How do we know?

Often times I encounter the age old argument, How else will you know _Y_ is good or bad unless you do _Y_? As though it were not possible for me to know _Y_ without doing it? And what if _Y_ is something harmful to us?

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in his oration on Education from the TV series Life is Worth Living, had this to say about knowing:

We at times fail to distinguish between two ways of knowing anything. For example, typhoid fever can be known as we know it now, negatively; we do not have it. The evil is known by negation. There are some people who know typhoid fever experimentally; they suffer from it.. It is one thing to know intellectual errors, as the negation of truth; it is quite another thng to know evil by infection. The germ could ruin us. To know what dishonesty is one need not be a thief. To know what life is, one need not be an adulterer. Drunkenness can be known without being drunk. Education which emphasizes the necessity of living evil in order to know evil is in danger of making the mind captive to evil. Values and joys are associated with temperance, which the alcoholic does not know, and with innocence, which the sex addict can never experience. Let a drunken man become sober and he will see things as they are; let a skeptic turn to the Diety and he will begin to know truth.

So knowing evils by negation isn't necessarily a worse knowledge than knowing evils experimentally. I can see the effects of crack cocaine on the body to know that it is harmful without doing it. I can see the effects of jumping off a 10 storey building onto concrete to know that it is deadly. The same goes for spiritual evils, or sin. While I am a sinner, I know sin by the effects of it in my own life - yet I also know that by cooperating with grace and embracing the cross in faith, I can avoid sin. And because I also trust Our Lord when He tells us of how sin harms our soul, I know sin without indulging in it. Now, I don't dare boast that I have mastered this, but it is a daily walk, and were it not for God's grace, I could not do it. Hence we have the sacraments as tangible ways in which we are strengthened by His grace.

But what about the difference between knowledge by negation and knowledge by experimentation? Sometimes it is argued that to really live is to, at times, do less than moral or even harmful things. The implication is that we can never really know life without them. But is this really true? I would answer shortly that in the essence of it, it isn't true. - but perhaps there is a kernel of truth buried in there, but I think it has more to do with the reality of the human condition. Certainly one who engages in harmful activities will know them, while it is experimentally. This is because experimentation is much more concrete than knowing something by negation, which isn't as tangible to us. A young child, for example, will most realistically learn this way. The child has to touch the hot stove to know that it is hot, in spite of warnings. The child has to over indulge on sugar sweets, even if mom or dad puts the cookie jar up high. But are there degrees to which we might consider something less than moral? Has this changed in the course of time? Certainly I would hope that my child, if I had a child, wouldn't become convinced that one needs to go do crack to know what crack is all about.

But it seems to me that as one gets older, the more one realizes that one doesn't have to experiment to know the harmful effects of particular things. Therefore, I think it has more to do with the maturity of one's mind, just as the maturity of one's soul, to know and understand harmful things by negation. It is certainly true that there is considerable risk in attempting to know things experiementally, for as Sheen states,

Education which emphasizes the necessity of living evil in order to know evil is in danger of making the mind captive to evil.

We endanger our bodies to addiction and death by indulging in crack to know the effects of crack. We endanger our souls by indulging in sin to know the effects of sin.