Some kinds of knowledge add information to our memory. Others change our way of being.
We can learn the definition of a tree, identify its parts, and understand how it functions. But through it we can also discover a network of relationships that previously escaped us: soil, water, light, organisms, seasons, and the history of life. The tree remains before us, but we no longer see it in the same way. And we, who have come to know it, do not remain exactly the same either.
Something similar happens when we deeply understand a person, a work of art, or an experience that has changed our life. Knowing ceases to be merely collecting data about something external. It becomes an opening through which our own existence expands.
It is in this sense that the expression “knowing is becoming” offers a fruitful point of entry into the thought of Charles de Bovelles—and into its dialogue with the Theory of Descent.
Here, this expression will serve as an interpretive key, not as a literal quotation from the philosopher. Nor does it mean that knowing something materially transforms us into it. Its meaning is different: what we understand can become part of the way we perceive, judge, and inhabit the world.
1. Being Human as a Task, Not Merely a Given Condition
Charles de Bovelles was a French Renaissance thinker. His works include the Liber de sapiente, or Book of the Wise, published in the 1510 collection that also brings together treatises on the intellect, the senses, and opposites. This collection situates his inquiry at the intersection of knowledge, wisdom, and human formation. See the historical edition digitized by the Zurich library.
An important distinction in reading Bovelles is that between possessing a human nature and realizing its possibilities through wisdom. Being born human does not amount to becoming wise: a work of self-formation remains, one that does not come ready-made with biological existence. Tamara Albertini’s study of the Liber de sapiente explores precisely the demand for wisdom within this conception. Study of the Book of the Wise.
This question establishes a first point of contact with the Theory of Descent.
Possessing a potential is not the same as actualizing it. The capacity to understand is not equivalent to understanding achieved; the possibility of loving is not equivalent to love lived; possible freedom is not equivalent to a choice made and owned.
Between capacity and realization lies a journey.
In the language of the Theory of Descent, this journey requires experience: encounter, duration, resistance, learning, and transformation. Consciousness does not merely receive a world; it takes shape through its relationship with it.
2. The Mirror That Is Also Transformed
The image of the human being as a mirror of the universe helps develop this reflection. Yet we need to use it carefully.
An ordinary mirror reproduces what stands before it without learning from what it reflects. Human consciousness does not work that way. What we come to know can change the very way in which we will know thereafter.
A child learning to read does not merely acquire a collection of signs. The child begins to inhabit a world in which inscriptions, books, and messages hold new possibilities of meaning.
Someone studying history may begin to see a street not simply as a collection of buildings, but as accumulated labor, political struggles, collective choices, and silenced memories.
Someone learning to listen to another person may discover that their own point of view does not exhaust reality.
In such cases, knowledge transforms the “mirror.” Consciousness expands its possibilities for receiving and understanding the world.
This does not mean that it freely invents everything that exists. Reality also resists our interpretations. Facts contradict expectations, people disprove our judgments, and experiences demand that we revise our certainties.
To know is to allow our encounter with reality to transform the limits of our perspective.
3. In What Sense Is Knowing Becoming?
The expression can be understood on three levels.
The first is intellectual. By understanding a relationship, we become able to think it through. What was previously confused acquires an intelligible organization.
The second is existential. Deep understanding can change our values, our interests, and our way of interpreting life.
The third is ethical. What we understand may call for a response.
Knowing injustice, for example, should not be limited to the ability to define it. It can make us more attentive to the situations in which it occurs and more responsible in confronting them.
But this transition is not automatic. Someone may know arguments about justice and act unjustly. They may understand a vulnerability and exploit it. Information, intelligence, and wisdom are not synonymous.
For this reason, “knowing is becoming” should not be understood as an inevitable law according to which all knowledge improves its possessor. It is also a demand: to allow understanding to become integrated into life.
Within the Theory of Descent, this makes it possible to distinguish two things we frequently confuse: accumulating experiences and working through what has been lived.
