Knowledge
17th installment to my philosophical system.
Most men’s knowledge is but history duly taken up, and very few are actually made the better for all of it. What most people consider as knowledge is but the dross of erudition. It serves very little in the way of advancement in learning for man, and rather only acts as an impediment to true learning—that which is only attained after countless hours of fruitless struggles to comprehend a single, powerful idea.
Laymen and scholars alike mistake the quantity of ideas for the actual quality behind them; but if merely sounding smart were enough to constitute knowledge, then philosophers and politicians would be walking encyclopedias. I would say what I myself think constitutes real learning, but Schopenhauer has already done that for me better than I ever could, and so I will quote him here:
The thinker stands in the same relation to the ordinary book-philosopher as an eye-witness does to the historian; he speaks from direct knowledge of his own. That is why all those who think for themselves come, at bottom, to much the same conclusion. The differences they present are due to their different points of view; and when these do not affect the matter, they all speak alike. They merely express the result of their own objective perception of things. —On Thinking for Oneself.
It is precisely for this reason that it is a very difficult thing to write about knowledge at all, for anyone who attempts such an enterprise—assuming they have done the requisite reading and study to even begin—is met with the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise) at every turn. Seemingly every learned man and woman in history, from the ancients to us moderns, has more or less said the same thing about it, and so, to write on it is akin to painting on an already covered canvas.
What I take most from that quote of Schopenhauer’s is the clear distinction between the thinker and the mere imitator of ideas. The thinker is one who comes to his own conclusions about his every experience; he draws from his own source of wisdom, and in that way acts as his own teacher, whose material is gotten from the world which surrounds him, rather than the ideas or opinions of those who have read in books how things are to go. The imitator takes everything second-hand, and even when he has encountered the world on his own, he still views and interprets it through a secondary lens—a habit of thinking that is not his own, and rather is a mechanical process that he was drilled to repeat subconsciously. In that way, the man who focuses solely on what lies in books or in the words of other “learned” men will never come to his own opinions, and will be stuck with taking them from others for the rest of his days.
As a result of all this, it could easily be argued that education really perverts the young mind, because it interrupts its natural development with a surrogate: a systematic pedagogy that is drilled into them from the start, taught by “authority figures” from on high, which causes the child to hesitate in their own thinking, and forces them to sieve out their own ideas from those which they are taught by others; the child thus never fully matures in their mental development, and is forced to go the rest of their days like a cripple without a crutch.
This is all to say nothing of how unnatural and unintuitive this is for the child, especially if they are natural contrarians. To one who is more agreeable temperamentally (like myself) it is even worse, for we take wholesale the garbage we are taught: we even go as far as to memorize it, and internalize it to the point of never forgetting it, in the same way every child leaves elementary school remembering nothing but the Pledge of Allegiance.
Not only is this approach to knowledge bad developmentally, but it is also very dangerous, for it forces the child to view the world as something which “other people” have already figured out, thus completely annihilating any innate passion or curiosity which they may have for the world and all the abstractions within it. With this deleterious process complete, philosophy becomes impossible, for wonder is beaten out of the child and replaced with a scantron. All knowledge is taken for granted, and the most profound discoveries are treated as mere facts, as if that alone were enough to make them meaningful or interesting.
Knowledge is interesting only insofar as it has meaning for us. If knowledge is to have a meaning, let it be born in us, and let it stem from our interest in it for its own sake. If knowledge is to have a teleology, it is, I feel, either to be for personal ends or for humanitarian ends, both of which are two paths that lead to the same destination: wisdom. Personal wisdom is that which uplifts the soul and makes life a tolerable affair. Humanistic wisdom consists of those ideas which are meant to uplift the whole human race, rather than a single individual within it.
The history of humanity can be taught in a comprehensive manner from the perspective of its intellectual developments alone—one of the few frameworks which allow for that. Many like to think of history as merely the chronological organization of events, but this reduces the subject to a mere timeline, lacking all depth and complexity behind the events, and ignoring the material conditions that made them possible in the first place. There is no one right way to tell history, but for those who seek to understand how we have come to where we are today, with all our technologies and amenities, one must necessarily be a student of history—and in particular the history of philosophy—if it is all to make sense.
