General knowledge, that is, book reading, school learning, and the ability to cite or quote sources at will, does not by itself make us interesting or even a really knowledgeable person.
Personal knowledge does, though it often is not even considered knowledge.
Our emotions evoked by general knowledge and more particularly our personal reactions to, and experiences with, all aspects of our lives give us personal knowledge that no else possesses.
In Independent Judgment and Introspection, I make passing reference to these two types of knowledge. I also discuss Edith Packer’s distinction (pp. 226-38) between universal and personal evaluations when identifying emotions. Personal evaluations constitute a significant part of our personal knowledge.
Consider two quotations from my book that summarize general and personal knowledge:
To survive and flourish, humans require general knowledge, or education, in the form of concepts and principles to guide their choices and actions. Each individual, in addition, requires specific knowledge, or a set of concepts and principles unique to his or her experience, to direct action to the achievement of health and happiness (p. 54).General knowledge comes largely from others; it is essentially our education broadly construed, not just what we learn in school. Personal knowledge, which includes the general, is what we have experienced over the years and makes us who we are as individuals.
Systematic bodies of concepts and principles constitute our sciences; specific bodies of concepts and principles, unique to our own experiences, constitute our personal knowledge (p. 73).
Personal knowledge comes first. It is what we begin acquiring early in life, and continue to acquire throughout. It starts developing before we can speak, perhaps even in the womb, in reaction to pleasureful and painful experiences. The pleasure-pain aspects of these experiences provide the foundation of our emotions, and the emotions we associate with concrete experiences in childhood and youth influence how healthy and happy we will be as adults.
Personal knowledge, as a result, might also be called experiential knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge based on the objects, persons, events, and even ideas we come in contact with, or rather, experience firsthand.
When we learn to talk, we form concepts and elementary, childlike principles, such as “all animals that walk on two legs are human beings,” which is to say at this point we are beginning to form universals that constitute the basis from which we go on to acquire general knowledge. The principles are called “childlike” because they may not agree with what a more knowledgeable adult might say.
General knowledge is what we learn from older people, initially our parents, siblings, and others around us. More importantly, it comes from teachers and books.
General knowledge is our education and does not stop, one would hope, after receiving high school or college diplomas. It is the systematic bodies of concepts and principles that constitute our sciences, both basic and applied, and we learn and remember the portions of each that are relevant to our lives.
General knowledge becomes part of our personal knowledge when it is individualized to our interests and goals.
Personal knowledge indicates who we are as unique, individual human beings and forms the basis of our personalities, our distinctive ways of thinking and acting. Much of our personal knowledge is specific to concrete objects, persons, and events, such as a ball bouncing and rolling (seen as a young child), a recent performance of a Brahms symphony, or the practical competence of changing a tire on the family car.
Personal knowledge is not universal in the way general knowledge is, though it can become general if, say, we continually increase our general knowledge enabling us to write a book about Brahms symphonies or the repair of certain automobiles. Most of what we do with our personal knowledge is apply the general we have learned previously (1, 2).
Personal knowledge is a collection of experiences—with parents and other relatives; with school subjects, teachers, and classmates; of the time we learned how to ride a bicycle; of happy and sad times at summer camp; and, as an adult, of work, family, and leisure. Throughout life.
The application of knowledge, whether general or personal, is not an emotion-free process.
All knowledge contains evaluations, universal and personal, and those evaluations are what produce our emotions.
Every emotion, as Edith Packer has written (1, pp. 226-38; 2, 151-53), expresses a universal evaluation that is present in all instances of that one emotion. For example, quoting Packer, joy says “I have achieved one of my most important values” and anger says “an injustice has been done to me.”
Behind every emotion and its universal evaluation, we have our own personal experience of the emotion that draws a correct or incorrect conclusion about the experience. For joy: “I got into my first choice of school and feel like dancing around the room!” For anger: “The teacher said I’m no good at math—I’m never going to like or trust teachers.”
It is these inner conversations or voice, as Packer describes the personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge.
The quantity of general knowledge that we each hold obviously varies from person to person, as does its quality, that is, its degree of truth or falsity. But the variation in personal knowledge is even more diverse, as we all come from different backgrounds, family cultures—and experiences. Which is to say, we’ve all felt diverse emotions throughout our lives, which essentially is what gives us unique personalities.
Personal knowledge is what makes us and other people interesting—happy or sad, funny or obnoxious, caring or mean.
Unfortunately, personal evaluations associated with the many emotions we have had in our lives are precisely what most of us are not aware of and have not been taught to identify. Nor have we been taught how to change mistaken evaluations.
General knowledge by itself can be thought of as a sort of sterile academic content in our brains. Personal knowledge makes us engaging—or repugnant.
Personal knowledge is what gives meaning to the expression “variety is the spice of life.”
