Wednesday, August 27, 2003
(9:21 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The blasphemy in my old jangly walk
While I was in New York, Kevin (whom I was visiting) noted that it was strange that I would be so indecisive in social situations while being so opinionated in general. I replied that I don't like to be opinionated in areas where I could change things.
I remember back in my early undergrad days, when I was firmly under the "spell of Plato," so much so that I made a somewhat serious attempt to learn Attic Greek. When Socrates debated about whether one could know the good and not know it, I was seduced. Surely, I thought, it made no sense that someone would know the good and not do it -- surely, his very negligence with regard to the good shows that he does not know it.
At some point, though, knowing stopped being such a weighty thing. Whether it is the scientific method, where every piece of knowledge could conceivably be proven false at any moment (never more clear than today, with our constant "advances" and constant contradictory reports on health issues in particular), or whether it is the more general hollowing out of the Great Ideas in the 20th century, "knowledge" is no longer convincing as a primary motivating factor in relating to reality. We can still understand, to some extent, the driving force of the thirst for knowledge, but there the motivation is provided by desire itself, not by the information or facts that the scientist or the polymathic scholar amasses.
Still, knowledge itself seems to be impotent. I stumble on that plain fact every day of my life, when I know, really know what must be done, know in intimate details the way that I am stunting my own possibilities, the ways I am acting as my own worst enemy, and see quite plainly that no change seems to be forthcoming. I have published self-analysis after self-analysis after self-analysis, and I have written many more for my own benefit. All that self-knowledge, which is more or less genuine or accurate as far as I can tell, has not, in itself, changed anything. I could repeat this pattern in broader, higher-brow ways, but I think the example of my own life is adequate in the context of a blog.
I wonder if the problem is something like the subject-object split, where the subject is supposed to be the locus of the "view from nowhere," divorced from the objects of its "knowledge." The modern self, as the place of consciousness and knowledge, is not in need of any fundamental change, since it is supposed to be the universal deep structure of all human beings. For us to return to the place where Socrates' argument works, we might need to look at the idea of knowledge through the lens of the Christian tradition. I think that is something like what Marx is doing when he says that to know something, you must change it. Knowledge, to become an active and productive concept, might best be understood along the lines of confession and penance, the process by which one's self-knowledge becomes an integral part of self-transformation -- you confess what you are so that you may no longer be that.
Bonus points to anyone other than Mike Schaefer who can give the citation for the quotation that makes up the title of this post.
