In German, there are two different words for knowing. Kennen and wissen. Kennen is the kind of knowledge that you must have personally and is difficult to transmit, like the knowledge of the experience of kissing a specific girl. Wissen is the abstract knowledge about categories, tokens, actions, relations and parts. To know what the word kiss denotes, or to formally specify a girl is wissen.

In his provocative book on hemispheric lateralization and the projections of related cognitive idiosyncrasies into the structural foundations of our cultures and collectives, Iain McGilchrist muses on the relationship between these ‘different ways of being in the world’, the peculiar structure of our hemispheres, and how they play into our experience of identity.

Kennen is associated with living beings, wissen with abstractions and objects. Our right hemispheres are more kennen-oriented and our left, generally, more wissen-oriented, though both probably participate in both forms. But we treat certain relationals more or less as living beings — as more than objects, and these fascinate us precisely because they catalyze deep attention and the assets associated with intimacy and awareness of novelty.

“To take one example of an apparently non-living entity that appears to require us to know it in the sense of kennen rather than wissen, think of a piece of music. The approach to music is like entering into relation with another living individual, and research suggests that understanding music is similar to knowing a person; we freely attribute human qualities to music, including age, sex, personality characteristics and feelings. The empathic nature of the experience means it has more in common with encountering a person than a concept or idea that could be expressed in words. It is important to realize that music does not -symbolize- emotional meaning, which would require that it be interpreted; it -metaphorizes- it — ‘carries it over’ direct to our unconscious minds. Equally it does not symbolize human qualities: it conveys them direct, so that it acts on us, and we respond to it, as in a human encounter. In other words, knowing a piece of music, like knowing other works of art, is a matter of kennenlernen. Coming to us through the right hemisphere, such living creations are seen as being essentially human in nature. In an earlier book I argues that works of art — music, poems, paintings, great buildings — can be understood only if we appreciate that they are more like people than texts, concepts or things. But the perception is ancient: Aristotle, for example, compared tragedy to an organic being.”

Though he here speaks of apparently non-living entities, the converse is obvious: that nature is ‘the great living entity’ who, in encounter, is the root of kennen, and that cities and human object produce can be understood as physical expressions of wissen — with some few peculiar exceptions, such as art or ritual tradition.