“In knowledge, nothing new is possible, and what you know is the universal, the general law.” Northrop Frye
That means life is a cycle that repeats itself over and over again, and it is all subject to a time and place for everything. We do not determine the rhythm of life any more than we determine the beginning or the end of time.
Experience is unique, it is alway different and it cannot be duplicated and in that sense, it is unlike knowledge, which involves the cycle of life where nothing is new under the sun -and that is why Northrop Frye said that the most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
We are raising a population which evidently thinks that the most technologically efficient machine is google or the personal computer or the smartphone, but in fact, it's still the book.
That is why most stories have pretty well the same shape. Each story may represent unique experiences, but the sequence of repeated cycles has been consistent throughout human history. Contradictions are too superficial to form any bombastic or dogmatic theory, of the sort that Freud tried to sell.
As Northrop Frye made clear, "Knowledge is something somebody tells you or you tell yourself or regard as your own experience when it has receded into the past and become objective. Experience, when it is being experienced is unique. Experience when it has gone into the past becomes an object of knowledge and so becomes a part of that repeating realm of existence, which is a way of saying there is nothing new. So that every second, you are experiencing the new in a world where there is nothing new."
"Knowledge is always the knowledge of something and wisdom is the sense of potential situations. And so you consult an expert for how to repair a clock and you consult a wise man for what might be the best thing for you to do."
"You can experience the particular but you cannot know it."
And so,it appears that wisdom is the balancing of experience and knowledge and it gets complicated because the uniformity of the past meets the freshness of the present moment.
Finally, to clarify all of the above, don't forget; there are two kinds of reason -there is pure reason that leads us to write books like "The Rise and Fall of Civilizations" and practical reason, which philosophers like Kant defined as the pulsation of experience.
