It’s a funny thing, “knowledge.” When we think about what it is, we tend to associate it with “historical facts,” empirical or scientific “facts,” and what we might call “true” memories, or ideas that represent things we believe “actually happened.” But is knowledge more than this? Better yet: is it reducible to something finer, something more fundamental? Friedrich Nietzsche spent a good deal of his later productive years looking at the concept of power, going so far, indeed, to proclaim, famously, “This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power - and nothing besides!” In a similar sense, might we say that knowledge, at least the quest for knowledge, is, in fact, the quest for power? Isn’t “knowledge” what we consider the how in how we live? The classical idealism of Plato suggests that insofar as we are able to “transcend” this world - get at the real world or pure being, as some might wish to say - we do so by way of reason, understanding, truth - indeed, knowledge. But when we have “arrived” at such “knowledge,” what has resulted? If we come to “understand” something, what does that mean?
The basic problem with Platonic idealism is that it posits the existence of something other than what we experience, an out there, beyond what we are presented with. This is not the place to refute Platonic idealism, or rationalism more broadly; suffice to say that what we mean by the word “knowledge” is in fact only a collection of raw data that seems to get stored in our minds, sometimes under our control, sometimes not, in reference to things we experience (see, feel, hear, smell, taste). At this crude level, “knowledge” means little more than “idea” or, perhaps to be more precise, “knowledge” is a whirlwind hybrid of memory and sense experience. Platonic idealism, in turn, wants to say that knowledge can be isolated and pinpointed such that we come to know the “pure form” of a given idea or concept. What precisely has Plato done here if not determined what something - anything - is? And is such a determination, right or wrong in its logic, not an expression of power? And if it is, is it not then something anyone can do? Indeed, it would seem that at the deepest levels of our awareness (if such a phrase even means anything) we’re the ones who determine what “the truth” is. Plato had one approach; Nietzsche another; but perhaps more importantly, one might argue, such “approaches” are in fact limited by what we might call perspectival bias.
In her essay “How is Epistemology Political?,” Linda Martin Alcoff calls our attention to the relation between epistemology and power, and specifically the ways in which such power can be oppressive. In her introduction she observes the existence of “social hierarchies of power and privilege” that “determine who can participate in epistemological discussions.” This is to say, of course, that the production of epistemology occurs at an elite and privileged level. Putting aside the jargon and sugarcoating, the inference is that “truth” is being determined by others insofar as what has hitherto stood for “good epistemology” is only at which has been judged “good” by those in political/intellectual (which would include, of course, religious) power. It is also to say that “truth” is something humans invent - or, at least, reinforce - often as a means to preserve a “social order.”
In a sense this is all fine and good. We must trust one another in this way to a large degree - or, what means the same thing, we possess the “knowledge” that there exist others who “tell the truth,” and as such we would be foolish not to listen. But in another sense, this observation also entails the fact that those who are already in power delegate, as it were, “the truth” to “the rest of us.”
There is no better example of this than the prototypical Western “canon.” It is not that the volumes that compose any such canon are unworthy of attention; quite the contrary, I would think. Instead, what is central is the idea that there exists, and must exist, an elite group of actual, living people who determine which volumes comprise the canon; the people who actually get to say “this book speaks the truth” or “this book is valuable and should be read by all students of literature,” for example. Just as Plato did above, this is an act of determining the truth, an expression of power; power over, if nothing else, the immediate environment - or, what is the same thing, the reality - of the individual doing the determining. But, of course, it goes farther than this. The determination then travels through the hallways of academia, and subsequent ripple effects tend to even infiltrate “society” and “popular culture.” Alcoff, in turn, points to the fact that this designation, in the Western world, is almost always made by “upper- and middle-class white males.” And is it thus any surprise when we learn that much of the canon of Western literature, science and philosophy has been in fact, too, written by upper- and middle-class white men?
As a feminist, Alcoff’s objection to this knowledge/power dynamic is rooted in matters of racism, sexism, and oppression more generally. I believe this only obscures the core of the matter. If Alcoff is right, as I believe she is, that knowledge is power (in the existential sense) and that epistemology proper is thus the study of power, and that, in consequence, those who make determinations at the epistemological level (whatever those determinations happen to be) are thus wielding power, then it follows that any epistemological determination - i.e., an epistemological determination made by anyone - also entails this same wielding of power. To introduce more complex and dynamic concepts such as race, sex and oppression, is to irretrievably muddy the epistemological waters with matters of sociology, economics, politics, even anthropology, and miss what it is epistemology is trying to get at. If the question is whether “knowledge” is free from authority and political control, the answer would already appear to be an emphatic yes. Opposed to concerning ourselves with matters entirely outside our control (such as ethnicity or genitalia) I maintain that our focus should remain fixed on this idea of “knowledge” and what it means to say, for instance, “knowledge is power,” or that human beings are of such a type that they “determine truth.” These are questions that sink to the very depths of epistemology, with virtually no connection at all to matters of race, sex or even creed. While it might be true that, for example, Hume’s epistemology is just one possible epistemology, from one specific/possible perspective, it does not follow from here that epistemology is a relative endeavor (nor do I think Alcoff would say as much). Instead, the concern is whether, fundamentally, our conceptions of “knowledge and the truth” are determined by others or determined by ourselves, and, further, whether it truly matters who is doing the determinating.
