The Wooden Horse and the Burden We Carry: Knowing or Becoming?

In the Masnavi, the masterpiece of Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, there is a powerful metaphor about the relationship between human beings and knowledge: children riding wooden horses.

A child takes a stick, places it between his legs, and runs through the streets pretending to ride a horse. In the child's imagination, that simple piece of wood has transformed into a real horse. It carries him, gives him speed, and takes him somewhere.

Yet from the perspective of an observer, reality is quite different.

The child is not riding a horse. He is carrying the very thing he believes is carrying him.

Rumi applies this simple childhood game to the workings of the human mind. Human beings often see their thoughts, concepts, and accumulated knowledge as tools that elevate them. The books they have read, the ideas they have learned, and the opinions they defend give them a sense of intellectual height.

However, they often fail to notice something important: they themselves are the ones carrying the weight of this intellectual accumulation.

This leads to a fundamental question: does knowledge always liberate us, or can it sometimes become another burden that we carry on our shoulders?

Rumi offers a remarkably concise yet profound answer to this question in the first volume of the Masnavi:

When knowledge reaches the heart, it becomes a friend; when it reaches only the body, it becomes a burden.— Rumi, Masnavi, Book I

The wordplay in the original Persian is significant. Yar means friend or companion, while bar means burden or weight. The difference between them is only one letter. Yet for Rumi, this small linguistic distinction represents two completely different outcomes of knowledge in human life.

When knowledge enters a person's inner being, transforming their character and actions, it becomes a companion. But when knowledge remains only an intellectual possession, serving pride, status, or a sense of superiority, it becomes a heavy burden.

Three Philosophical Approaches to the Transformative Power of Knowledge

The idea that knowledge should liberate human beings is one of the oldest questions in the history of philosophy. Yet Socrates, Spinoza, and Rumi approach this transformation from different directions.

Human beings are not transformed simply by possessing knowledge. What truly matters is what knowledge does to the person who possesses it.

Socrates: Knowing That You Do Not Know

Socrates' central concern was not ignorance itself, but the illusion of knowledge.

In his conversations with people who considered themselves knowledgeable, Socrates questioned the very things they claimed to understand. A person might speak confidently about courage, justice, or virtue; yet through careful questioning, Socrates would reveal that their understanding was often incomplete or based on assumptions they had never examined.

The purpose of this method, known as elenchus, was not humiliation. Socratic questioning aimed to free the mind from false beliefs and unexamined assumptions.

This is where Socrates' famous wisdom appears: he was considered wise because he recognized the limits of his own knowledge.