms of sight, as a kind of darkness. In a sense this is true. Blindness and darkness are both conditions that prevent the seeing of objects. Here, however, the similarity ends. Darkness itself is seen; blindness is not. Blindness, though it pertains to sight, falls outside the terms of sight. Blindness is nothingness. There is no missing something; there is only nothing.
The only way to know what a blind spot is to experience it practically by performing an experiment and experiencing a deeper contrast. There is not-seeing for lack of light, and then there is not-seeing for lack of sight.
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The uncanniness of the ontological blind spot: nothing is missing.
If you imagine what ontological blindness is, you will likely conceive it in terms of understanding, as a lack of knowledge. In a sense this is true. Ontological blindness and lack of knowledge are both conditions that prevent the knowing of information. Here, however, the similarity ends. Lack of knowledge itself is understood; ontological blindness is not. Ontological blindness, though it pertains to understanding, falls outside the terms of understanding: ontological blindness is nothingness. This means there is no missing something: as far as you know you’ve know everything you need to know. This is what is meant by “horizon”.
The only way to experience an ontological blind spot is to experience it practically by reading hermeneutically, and acquiring a new mode of understanding against which the non-understanding or (more likely) misunderstanding can be perceived, so you can experience a deeper contrast. There is not-knowing for lack of information, and then there is not-knowing for lack of understanding.
Such insight makes a person cautious and humble, not because he is scared and not because he thinks little of himself, but because he knows well what nothingness is like.
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What if a person refuses to perform the blind spot experiment until someone explains to him precisely what he will learn from it?
What if a person refuses to listen and hear someone out until it is explained to him precisely what he will gain from the effort? What if everyone is like this? What if everyone has always been like this? It takes thousands of years to teach the world anything.
Challenging challenges
Rising to a difficult challenge is easily confused with submitting to a difficult demand.
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When all difficulties are euphemistically categorized as “challenges” it becomes impossible to discuss the difference ennobling and degrading difficulties.
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If all problems are challenges, and therefore growth opportunities, why not passively accept anything circumstance throws at you? Why have career goals, when whatever you are assigned can only help you better yourself? Isn’t it true that even boring tasks are challenging to those clever enough to see them as interesting?
I suppose it is possible to challenge these points, but all that would come of it is boring the hell out of people with pointless argument and being perceived as a problem.
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Investing energy in a strength yields more strength than investing energy in a weakness.
A person in a position of strength picks his challenges. What he picks are those problems that help him develop and maximize his strengths. The stronger he becomes the more he determines what he does or does not do — and also what others do or do not do. He shunts unwelcome, weakening problems away from himself and “challenges” others to overcome them.
30+
A generation who refuses to trust anyone over the age of thirty will fail to learn from their elders what it means to be an elder. Their bodies might grow old, but they stay youthful in spirit. Point it out to them and they’re flattered.
Leaps and steps
Faith arrives in a great intuitive leap but departs in tiny and ever diminishing logical geisha steps.
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Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, as related by Aristotle: “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”
This paradox is a lot more daunting before locomotion begins than after the goal is reached. If we simply reach the goal then turn around look back on the finite space we traversed, we see that it takes no more time to traverse one point than ten million. But to think about traversing each of ten million points can take a lot of time. And to report our arrival at each of these infinite midpoints — even if the report took ten-millionth of a second — makes progress impossible.
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Here is how it goes when the full burden of proof is placed on the new:
The question is asked: “Why the new? Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”
And a minute into the answer another question is asked: “Why put all this effort into answering ‘Why the new?’ Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”
And a minute into that answer yet another question: “Why put all this effort into answering ‘Why put all this effort into answering “Why the new?”‘ Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”
And so on. Why(Why(Why(Why(Why(…))))).
x = Why (x)
It takes an infinite amount of time to justify the new.
Placebo
If a placebo works, why destroy its active ingredient by pointing out it’s a “placebo”?
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These days nobody wants to talk about philosophy without justifying it with neuroscience.
I am an advocate of looking for all possible correlations in the field of experience, but some minds seem compelled to beg the brain for legitimacy, and to win the brain’s endorsement of every quality mind appears to possess — as if a thorough neuroscientific grounding somehow protects a mind from delusion. This strikes me as delusional.
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Physics is the pill moderns administer and take to compel agreement.
And yes, nerds, it is blue.
Cassandra
Metcalf’s Law also applies to concepts.
Two ways to approach brand
For the technical definitions of bullshit and chickenshit, see yesterday’s (re-re-)post on the topic.
I don’t care how many times you say “baked-in” or “activated” or “experience” or whatever…
…if brand only comes up in the context of marketing…
…if soul-searching on “who are we?” occurs mainly in the context of proposals and pitch decks…
…if entire meetings about operations, processes, finances, hiring, or development of offerings pass without a singe person asking “is this on-brand?”…
…that means: in action — where it counts — you subscribe to the bullshit-coated chickenshit branding paradigm. Or, it might mean that you are a commodity who makes no pretense of brand, which is awesome, and I salute you for your rare, bold and courageous honesty.
