“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
The Dialectic of Love and Revulsion
Two Ways to History.—We arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love, though each also has its characteristic perversion that betrays the epistemic impulse. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to the motive behind it all. Love yields understanding without distance, and so it can distort its object to conform to our desires. In the attempt to study our own history and our own civilization, we have grasped them through love and imagined that our understanding was a function of rationality, when it was, in fact, an expression of affinity. Because it is ours, we cannot be dispassionate in its presence, any more than we can be indifferent about our own identity. But other histories and other civilizations, alien to us as not being our own, we can study with the same disciplined rigor we bring to studying an exotic microorganism, or even a fascinating pathology. We can be repulsed, and yet pursue dispassionate scientific inquiry; we could even count the revulsion as a valuable ally in science, as it allows us to maintain our distance from an object of knowledge, the better to remain disinterested in the constitution of the knowledge so occasioned. This, however, is a later achievement of science, which must first develop its methods in the absence of any such revulsion. Discipline must be won through effort, increasing its capacity through repeated engagement. Once the method and the discipline have been developed, they can be directed to any object, but first they must be won through love. The dialectic within science is to study a beloved object and an indifferent or repulsive object with precisely the same methodology, so that what we learn from the one can be applied to the other. In this way, love can supplement discipline, and discipline love. Thus the beloved and the indifferent object of knowledge, both grasped through the same effort of the mind, become mutually intelligible if the methodology of love is mirrored in the methodology of discipline and vice versa.
Transcendental Foundations of Knowledge
History in Naïve Positivity.—That the special sciences are formulated in an attitude of naïve positivity was Husserl’s contention, meaning that the knowledge of familiar natural sciences lacked a transcendental foundation, which could only be provided by phenomenology. This view has little or no traction outside phenomenology, but the core of the idea is, or can be made, independent of the specific phenomenological program for providing a transcendental foundation for scientific knowledge. Once we grasp the paradoxical notion of a non-naturalistic natural science, we can entertain any number of possible non-naturalistic formulations of scientific foundations. Indeed, we can draw upon the entire idealist tradition, going back to Plato or before, as an historical template for understanding the struggle to provide a foundation for scientific knowledge independent of empirical science, which cannot found itself without being any less paradoxical than non-naturalistic natural science. But all this is mere prelude to the imperative to frame a transcendental foundation of knowledge that is not limited to empirical science, but can with equal rigor provide the foundation for all that is not strictly empirical in the narrow sense. A transcendental foundation for the empirical sciences is low-hanging fruit compared to a transcendental foundation for those bodies of knowledge that have not yet, even in our time, received a formal exposition. History, too, demands a transcendental foundation if it is to rise above its oft-expressed ambition to be founded as a science in naïve positivity. Even this modest aim has eluded the historians, which leaves this body of knowledge pristine in a way that empirical science is not, and so an ideal candidate for a non-naturalistic transcendental foundations.
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Knowledge within Our Power and Knowledge outside Our Power
Epistemic Stoicism.—Basic to Stoicism is the distinction between that which is within our power and all that that is not within our power. With the demonstrable failure of the Hilbertian imperative that we must know, we will know, comes the recognition that knowledge is not entirely within our control, as well as the realization that knowledge is not an exclusively human construct. When that recognition settles in, we realize that accessible knowledge is but a small fragment of the totality of knowledge, the greater part of which is inaccessible knowledge, with all-too-familiar instances of inaccessible knowledge being all that we do not or cannot experience, distant circumstances once contemplated by theory of internal relations, and all that is hidden from us, like the secrets held in the hearts of others, even those nearest to us. Following Marx we can say that men make their own knowledge, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Knowledge remains a human construction, for all that remains inaccessible, but it is constructed under constraints. The Stoic epistemologist recognizes these limitations upon knowledge not within our power, and understands that that knowledge which is his is only that within his power; at the same time, taking the view from above, the Stoic epistemologist sees that knowledge within his power together with all knowledge not within his power, and from this view derives both his epistemic humility and his comprehension of the whole that shows his knowledge within the totality of knowledge.
Wisdom Traditions and Intellectual Virtues
Human, All-Too-Human Knowledge.—The value of scientific knowledge could be defended on the purely Platonic grounds that knowledge is the good. From this is follows that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is good, or (at very least) a means to the good, and the intellectual virtues that facilitate the growth of scientific knowledge are a necessary condition of realizing the good of scientific knowledge. The fly in the ointment of this ethical argument for science is that contemporary empirical science does not count as knowledge in the Platonic sense. This is an opportunity, however, to demonstrate the empirical ellipses in wisdom traditions derived from (or adjacent to) Platonism—not only Plotinian mysticism, but also Stoicism. Arguably, the same intellectual virtues prized by these wisdom traditions are at work in the growth of scientific knowledge, and this is, in itself, another argument for the ethical value of science, which embodies both the good at which we aim and the intellectual virtues by which we reach that end. In this way, the good of scientific knowledge, through the lens of Plato, transcends the dichotomy of teleology and deontology.
