“You Perceive with
Your Mind”: Knowledge
MITCHELL S. GREEN
A major theme in rap lyrics is that the only way to survive is to use your head, be aware, and know what's going on around you. That simple idea packs a lot of background. The most obvious ideas about knowledge turn out, if you look at them close up, to be pretty questionable. For example: How do we get knowledge about the world? A natural and ancient answer to this question is that much if not all of our knowledge comes from our senses. So, for example, the nose gives us knowledge of what things smell like, and if all goes well, also indicates whether the thing we smell is healthy, tasty, or noxious. Likewise, the eyes tell us the color and shape of things, and thereby give us information about whether those things are useful, dangerous, and so on. Like everybody else, rappers know all this. Or do they? Maybe some rappers know that this isn't really so.
I'm not talking about Extra-Sensory Perception, channeling, auras, or about what Common calls “The 6th Sense” (Like Water For Chocolate). I'm talking about the way that philosophers like to question the most mundane ideas to see if they contain something inside in need of, well, liberation. We're going to discover that philosophers and rappers can find a common cause.
The idea that the senses convey knowledge is so natural, pervasive and ancient that it's part of common sense. According to this idea, what the senses give us is something like what you see on the plasma screen in the pimped out stretch Hummer, or hear on a newly minted Funkmaster Flex track, or smell when