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Lately I met a fool.
When I had finished talking, he said:

I no longer try to teach humans..
They already know everything.
I no longer try to teach horses, or cats, or frogs..
They already know everything.
I no longer try to teach weeds..
They already know everything.

And I no longer try to learn from humans..
They know more than I can understand.
I no longer try to learn from horses, or from cats, or from frogs..
They know more than I can understand.
I no longer try to learn from weeds..
They know more than I can understand.

At times now I dance with the moon on the water..
She knows nothing, just like me.
We are equals.

Very Nice Poem

We are all know-it-alls
Even those who say they know nothing
Because they know all about
Knowing nothing
So they know something
About everything there is to know
(For them)
(About them)
And I think most of them know (or think)
That there is something they should know

But Socrates said " I know that I know not"
And Buddha said there is nothing to know
(Except that there is nothing to know)
I think he knew it all!

Sean

Yep, the dialectics of all and nothing are quite some koan, even without getting one's logic messed up, like poor René Descartes with his "I think, therefore I am".

But then Socrates did show that a totally uneducated slave "knew" the square root of 2. For practical purposes, the "know-it-all"-hypothesis is often one of the more efficient ones. The problems start with believing that it's actually the case.

daka wrote:And I think most of them know (or think)
That there is something they should know

Preferably something that can't be known — and then wonder where the despair is coming from...

I should have asked the fool how he knew that the moon on the water knows nothing.
But alas, I had finished talking.