Saturday, October 08, 2005
(11:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Relevance as such
Relevance is a cruel taskmistress, especially in this age where we have finally opened ourselves out onto the very ontological horizon of relevance. Whereas before, things were relevant to certain contexts, skill sets, or modes of inquiry, now we have reached a point in our intellectual history where we are face to face with relevance as such.The discovery of this intransitive relevance, which inheres in certain things and fails to inhere in others, is the greatest philosophical achievement of our age -- it is nothing short of the fulfillment of the Enlightenment dream of Absolute Knowledge. Now we know, not simply that certain things don't belong to certain contexts, but that certain things don't belong anywhere. Certain things that a naive observer might take to be a part of the world of human meaning in point of fact do not belong to that world. They are not among the set of "relevant" things -- they have no relation whatsoever to things that relate.
It is a marvel of modern science that we are even able to study such objects, given that they bear no relation to what it is possible for human beings to know -- but our modern scholars have found certain indicators, certain traces of these ontologically irrelevant quasi-beings. Are schoolchildren acting bored? Fidgety? Are they doodling in their notebooks? There's a good chance that something irrelevant is nearby. What about poorly educated adults who watch a lot of television? Again, their comportment -- usually a barely-perceptible "glaze" over their eyes -- is indispensable indirect evidence of the existence of a non-relevant object in the vicinity. And of course, the testimony of the business community is invaluable, though in a different way -- as our best guide to what is ontologically relevant, businessmen also serve to highlight the non-relevant through their very silence.
In the end, however, our knowledge of the irrelevant, even if indirect, creates several seemingly irresolvable paradoxes. Is knowledge of the irrelevant relevant? Through this knowledge, do we somehow manage to incorporate the irrelevant -- in its very irrelevance -- within the horizon of relevance? Or is it rather the case the "the irrelevant" is nothing but a limit concept that serves only to grant consistency and solidity to our knowledge of the world of relevance? Irrelevance as the constitutive exception to the regime of relevance, giving the world of relevance its very relevance -- grad students, it would appear, are good for something after all.
