Knowledge is seeing the general principles that constitute the event, seeing the particular under the general, but knowing is encountering the event in as naked a particularity as possible. Strange duality of the root idea of cognition, knowing as you are known in the event or knowing as ancillary to the event, intimacy with things as against representing them - these are not aligned. There is an ethos of knowledge, but it is an outgrowth of a more encompassing ethical field of struggle and contradiction. You are already immersed in this ethical sphere so that your acts have meaning only in as much as they instance local categories or maxims. But the acts demanded of you are entirely particular - this thing that only you can do, here and now. The ethical sphere belongs to the human, not to you as such, birth and blood ask this of you for the sake of birth and blood. You must discover what your place is within it. Your desires and dispositions root you in it, but you see most clearly when you do not identify with assumed ethical passions, but see them as gifted to you, full of contradictory loves, so that you can assume them again.