Re-repost: chickenshit and bullshit
This is my third time posting this idea. It might be the best work thought I’ve ever had, which is depressing, and if I never better it I will have lived my life in vain. Here it is:
Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that seem to promise something, but that something can never be fulfilled through any practical action.
Chickenshit – Practical activity that seems like it ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in reality is pointless busyness.
Bullshit is meaning without practice. Chickenshit is practice without meaning.
If you can bring together meaning and practice, so your meaning is a positive something that can be realized and your practical actions are a means to a meaningful end… then you are The Shit.
Apologies in advance: This is not a nice post. Chances are you are a chickenshit middle manager (and this might be true if even if you are an “executive”) or you are a bullshit idealist spouting off “visionary” nonsense in whatever realm you’ve identified as “anything goes”, where you can just make shit up. Most likely you are both chickenshit and bullshit, oscillating between the two all day long, depending on context. Think about it: generally, you call a meeting to navel-gaze a spew of bullshit which evaporates in mid-air before it even splatters on the conference room table OR you convene to hammer out chickenshit minutiae. The notion that meaning must be actualized through concrete practice to amount to anything at all (as opposed to corporate messaging blather) and that practice must be motivated by meaning if it is to be willingly embraced and internalized (as opposed to enforced) — that is unthinkable to your average business flathead, whose sea-level/C-level intellect is busy, busy, busy and fragmented along eight different twittery thoughts at every individually fragmented minute of the day.
We’ve got 140 character attention spans. We invent 140 character-long bullshit slogans; we issue 140 character-long chickenshit tactical decrees. And we want to praise ourselves for our back-of-a-napkin brevity, and for being so action-oriented. Ready, fire, aim. We are intellectually and operationally spastic, and proud of it.
So, yesterday, which I’m realizing now was a shittily eventful day, a colleague made the mistake of talking to me about how America needs to get back to those things we all agree on. Since it was yesterday, this became an excuse for a tirade.
I began with something like: “Heaven help us if we agree any more than we already have. Because wherever a Republican and Democrat agree on something, it is certain to be wrong in the most horrific possible way.” For instance, international style architecture — utopian uniformity to the leftist, cheap-as-hell to the rightist — What’s not to love? And mandatory two-income households — equality for men and women for the leftists, doubling the supply of laborers and consumers for the rightist — Paradise! Consuming every waking hour of our children’s lives with scheduled regimented educational activity, and filling the remained with easy parentless entertainment, which consists either of synthetic borderline-disorder (Facebook) or synthetic autism (video games) . Now we’ve got free childcare on one hand to compensate for our 24/7 careers, and the feeling that we’re turning education up to 11. More hours = more dollars and more standardized test points = more happiness.
Let’s agree to disagree, please.
And then I went on to point out that what we agree on is only that “Freedom”, “Happiness”, “Prosperity” are words that designate good things, but the concrete reality we imagine when we say these words could not diverge more.
Apart from these huge, hot-air sugar balloons, the only agreement we have is the necessity of innumerable brainless procedures. And we try hard not to discuss the purpose of them, because we all want to harness them to our own deeply divergent ends… etc.
Somehow I managed to rant on this topic without noticing that I was, once again, talking about Bullshit and Chickenshit.
America agrees on Bullshit and Chickenshit, but the substantial shit has become entirely undiscussable, just as it is in 99% of businesses, and 100% of public schools.
Unreason is degrading
One of the big differences between a political order based on reason and a political order based on coercion: in a reasonable order disagreements are resolved in ways that make people regard one another more highly, and in a coercive order the disagreements are resolved with increased mutual antipathy, contempt on one side and resentment on the other.
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What is strange is that unreason can come from below as well as above. Some people cannot be appealed to, and can only be influenced by means that also make them hate you.
The choice is: a) allow them to do whatever they were going to do (however harmful it is to you), or b) get your way and become hated.
I’m guessing this truth is the daily reality of many/most managers. Of course there are power-loving managers who embrace this truth eagerly, because it justifies their natural inclinations. (“Nobody wants to do what they should. That’s why we call it ‘work’.”) But no doubt there are other managers who become resigned to this view, and become reluctant creators of a world of masters and unwilling slaves. I’ve had clients who see the world this way, and they radiate misery.
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Yesterday I had to coerce someone into doing something they were unwilling to do. I tried to feel triumphant, but I could only feel filthy. Regardless of the outcome, unreason is degrading.
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By the way, in conditions where conversation is impossible, reason is impossible, and coercion is inevitable. Tyrannical souls always create hectic, isolating, fragmentary conditions around them, so the only options is someone taking charge and making “executive” decisions.