The Choice between Scientific Knowledge and Enlightenment Ideology
Knowledge and Ideology.—If we want science plus Enlightenment ideology, then we want something distinct from science sensu stricto—a strictly limited science that is consistent with Enlightenment ideology. The contemporary kluge of science being limited to the scope of Enlightenment beliefs through institutional intimidation cannot be regarded as entirely successful, but perhaps this would be a potent combination if acted upon systematically. Like Kant needing to limit knowledge to make room for religious faith, this would mean limiting science to make room for Enlightenment beliefs. There is nothing at all unforgivable about holding this view; what is unforgivable is to conflate the two so as to be indifferent to, or unaware of, the distinction between scientific knowledge and Enlightenment ideology.
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Two Routes to Knowledge
Two Routes to Knowledge.—We can arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to much that has inspired the knowledge in question. Love yields understanding without distance, and so tends to distort its object to conform to our desires. It is only when discipline gives way to love or love converges on discipline that knowledge is true to its object.
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Metaphors of Knowledge
One of the central metaphors for knowledge in western civilization has been the story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. While the original tree of knowledge was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – therefore specifically moral knowledge – the images and the symbols of the fall of man are pervasive in the western tradition, and have not remained confined to moral knowledge. To eat of the fruit of the tree is both to be enlightened and to be dispossessed: one gains knowledge, but loses paradise. Paradise, then, is blissful ignorance; the struggle and strife of earthly life is knowledge painfully acquired. “…of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Another metaphor of knowledge, derived from another tributary to the western tradition, is the craft analogy, which Plato repeatedly puts in the mouth of Socrates: knowledge is a skill derived from practical experience, and if we are seek the best pots from the potter, the best bread from the baker, and the most competent seamanship from an experience pilot, who will sail the ship of state? In Socrates’ time there was no Oxford PPE, no Senate internships, so it was a problem to define the knowledge necessary to run a state. Now one can take a degree in political science and read Plato’s Republic, presumably preparing one to sail the ship of state, but the metaphor of knowledge through experience lives on, even if it is not as well known as the Bible story. However, the Socratic craft analogy comes packaged for us in the story of the trial and death of Socrates – for Socrates was put on trial for asking inconvenient questions of men who made a pretense of knowledge – and this story is perhaps as well known as the story of the fall of man.
One of the most prevalent metaphors for knowledge in the early twenty-first century also comes out of a story, and that story is The Matrix, from the scene in which Neo is offered a choice between the red pill and the blue pill. This is a distinctively modern metaphor of knowledge, both in the individualism of the protagonist, presented with a stark choice, and that the stark choice is a choice between true but unwelcome knowledge and false but comforting illusions. There are elements in common between the Biblical metaphor of knowledge and this modern metaphor of knowledge: a choice, the loss of paradise, Neo as a soteriological figure (he is “The One”). But the parallels aren’t exhaustive: Morpheus plays the role of the tempter, but he is not Satanic, and indeed represents the good – perhaps even the good of knowledge.
Neo, of course, takes the red pill and gains unexpected knowledge, as did Adam. Neo must also train himself in the discipline of knowledge, as in the craft analogy; much of the first Matrix film is concerned with Neo’s training in the martial arts – training that does not reach its full fruition until he flips the script on the bad guys, using their relationship to knowledge against them. In this metaphor of knowledge, then, knowledge is epistemic judo, and this may well be an apt epistemic metaphor for our times.
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Human Dispersion in East Asia: Experimental Archaeology
Researchers row a boat made of grass near the island of Yonaguni, Okinawa Prefecture, in 2014. | NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE / KYODO (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/02/10/national/history/ocean-voyage-by-early-ancestors-to-be-re-attempted-by-japanese-researchers/#.VrwPB1LkrnX)
A couple of recent articles, Researchers to test theory of ancient mariners in a straw boat
and Ocean voyage by early ancestors to be re-attempted by Japanese researchers, brought a new experimental archaeology project to my attention. Yousuke Kaifu, an anthropologist who has studied early hominids throughout east Asia, is leading the recreation of some of the voyages that brought the first human beings to Japan. They will first attempt passage from Yonaguni to Iriomote, and then the longer journey from Taiwan to Yonaguni.