Not everything that happens to us is immediately transformed into awareness. Experience needs to be questioned, understood, and integrated.
4. Difference Is Not a Defect in Knowledge
A familiar spiritual narrative may suggest that separation is merely an obstacle to be eliminated. The Theory of Descent proposes a different reading: distinction also makes possible what we wish to realize.
For an encounter to occur, there must be perspectives capable of meeting. For discovery to occur, something must present itself as not yet known. For understanding another person to occur, the other cannot merely be a repetition of myself.
Difference, therefore, is not only what knowledge overcomes. It is also what knowledge needs.
This clarifies the meaning of the so-called necessary illusions. The illusion does not consist in claiming that lived differences are nonexistent or irrelevant. It consists in taking them to be absolute separations, as though each being existed entirely on its own, without belonging, relationship, or a common origin.
The experience of individuality is real. Its limits, choices, and consequences matter. What the theory questions is its interpretation as definitive ontological isolation.
Knowledge can bridge distance without erasing the poles of the relationship.
Understanding a person does not require us to stop being who we are. It requires us to abandon the assumption that only our perspective is legitimate.
5. From Unity to Experience: Knowledge Requires a Journey
In the Theory of Descent, manifestation is understood as the field in which the Source’s potentials become experiences.
Applied to knowledge, this idea allows us to distinguish the possibility of knowing from the concrete realization of a discovery.
Possibility does not contain, as an experience already lived, the particular journey of the learner: their questions, mistakes, hesitations, encounters, and revisions.
A mathematical truth can be presented in a single line. Understanding it may require a long journey. The experience of arriving at it is not the same as the mere presence of its formulation.
Something similar happens with self-knowledge. We may hear an observation about ourselves for years and only later understand its significance.
On this reading, descent does not merely provide objects for a ready-made consciousness. It provides conditions for the formation of a consciousness that learns to recognize relationships.
Body, time, language, coexistence, and memory are not dispensable elements of this process. They are part of its realization.
Here the greatness of the physical plane reappears: it is not merely somewhere we must escape in order to know the truth. It is a field in which understanding can acquire experience, consequence, and responsibility.
6. Does the Source Need to Learn?
This comparison requires us to confront an important philosophical difficulty.
If we claim that the One manifests in order to know itself, are we saying that it is initially ignorant? That it lacks something? That it needs to correct a deficiency?
The Theory of Descent needs to distinguish lack from actualization.
The proposal need not present the Source as an uninformed being collecting news about the world. It can understand manifestation as the lived realization of possibilities that are not the same as particular experiences that have already occurred.
Nevertheless, there is a genuine tension between this conception and doctrines that attribute wholly complete and immutable actuality to the absolute. Using the same words—God, One, fullness—is not enough to eliminate differences between philosophical systems.
A more careful formulation would be:
In the Theory of Descent, multiplicity allows the possibilities of Unity to be lived and recognized from determinate perspectives.
This does not prove the theory. It makes its metaphysical proposal explicit.
It also avoids imagining a chronological sequence prior to time itself. The expression “before descent” may designate a priority of grounding, not necessarily a distant moment when the Source was waiting to create.
7. Knowing the World Does Not Prove That It Exists Only in the Mind
Another distinction is indispensable.
Everything we know appears to us in some form of experience. But it does not follow that everything exists only in our individual consciousness.
A mountain does not need to be perceived by me in order to exist. Another person cannot be reduced to my image of them. My ignorance of an event does not prevent it from having occurred.
Consciousness is a condition of the world insofar as it is known by us. This statement does not, by itself, settle the question of the ground of all reality.
The Theory of Descent adds a metaphysical interpretation: different beings and perspectives belong to the same Source. This interpretation must be presented as such, not as the necessary conclusion of any description of knowledge.
There is therefore a difference between saying “we know through consciousness” and saying “all reality is an expression of the One.” The second claim requires its own argument.
Preserving this distinction strengthens philosophical dialogue. It prevents a fruitful intuition from being mistaken for a demonstration that has not yet been provided.