Tyrants love manic activity, opaque, complicated bureaucracies, emergencies of all kinds — whatever forces perpetual premature action. “ready, fire, aim”, or problem, answer, question…
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Yesterday (in a separate event) someone mentioned a name I hadn’t heard in a decade, and I realized, even a decade later, I still intensely dislike that person for something she said: “We do not have time to philosophize: just do it.”
Horizon
When we’re at sea-level and we look around our horizon is tight and constantly interrupted by things in the way. In a sense, the “actual” horizon is one of arbitrary obscurement by myriad objects; the “real” horizon is just an inconsequential idea.
When we climb high enough we reach a point where no object breaks the horizon and we can see the horizon itself. We can survey what is framed within the circularity of the horizon and see their spatial relationships objectively, that is, from a distance, from the outside.
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The view from inside and the view from a distance (can) reciprocally inter-inform.
Imagine a person looking at the view of a labyrinth from above as a maze, attempting to translate the path he is tracing with his fingertip back into the view from from within. Does he also recall the anxiety of being trapped inside the labyrinth? Does he recognize the anxiety to be part of the essential difference between the above-ness of a maze and the within-ness of a labyrinth?
Now imagine a person panicking inside a labyrinth, doing his best to remember a maze view he was shown. He is trying to locate and orient himself on his mental map so he can chart a path out. But also he is trying to overcome his anxiety by distancing himself from his situation.
Now imagine a man trapped in a labyrinth describing his situation to an expert on mazes. The former has no concept of a maze, and the latter has no concept of a labyrinth. Each thinks he understands what the other means by “situation”, and neither comprehends the nature of the discrepancy.
The common words map to a common structure recognizable to each, but the experience does not map. There are no words for the uncommonality gap that separates them and creates discrepancy.
They say what they can to each other, but only what they cannot say can resolve the problem. Nobody talks about nothing, because there’s nothing to say and nothing to say it with.
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People use the metaphor “depth” in two telling ways. Usually they mean either “really incomprehensible” (“he’s a deep thinker”) or “really thorough” (“his report went into great depth”). Both interpretations of the term reveal a shallow point-of-view on depth.
Depth also can become associated with how far into a perspective a mind can go, leaving behind “higher” and more superficial points of view. This is a lot closer to the meaning of depth than the first two examples, because 1) at least the vertical axis of depth has been found, and 2) the fundamental weakness (and inevitable degeneration) of alienated height has been correctly diagnosed. Alienated height (height dissociated from depth) is mere superficiality (super- “above” + -ficial “face” — a looking at faces as mindless appearance), and universal disrespect (dis- “not” + re- “back” + spect “look” — not being aware that others look back at you differently) for otherness. But, as right as it is, it is still not right enough (for the purposes of today).
Depth is not a point on an axis. Depth is better conceived as a span of vertical axis, from the very deepest points-of-view (which border on the animal) to the very highest point-of-view with the broadest perspective and most comprehensive horizon from which the deepest points can still be given justice.
As I said earlier the view from inside and the view from a distance (can) reciprocally inter-inform. Depth is a matter of how much inside-perspective can be meaningfully interrelated with the help of distant-perspective, and how much inside-perspective is present when surveying from a distant-perspective. And I think the highest and lowest points in a span of depth sputter out into nothingness. The highest point is a grasping for mostly-empty potentially-unifying forms and the lowest points border on mute impulse.
Depth put into practice arrests 1) crimes of passion, 2) crimes of dispassion and 3) the unholy marriage of passion and dispassion: the side-by-side cooperation of the two, where the dutiful man “just does his job”, but the job description is written by visionary psychopaths.
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The next time you look at an unbroken horizon and meditate on what lies beyond it, also take a moment to meditate on the ring of semi-somethingness between the world you look at and the world-beyond behind your eyes. Or alternately, spend some time watching your mind fill the blind spots of your eyes with nothingness, which is neither light nor dark.
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At the very top of even the highest skyscrapers you will find sea-level executives.
Horizon
I don’t think “horizon” is the right word.
Knowing etymologies
Data – Latin, literally ‘something given,’ neuter past participle of dare ‘give.’
Conceive/concept – Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take.’
Comprehend – Latin comprehendere, from com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
Inform/information – Latin informare ‘shape, fashion, describe,’ from in– ‘into’ + forma ‘a form.’
Fact – Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere ‘do.’
Integrate – Latin integrat– ‘made whole,’ from the verb integrare, from integer ‘whole’.
Incorporate – Latin incorporare, from in– ‘into’ + Latin corporare ‘form into a body’.
Knowledge – Old English cnawan (earlier gecnawan) [recognize, identify,] of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Latin (g)noscere, Greek gignoskein.