The history of knowledge.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I have developed a particular way of analyzing the history of knowledge which I want to talk about. There are certain periods in the history of knowledge when the structure of man’s subjectivity changes dramatically and rapidly, because of a fundamental change in his understanding of himself. This necessitates and conditions a fundamental transformation of man’s concepts. (Like when platonic love became Christian love) The history of knowledge is structured by these transformations: a history of knowledge must pair a particular structure of subjectivity with its particular expression in a concept (s). The history of philosophy has either been treated as a chaos or linear, but no one has regarded these conceptual transformations or endeavoured to represent them, and any attempt at a history of knowledge has thus obscured and made it incomprehensible. The major change in the structure of man’s subjectivity, and the conceptual transformations of suffering are the most important one’s I think, which I wrote about in the following:

The origin of ‘spiritual pain’.-- One must not mistake the “social contract” for morality. The social contract is much older, it is intended merely to expedite the functions of a society. We agree on the most basic things possible: not to steal, not to kill, (unless the person belongs to a different tribe or society) etc. Morality is much different. It evolves out of metaphysical, philosophical, and religious valuations of certain drives, impulses, passions. Just as the social contract evolves to allow the polis or social-political body to function more effectively, so morality evolves to allow man’s inner society, the inner polis of drives, passions, and hungers, to function more effectively. The former is very archaic, present even in the oldest and most isolated tribes, but morality is something we only see in higher culture. The contract, a product of reason, aided man in combating physical pain and the forces of nature. But when life was settled, and the polis itself was firmly established, pain was drawn inward, was spiritualized, and man experienced the ‘inner antagonism of the drives’ and a consciousness of himself, or rather a ‘conscience’ of himself- the idea of “man” for the first time evolved here, where formerly there was only a member of a tribe and a non-member. The Greeks fought this inner pain with art- ultimately they made everything into art, both man and the world; through art they unified certain drives and relieved their antagonism. Only much later did a system of moral and religious thinking evolve for the same end. This is why the Greeks portrayed Eros itself as the ‘inner antagonism’ - the son of penia and poros, lack and excess, which discharged itself in art and, in the vision of Plato, through the ascension of the entire scale of contemplation. But, instead of Eros- an inner antagonism, in Christianity there was transposed into the heart of the individual an ‘absolute longing,’ an inner lack which took the place of Eros and found its answer only in God. The theological category for this inner lack is quite various: finitude, creatureliness, etc. In any case the perfect antagonism was here realized, that one between the finite and infinite, the profane and the divine, the carnal and the holy: the entire order of religious thinking utilizes this antagonism to inform the unity of man’s psychic being. The ‘spiritual pain’ is discharged through the order informed by this perfect antagonism in the contemplation of God. The theological description of such is ‘kenos’ - the act of Christ’s self-emptying before God, which John of the Cross made use of in his own theological speculation. From it he invented the concept of a ‘dark night of the soul,’ in which all mortal and finite passions gradually detach themselves from their mortal and finite objects, through an intensive and terrible process of ‘purification,’ in order to gradually attach themselves to the divine principles. The internalization and externalization of the antagonism of the drives, the concepts of Eros and an inner lack, have led to these transformations of the concepts of human suffering.

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Thus the major genealogical principle here is that man’s ever increasing knowledge does not condition his subjectivity: quite the opposite. The structure of man’s subjectivity conditions his knowledge.

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What’s the evidence for all this?

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It’s a theory.

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A theory that explains what evidence?

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The French historian Michelet used a concept of a permanent antagonism within man’s drives to write a history which looked at man- human subjectivity, as being in a perpetual state of degeneration and reconstitution in so many original forms. In his history he looks for the corruptible, perishing element within a particular instantiation of human subjectivity, and writes a history around that element. I use that idea to posit a perpetual re-conditioning of the body of human knowledge in relation to the transformations of the structure of our subjectivity. So it is based on that, among other philosophers and writers that I have learned something from, as well as my comparison of the relation between Greek and Christian culture which sort of coalesced the idea. It is a theory, a way of analyzing the history of knowledge. And the major “evidence” I am analyzing in this particular case is the obvious change in man’s understanding of suffering which occurred between Greek and Christian philosophy.

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But what’s the evidence that this theory explains?

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And the major “evidence” I am analyzing in this particular case is the obvious change in man’s understanding of suffering which occurred between Greek and Christian philosophy.

^

It is explaining how and why a change occurred in man’s understanding of suffering from the time of the Greeks to Christianity.

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Okay, I’m with you. This is an interesting piece of anthropology (though whether it’s any good I’ll have to leave for any human scientists reading to judge).

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I favor poetic and aphoristic writing, so I am clenching my jaw and expanding this into a book or at least large essay.

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But you’re confident this ground hasn’t been covered before? You wouldn’t want to reinvent the wheel, after all.

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I’ve read almost everything, and haven’t seen anything like what I am talking about here.

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Wow, I envy you your library,

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I read two books a day, the library is called “google books.”

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Then I envy you your free time and great age.

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I have to eat lots of pain killers to be able to endure reading 15 hours a day straight. As Fenelon said, we must “crucify nature within ourselves.” Denying many of your “psychological needs” certainly invokes nature’s hostility, but the needs of the “soul” so to speak need not coincide with those psychological needs, and often do not.

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Not much time to fit in a day’s work and a night’s sleep too, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ll leave your thread to those anthropologists now …

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Work offends my rather “aristocratic sensibility.”

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In another piece of my actual writing I demonstrate the problematic nature of this:

The problem of maturity in thinking.-- The distinct ideas of the philosophers do not spring up individually as in a bed of flowers, in which a great variety of different species may be accounted for, but in fact, no matter how diverse they may appear, must in every case share a common root in the deepest subterannea of man’s repeated experiences, impressions, and feelings. This implies that, if we wish to follow the eyes of the scholar and trace the pale, nude, and trembling beauty of wisdom, the object of our apprehension cannot lie in the clever taxonomies of which the scholastic discipline is most distinguished by, but rather in the ontogeny of thought, as only our psychologists are capable of demonstrating. The problem is that, perhaps, the soul of the philosopher resembles nothing more closely than the Rana Paradoxa- that ‘paradox’ of nature which, rather it was degenerating into a lower form of life or arising into a higher one, could never be strictly determined. A comparable ambiguity of the history of knowledge itself is discernable to us, for there are certain periods in the history of knowledge when the structure of man’s subjectivity changes dramatically and rapidly, because of a fundamental change in his understanding of himself: this change is always derived intrinsically, from the fundamental antagonism and mutability of his drives in rerum natura. This necessitates and conditions a fundamental transformation of man’s concepts. (One example is when Platonic love became Christian love, or the chief conceptual transformation of Eros into an ‘inner lack and absolute longing.’) The history of knowledge is structured by these transformations, and it is precisely in them that knowledge appears as an ambiguous Rana Paradoxa. A history of knowledge must pair a particular structure of subjectivity with its particular expression in a concept (s). The history of philosophy and knowledge has either been treated as a chaos, linear, or as a point in God’s providence by theologians, but no one has regarded these conceptual transformations or endeavoured to represent them, and all attempts at a history of knowledge have thus obscured and made the subject in question quite incomprehensible.

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I don’t think this is problematic at all. It looks more like entropy. and I think its a great way of analyzing the history of knowledge.