Having now spoken of knowledge in general, I now wish to speak of it in the concrete. Knowledge is colloquially understood as a body of facts which have been verified beyond all reasonable doubt thanks to an overwhelming preponderance of evidence for their validity. From a pragmatic, or rather existential, perspective, however, I could not find a more disagreeable maxim. What does all this “evidence” have to do with me? Where is the subjectivity in it? Where is the passion or love? How exactly am I supposed to get off to this idea if it is presented to me in a grotesque, incomprehensible manner?
I do not view knowledge the way my contemporaries do. I do not treat it analytically, as a thing merely to be categorized and labeled; as just another datum to be tossed upon the ever-growing stockpile of human knowledge. To me, that approach was always stale and dead. It was as if something was lacking in it. It was off. It had a slothful quality to it, and lacked all impetus or innate motive force, which made it appear to me as something not worth pursuing. I never was able to do things for which I had no interest.
For me, knowledge is ethical, and it is ethical because it is fundamentally subjective. Like I was saying earlier, the modern world is not ready for this conversation yet. Nobody today is willing to entertain the fact that what we call “truth” may really be a lie, and that every idea we hold to, and every subject which purports to provide us with knowledge about the world, is really only a single framework by which to operate in—the inheritance of which has been disastrous on nearly every level. Truth is a lie because it rejects contradiction. Like a greedy capitalist, it makes the contract to its advantage and then gets upset when its blatant unfairness is called out.
In order for knowledge to prosper, it must be liberated from the chains of reductionism. Every thought has two aspects in the same manner a coin has two sides: on the one side we have its positive aspect—that which is generally accepted prima facie (at first sight), and which is applauded by the majority as generally correct thanks to its intuitiveness—and on the other we have its negative aspect—that aspect of the concept which serves only to negate the positive side. Every truth, then, is really in a constant process of becoming and falling away—at every turn does it feel itself in upheaval, wishing to affirm the one, but being prevented by the other from doing so; it is like the split-brain patient who puts his hat on with his left hand and removes it with his right simultaneously.
This is the famous negation of negation: the process by which two opposites may be reconciled into a higher synthesis, in order that, in the process of aufhebung (sublation), they eventually reach the absolute. This is the core of all dialectical or paraconsistent logical systems. They are above truth, for they are not beholden to their own criteria of truth; rather, truth, in this framework, reveals itself to them as a result of its effects on them! It is truth made subjectively. At once does all seem clear when the barbarous adulations of the logicians are swept away, and room is made for this new approach to knowledge: knowledge as process, as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—of becoming and beholding as such.
Life is for us to experience, and the world is for us to change. The world is that object which appears for us as subjects, but which remains always above us in an absolute sense, for it was prior to us; thus it seems reality resembles the dialectic even when it wishes to affirm itself in the concrete sense. It would have been a shame if reality were not dialectical, because then the formalist and dogmatic metaphysicians would actually be right in affirming an ultimate ground to all things.
If I may be blunt, the only difference between me and Hegel is that I have the gall to deny that which I feel is true simply because to affirm one position (“truth”) over any other would be to ignore what the dialectic tells me is the case: that truth is like a lung which expands and contracts, the result of which stems from the negative pressure within the thoracic cavity, and the influx of positive pressure exerted by the contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles—you see, even nature is dialectical (positive and negative), and that is why I must remain in the dialectic, rather than in one or the other. To say truth is either—or is to mistake the nature of it. This is what most men have done before me, but what none have managed to explicate before me. Truth is one movement, and that movement is dialectical (every motion possible).
Deus sive natura in veritate est unus. (God, or Nature, in truth is one.) God is not nature, nor nature god, but rather both are two parts that belong to the same greater whole, whose creator is not abstract but concrete—one within the minds of men (God), and the other in its lived embodiment in men (nature). If only this were the commonly accepted position on God—there would be so much less infighting and dogmatism. Kant killed philosophy to save God from logic. Hegel saved God in the same manner Spinoza did—by redefining what God meant: aequivocatio argumentorum iterum victor est. (The equivocation of arguments is victorious again.) It is no wonder why every man who attempts reconciling God with reason ends up becoming either a dogmatist or Spinozist; you either affirm a position you already know is baseless, or you presuppose the precise thing you want your reason to prove as true—in the process committing a petitio principii (begging the question fallacy).
