Knowing vs Really Knowing

My wife’s name is Christine. Before I married her, even when just I first met her, I could say that I knew Christine.

“Christine? Sure. She’s right there.” She is a woman of this height and other such characteristics that most of us could easily describe and recognize.

So, I knew Christine before I really knew her.

However, only after I spent more time with Christine — especially after being her husband for a decade — can I say that I really know Christine.

This is natural language: If you asked me after I first met Christine if I knew her, I would say, “Sure.” And then I would list characteristics to identify her. But if you asked me if I really knew her, I would say, “No, we just met.”

Here is the funny thing about knowing vs. really knowing. My knowing Christine is something I can communicate, because it involves listing easily describable characteristics. But my really knowing Christine is not easy to communicate, in fact it is almost impossible to communicate. It’s something I know through long acquaintance, it is a knowledge of person — knowledge of a subject as subject. To communicate my really knowing Christine, I would hardly know where to begin, and whatever I conveyed I would almost certainly feel is inadequate to capture what I believe my true knowledge of her is.

The more penetrating my knowledge of Christine, the less of it I seem capable of making explicit, at least in the form of communication. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that I really have this knowledge and that this knowledge is more profound than just listing Christine’s gender, height, and date of birth. Why? Because this knowledge is getting past mere appearances, and while appearances are real, they are not the root of Christine’s being, or essence. Only once I have gotten beyond appearances and to the primal source of those predicates do I feel I can say I really know, and yet once I have arrived at that subjective core I no longer feel competent to explain just what it is that I know that I really know.