On Two Kinds of Knowing
First off, apologies to my small coterie of readers for how very little I have written this summer; I have a stack (no pun intended) of half-formed writings in the queue, most alluded to in previous installments, but have been struggling to complete them, and, to be entirely honest, struggling with motivation and energy in general these last few weeks. One of the things I realized—like, I am sure, many others in academia—is the degree to which in-person teaching is a vital and energizing practice, without which other forms of scholarly work drag along or halt entirely. I am teaching online this summer but it’s simply not the same (there is much more to be said here about the intersections of the year—decade?—of covid with and intensifications of some of the worst features of technological hyper-modernity, but I’ll leave those aside for now). Fortunately I will resume teaching in person (barring any reverse on the part of university administration) at the end of this month, and that is an strengthening prospect.
I’m going to aim at weekly writings here, mostly if we’re being honest for my own sake, but I hope that my occasional thoughts and attempts at essays will be of benefit. Today’s installment is a precipitate of my current readings, including Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine, and Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion; readers of either will hear echoes herein, though I’d like to think I’ve made a slight contribution and am moving towards something more substantial.
Also note that I’ve renamed this newsletter to something perhaps a bit more pithy—and alliterative—less grandiose, and which I think better reflects the curious intersections of history, theory, deep time topics, and the theological that my writings have moved towards, we’ll see if I hang on to it.
There has perhaps always been and still is, if it is less visible and almost never distinguished or known to those in whom it inheres, a division between approaches to understanding, perceiving, and cognitively, creatively, etc reproducing or engaging with the world, in at least initially unproductive ways (ie what we tend to call science, philosophy, and humanities scholarship): on the one hand there is that which is oriented towards internal transformation, that which is known and made meant for not personal consumption but personal transformation, that the thing known (be it through investigation, contemplation, or creation) has an effect upon one’s inner self and being and habitus in the world. Power and dominion, to use the scriptural language, reside in this iteration through the knowing participation in the world, of drawing it into one’s self and expressing it doxologically and epistemically: an inner alchemy, a poetry that might make nothing happen in the external world but which makes much happen in the spirit, in the phenomenological sphere of the person, and which might thereby have—but this is not the primary initial objective—profound implications in the social sphere and in the physical world of nature itself, along the way. The point here is not to change the world but to be changed by the world, and it may, or may not, come along later that the world itself is changed by that transformation. Such is not the goal. Aspects of this understanding of knowledge and creative production are retained, if in an unrecognized and often cogently unjustified state, within contemporary pursuits of knowledge, some more than others: cosmology, for instance, has few if any ‘practical’ consequences, at least not in immediate view, and its practitioners seem primarily driven by a desire to know, to take into themselves the reason and wisdom of the world (even if they do not express it as such).
But the overwhelming impetus, at least as far as public presentation goes, across the sciences and to some extent the humanities also is towards the other side of the (conceptual and heuristic primarily) divide: to know and the perceive in order to exercise power and dominion in a physical and operative way, towards the material and social transformation of the world in the service of particular human ends, ends that tend to be coordinated at ever larger scales and concentrated into sites of knowledge production and retention, even monopolization. Here whatever inner transformation or formation of a habitus takes place is deliberately geared towards external effects. ‘Useless’ knowledge is justified as part of an overall edifice moving towards some practical goal, towards the application of power for production and consumption and the reproduction and intensification of power qua power, over one’s self to some extent but even more over ‘nature’ and other humans. Certainly there can be a vast host of motivating factors driving this exercise of knowledge towards power, from the praiseworthy and even humanly essential to the utterly destructive and world-ending, but the basic logic of power and dominion here is the same.
If both sides of this division have arguably existed throughout human history—they might be glimpsed even in the Paleolithic—modernity is stamped by the overwhelming dominance of the second, particularly since the first probably requires for its continuation metaphysical and theological priors that knowledge as power-creating machine has driven out or otherwise suppressed. Attempts at a sort of mysticism of nature have not tended to be sustainable, and often end up going in irrational and erratic directions. Instead, even as scientists and other scholars have increasingly recognized the danger of knowledge as power monopolizing human investigation and epistemic concerns, they—we, for the humanities are a part of this dynamic as well, albeit in different ways—find ourselves unable to extract ourselves from the power generating machine, for reasons philosophical but also quite practical. There’s no money, really, in science for the sake of knowing nature as a path of personal transformation and against the domination of machine and technique. To be sure, a great deal of ‘useless knowledge’ continues to be produced, though as often as not it is because of institutional conservatism and inertia (with roots in medieval ideas of knowledge and scholarly pursuit) permitting space for personal interests and curiosity, helped along by the promise that one’s area of study will contribute to greater understanding of some pressing contemporary problem. But it is anyone’s guess for how much longer this state of affairs will continue absent some return to balance, and the breaking—if only partial—of the hegemony of practicality and technique.