In my study of God, I found that logic and reason alone were completely unable to handle such a contradiction, and thus I sought far and wide for a way to actually make reality make sense again, and reconcile the human with the divine; I studied everything, wrote on everything, accomplished everything I could intellectually given the information I had available to me, and found that no one in recorded history had laid down a system that was exactly in harmony with my own views—and so I had to take the matter into my own hands, taking from my studies what I felt was right while discarding what I felt was wrong, and developing for myself my own philosophy: and so it was… this tome you see before you is that labor brought to fruition—my philosophical system in whole: my dialectical pragmatism fully explicated, and made use of in every aspect of reality I thought important enough to consider through its lens. It is not an end to philosophy proper, but rather one of many systems of philosophy that I hope may be of use to those who share my intellectual temperament. Let it be ignored, mocked, and ridiculed by everyone else for all I care. The fools have always been told the same from the wise, and in exactly the same manner do they go against them; thus the wise must always repeat themselves, and the fools must continue to make a mockery of themselves.
Like maturity, knowledge is something that takes a long time to finally reach. Man would be lucky to have even a small percentage of the total amount of human knowledge that currently exists. Knowledge, depending on the discipline, advances rapidly or not at all. In nascent fields like psychology, still young and without consensus, every theory is given its due, and all ideas are considered as worthy of inquiry and investigation. In fields that are already well-trodden—say physics, biology, philosophy, or mathematics—there is very little in the way of actual progress, not only because these fields are much older (which is the main reason), but because there is more agreement on what is established, what is foundational, and what is, above all else, “true.”
Young sciences represent the most perfect embodiment of knowledge because they are the most dialectical—constantly changing and evolving with the times; but sadly, as more is made known, and more discoveries are had and forgotten, the body of facts morphs into an academic discipline with conventions and firm foundations—in that sense, all knowledge (a body of facts) becomes dogmatic because the notion of an established truth is dogmatic. Truth, by definition, is dogmatic, and that is why it is the greatest enemy of the dialectic: if truth is the “positive” which all strive towards, reality as such is the negative which drags everything down to a realistic, levelheaded, pragmatic medium.
If only there were a way for man to study and learn things without having to affirm the “truth” of them; if only there were a way to live without willing at all—to be a brainless omniscience, a nonexistent omnipresence, a weak omnipotence—that would be my greatest happiness. If we return to Hegel for a moment, we find that his doctrine of the absolute, with its presupposed telos, is really a kind of anti-knowledge, or better yet, an anti-wisdom; he thought all things were progressing in a positive direction as a necessity of reason coming to recognize itself, but Hegel’s reason is cunning, and it would get to the “truth” through the form of a lie if it had to. For Hegel, all is one because all that appears for the subject is really that which appears for the subject’s reason, and through that experience, reason is given another sensation of the world by which to develop. The progress of history extends only so far as man is willing to recognize his place in it. Aufhebung weiter (sublation onwards) is really to be the motto of every dialectician, as well as for those godless anti-metaphysicians.
The capacity to learn is born within every man, but not every man can become a genius—the reason being that most find it impossible to become self-reliant in acquiring knowledge because they are unable to see past their current framework of conceptualizing knowledge. Everyone thinks of knowledge as formalized information, as a collection of discoveries and oddities to gaze at in admiration but to do nothing further with! Again, it must be made subject to subjectivity—information must be set free and made to roam the world on its own in order that it may find what it itself is, and at last, in that great self-realization, come to truly know its own self, liberated from those human fetters which have strangled it for so long.
Every man is his own barrier to knowledge; he could read the whole Library of Congress and still have no idea what it means to be himself. That is a great loss, and yet it is the exact path which most men go down in life, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing, and sacrificing their very life for the sake of living. Hence why every genius has been, in some way, an antipode to their own age; thinking for themselves and coming to conclusions that are in a direct way the opposite of what all their contemporaries think is the case.
I’ve always found that people are willing to passively accept whatever the Zeitgeist is so long as it does not harm them materially; thus, so long as exploitation and the working class exist, there will always be some truth in that famous quote by Marx:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. —The German Ideology.
If freedom is the goal, and if knowledge is the surest path to get us there, then let us make knowledge more powerful than it already is. Knowledge freed from the fetters of past dogmas and made mobile again; knowledge which inspires action, not hesitation! What we need in this world is an upliftment so strong, a love so firm, a heart so dear, and a mind so open, that every particular subject in the world moves forward in a direction of general goodness so that the majority of mankind may prosper. Until every hesitation of the mind is lifted, and every doubt is bypassed, and every obstacle to action is removed, true freedom will never reign in the world—a world in which the proletariat becomes the new ruling class, and directly afterwards abolishes classes altogether.
All philosophers, all thinkers, all oppressed—in a label, all working class—UNITE!