Job is Process Knowledge

The Book of Job has a surprising resemblance to a philosophical dialogue and that is probably deliberate.  Although, unlike a traditional philosophical dialogue, Job has bursts of pain and feeling and sometimes contradicts himself in a very human way.

The dialoguing is not the only resemblance to an ancient philosophical text.

the classical understanding, philosophy isn’t a topic about which you can acquire information, like molecular biology, it’s a fundamental way of life. To become a philosopher is to become a different sort of person through what Plato terms a “turning around of the soul.”

The ancients wrote esoterically because esoteric writing is the closest that writing can come to conversation, and the ancients believed that philosophy could only be taught through conversation. Does that shock you? If so, it’s because you come from a culture where philosophy is taken to be propositional knowledge, a set of facts or a list of arguments or a body of knowledge that can be learned. But the ancients considered philosophy to be a kind of process knowledge, like knowing how to dance, or how to ride a bike, or how to do B2B SaaS sales. Imagine trying to learn to play piano by reading a manual but never actually playing any music, that’s how the ancients would think about contemporary academic philosophy. For them, the only way to learn philosophy was to do philosophy with somebody who was already wise — sparring with them verbally, wrestling with them mentally, encountering problems together, solving them together. No text could possibly replace that, but to the extent that any text could, it would have to be a multilayered one. Their works are hard to read because they are fundamentally not designed to directly impart knowledge (!!!), they’re designed to make you, the reader, go through a particular set of mental transitions and moves that imitate the actions of somebody doing philosophy. They’re like the written version of a kung fu movie featuring a multi-tiered pagoda with antagonists of increasing skill on each floor.4 They aren’t training manuals, they are training.

–thus the Psmiths

Reading the book of Job this  time I suddenly realized that I wasn’t reading a set of doctrinal propositions.  I was undergoing a Job experience.  You start with him, you anguish with him, you argue with his friends with him, feel his betrayal from his friends and from God, and then with him you hear God rebuke you.  Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?  And with him you crave pardon and are received into the presence.

The Book of Job is a written reproduction of an experience we all have to have, we can only know it by going through it, and there is no other way than going through it.  By this door and no other.

I wonder if something similar could be said about Isaiah–that its purpose is not to reveal things to you but to induce you into a revelatory state of mind.