A glance at a map will show that the Okinawan chain of islands provides a series of “stepping stones” by which an early seafaring people could make their way from Taiwan to Japan, settling the islands as they arrived, and moving on northward as the spirit moved them. Another glance at a map will also show that the distance between Korea and Japan looks much closer than the island-hopping route from Taiwan through Okinawa to Japan. Indeed, it is thought that human beings arrived in Japan by three separate routes, a northerly route from Sakhalin to Hokkaido, across the Tsushima Strait from Korea, and the island-hopping route from the south.
I have a great fascination for experimental archaeology (which I wrote about in Experimental Archaeology and More Experimental Archaeology, and then extended to the future in Experimental Archaeology of the Future) and so am always interested to hear of new projects such as this investigation into the settlement of Japan. I realized now as I write this that the argument I made in my Centuari Dreams post, The Scientific Imperative of Human Spaceflight, which concerned the unique contribution to knowledge of an actual human presence in any research (in contradistinction to the remote presence we derive from robotic probes), could be reformulated to address any kind of research, and is not exclusive to space science.
While human ways of knowing are often deeply flawed, with our anthropocentrism and too many cognitive biases to count, in the final analysis our knowledge must be made human if it is to be understood by human beings and employed to better the human condition (and hopefully also the condition of the species with which we share our world, and the Earth itself). When human beings participate in the most direct way possible in scientific research, what the participating individual learns is not anything that can be measured, for the instruments we have constructed can do this far better than our senses can, but the human context of knowledge, which is necessary for even the most technically sophisticated research to be understood and put to use.
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An Anecdote about the Institutionalization of Knowledge
In my previous post, The Institutionalization of Knowledge, I didn’t give examples of how knowledge is institutionalized. Partly this is because I usually formulate my ideas abstractly, but perhaps partly also because one illustration that I could give, and which may have been in the back of my mind when I was writing, strikes close to home. I realized this today.
Some time ago In a post called The Scandinavian Continent I argued that, by the traditional – and largely arbitrary – standards of geography that declares Europe a continent, though it is a peninsula of Eurasia, we could as well call Scandinavia a continent, though Scandinavia – a peninsula of northwest Eurasia – is usually counted as a part of Europe. Later I followed this with a post called The Arabian Continent, in which I observed that, by the same standards, we could call the Arabian peninsula a continent. There are, moreover, reasonably good ethnographic reasons to separate Scandinavia and Arabia as distinct geographical domains.
Through a link back to my blog post I was made aware of an online discussion on the forum of a Scandinavian newspaper (I didn’t save the link, so I can’t find this discussion again). With some difficulty I made my way through the surprisingly extensive exchange (which was not in English) to find how my blog post had been mentioned, and in what context. As it turned out, someone had cited my blog post in making an argument for a Scandinavian identity distinct from Europe. Another contributor to the discussion had then immediately dismissed the reference to my blog post, saying that it was only a blog post and thus, I guess, need not be taken seriously.
We all know that blog posts are regularly the butt of jokes, and that everyone is warned not to take anything on the internet seriously. But this attitude becomes a pretext to dismiss an argument without ever engaging with it, without taking an argument on its merits. There are certain sources which we are all obligated to take seriously, no matter how many times these sources have self-sabotaged their credibility (for example, major news outlets like the New York Times) while other sources are safely ridiculed or ignored no matter what their content.
I certainly understand that most people don’t have time to research their sources to determine their veracity, or to think through a subtle argument on its own terms in order to assess its merits on the basis of principle rather than on the basis of reputation, so we all employ a combination of shortcuts to get at the information we believe to be critical to making it through our day-to-day lives.
But this process is insidious, and the apotheosis of the epistemic shortcut is the appeal to authority and the return to a scholastic intellectual framework – in other words, a retreat from science, properly understood.
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The Institutionalization of Knowledge
Central to the project of industrial-technological civilization is the institutionalization of knowledge, and specifically the institutionalization of knowledge as scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is both knowledge that is the result of the
institutionalization of the process of formulating knowledge – the
scientific method, which produces scientific knowledge – and of those institutions whereby this knowledge is
recorded and disseminated, in a word, institutionalized – books, libraries, universities, government
laboratories, research in private industry, scientific journals, and the
like.
One of the weaknesses of civilization prior to the scientific revolution was the failure to institutionalize knowledge in any systematic way. Even libraries, that enduring symbol of the institutionalization of knowledge, were largely unsystematic. When scholars of the renaissance realized that they could find the books of classical antiquity in monastic libraries, they had to search long and hard for texts buried within books that may have included a variety of other texts within them, with little apparent connection between the works combined under one cover.
While civilization without the institutionalization of knowledge possessed distinct weaknesses and disadvantages as a result of that failure to institutionalize, the institutionalization of knowledge introduces novel vulnerabilities of its own – most notably, the rejection of any putative knowledge that lies outside institutionalized structures, and the uncritical acceptance as “truth” of any putative knowledge that lies within institutionalized structures.
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