8. Noumenon and Phenomenon: An Analogy That Requires Limits
Kant’s vocabulary can help us formulate questions, but it should not be used as though it confirmed the Theory of Descent.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, the concept of noumenon, in its negative use, marks the limits of sensible knowledge. It is not a positive description of the One, nor an assertion of a divine reality that transforms itself into phenomenon in order to acquire consciousness. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
For this reason, directly identifying “noumenon” with “One” and “phenomenon” with “descent” would overstate the equivalence.
We can construct an analogy: distinguish the ground of reality from the ways in which it presents itself in experience. But the cosmology of descent is an independent elaboration, not a consequence of Kantian philosophy.
The decisive point for this article can be expressed without that identification: lived reality is always encountered from within determinate conditions.
We do not know from nowhere. We know through a body, a history, a language, and a perspective.
In the Theory of Descent, these conditions are not merely negative limitations. They are also means of actualization.
9. Conscious Return Does Not Erase Otherness
If knowledge arises from distinction, what happens when we recognize Unity?
One possible answer would be to imagine the disappearance of all differences. But that would empty the journey of its value: experience would be merely a detour to be canceled.
The Theory of Descent allows another reading. Return need not eliminate what has been lived; it can integrate it.
Consciousness recognizes that its perspective is not the whole, but also that it is not external to the whole. It discovers belonging without having to turn its history into something useless.
In this sense, overcoming separation does not mean abolishing every distinction. It means ceasing to confuse difference with the absence of connection.
This care is especially important when we speak about other people. Saying that we share a Source does not entitle us to claim that we know someone completely.
The other remains capable of surprising us, correcting us, and revealing dimensions we do not yet understand.
Unity does not grant the self the right to absorb the other. It invites the self to recognize a belonging that does not eliminate singularity.
10. Ficino and Bovelles: Loving and Understanding
The dialogue with Marsilio Ficino brings together two paths already running through this blog series.
As an interpretive synthesis, we can associate love with the movement of drawing closer and knowledge with the deepening of understanding.
But we should not rigidly separate an emotional dimension from an intellectual one. Love can also make perception more attentive. Knowledge can also transform feelings.
Loving without seeking to understand can produce projection: I love the image I have constructed, but I do not listen to the real person.
Knowing without care can produce domination: I understand how someone functions, but use that understanding to manipulate them.
The meeting of love and knowledge requires another attitude: drawing close without possessing, understanding without reducing, recognizing without erasing.
In the language of the Theory of Descent, both can participate in conscious return. Love realizes possibilities of relationship; knowledge allows dimensions of that relationship to be understood and integrated.
Neither dispenses with the freedom and responsibility of the person living it.
11. When the World Ceases to Be Merely a Backdrop
The contribution of this dialogue does not lie in turning Bovelles into an early author of the Theory of Descent. It lies in recognizing a shared question: what happens to human beings when they come to know?
The answer developed here is that understanding can transform the very way we participate in existence.
A forest ceases to be merely a collection of resources when we understand its relationships. A person ceases to be a category when we listen to their story. Our own life ceases to be a succession of episodes when we work through the meaning of what we have lived.
None of this requires denying external reality. It requires deepening our relationship with it.
In the Theory of Descent, knowing can be understood as one of the processes through which potential becomes experience and experience becomes recognition.
The world is not merely the backdrop before which consciousness appears. It is also the field in which consciousness learns, transforms itself, and responds.
Perhaps this is the most fruitful meaning of “knowing is becoming”: not turning the other into part of ourselves, but allowing the encounter to make us capable of a broader and more responsible participation in reality.
Unity, then, does not appear as an excuse to abandon the world. It becomes a way of inhabiting it.
To know deeply is not to make the world fit inside our certainties. It is to allow our encounter with the world to expand who we are.
What understanding has transformed not only what you think, but the way you live? Send your reflection or question to the author (Portuguese form).