Alcoff notes, for instance, citing bell hooks, that “Black writers are too often read by whites as writing about - blackness”, whereas white writers are assumed to write about “life”. Alcoff cites this as an instance “where the hierarchy of discursive authority goes against apparent logic or the basic rules of empiricism in order to maintain systems of privilege.” Notice, however, that Alcoff has already made a conceptual shift. If what she says about black writers and white readers is true, would it not follow that those white readers (whomever they supposedly are) are wrong to do this? As such, isn’t Alcoff, by way of hooks, determining the truth of the matter? Exhibiting power over reality? That is, if we assume Alcoff is correct, her point is simply that “sometimes white people read black authors and misappropriate the data” or, even more fundamentally, “sometimes people read things and misappropriate the data.” Introducing the concepts of race, class, gender and other such sociopolitical concepts that are inherently problematic and complex in their own right marks a rather explicit diversion from more concrete matters of epistemology.
There is nothing profound in the fact that people get things wrong, even less profound that white people get things wrong. Yet by positing the nature of truth such that it can be controlled, manipulated and influenced, Alcoff unwittingly exposes her epistemology as having ties - in the most literal sense imaginable - to the politics of others, to our relations with others. I do not mean to suggest that her subsequent assessments are incorrect, only that at such a point we are no longer talking epistemology but politics; we are not discussing something inherent in knowledge, but something relational, indeed political. And if we are correct in maintaining that we have agreed with Alcoff on what knowledge is, and if we are furthermore correct in maintaining that people - i.e., individuals - in fact determine thereby what is “true” (a manifestation of power) Alcoff’s move is clear: she understands she (and many others, presumably) are in position to infiltrate the sphere of politics, but as knowledge and truth correspond dramatically with power, she also finds opposition, namely in those who are not willing to relinquish such power, those who are unwilling to alter their definitions of “truth” and “knowledge” in order to cater to hers. The only recourse in such a circumstance is to define truth such that it serves the interests of power relative to the individual - in this case, Alcoff herself, or, what is the same thing, the data she expresses. What she recognizes, at bottom, is resistance - that is, a limitation of her power. She identifies the source of this limitation as (“primarily,” her word) what we have taken the liberty of calling perspectival bias. But what are we to think of this observation?
It must remain clear that Alcoff’s observations are important. It is the case that other people have a great say in how we understand reality, and it is the case that there are profound political and social connections to draw from this observation. But it is my contention that all of this comes after-the-fact. We could at any time interlace epistemic theory with sociology, politics, science, race, gender, ethnicity, historical era, etc., until we’re blue. Indeed, what we’ve been so comfortable calling “epistemology” must necessarily accompany these concepts; for what is our epistemology if not our truth? We carry it, as it were, wherever we go.
Alcoff comments that epistemology concerns not only truth, “but also […] belief and standards of justification,” but it is difficult to understand how “belief” and “standards of justification” are not merely different ways of conveying what is ultimately the same thing: we’re still just talking about that whirlwind hybrid of memory and sense experience, are we not? Have we gone and turned “knowledge” into something else?
Perhaps the quintessential fact is that, as Alcoff remarks, truth is “a human idea” wrought with “variability” and, what’s more, “can be given a variety of definitions.” Indeed, truth is one thing to Plato, and another to Hume. I certainly have an idea of what it is, what it represents, as I am certain you do. At some point, reality comes crashing back to us. What other people think doesn’t matter, can’t matter. Ultimately - and necessarily - we make the “final” determination. Alcoff’s contention that epistemological bias is a barrier to “non-privileged” individuals within a political power paradigm is a red herring. It pulls politics into epistemology, and why? Because the author has a political agenda - not necessarily in the usual sense, but in the sense that her existential aim was to coalesce epistemology and politics; the process of writing the essay itself can in fact be understood as a political maneuver whereby the final end is, for Alcoff, additional political power, additional order, a furtherance of her own sense of knowledge and truth, of reality. She insists, at bottom, that “other people” are controlling the nature and meaning of truth; all the while she must maintain, to avoid contradiction, that people, including individuals, are what give the concepts of “truth and knowledge” meaning in the first place. What she means to say, indeed all she says and all she can say, is that other people - more precisely, other people’s ideas, politics, epistemologies, ideologies, beliefs, opinions and just sheer gibberishes - are getting in the way of her ability to successfully navigate reality; they’re limiting her power, her infiniteness, her transcendence. Insofar as we understand at all what “knowledge” is, those “other people,” those truths, beliefs and opinions, of those with more power than you (or less power than you, it doesn’t matter) are in no way discernible from “knowledge,” nor from “truth,” nor “reality.”
Thinking about political aspects of epistemology is not epistemology, it’s politics. And as for the assertion that “other people” are controlling the nature and meaning of truth, I would only ask the question: is this even possible?