ABSTRACT
Knowledge is not conceived in passive receptivity; it is born in action. The act of knowing is a species of action in general. This does not imply that political knowledge is the outcome of political action. Political action is neither a sufficient condition nor a necessary condition for knowledge, whether of politics or of anything else. The act of knowing makes no political commitments; it is subject to no political validation. Politics today is perverting the act of knowing into something unnatural and corrupt. Money and power offer the mind a choice between corruption and irrelevance. The skepticism of the eighteenth century was constructive. It was practiced in order to determine which institutions could stand the test of free inquiry. In our time, free inquiry itself has been brought into question. The Age of Reason has given way to an Age of Madness, the Enlightenment to the darkness of ideological dogma, the Critical Philosophy to the cultivation of mindlessness. Humane skepticism has degenerated into a brutal and brutalizing nihilism. Sophistication has made us sophists. We are ready to redefine every issue with the pseudo-profundity of, “Who is to say?” We should ask instead, “How are we to say – on what basis?” “Who?” does not define the issue, but only dismisses the effort to address the issue with objectivity. We are obsessed with the notion that there is no independent way to determine whether we are judging rightly. The assumption is that all of us have taken sides, sufficiently comprehensive and well-defined so that in every conflict of ideas the judgment being made only expresses what side has been taken. This is what it means to impose on the act of knowing the categories of political action. In one of his stories, H.G. Wells describes a barroom argument in which a debater was “conducting the opposition by a monotonous but effective ‘So you say’, that drove [the opponent] to the very limit of his patience.” Patience is taxed by the disproportion between the psychological impact of the tactic and its lack of logical force – a disproportion increasingly characteristic of political argument today, which contrasts sadly with, say, the Federalist papers. The epistemological basis of nihilism lies in today’s widely accepted axioms of direct experience, that direct experience is a necessary and sufficient condition for knowing. Black studies programs, it is assumed, must be directed by Blacks; urban problems are to be analyzed only by ghetto-dwellers; courses on sex
discrimination are to be given only by women; governing bodies of universities are to include students – and all these appointed even if they have little qualification other than being Black, urban, women or young. Many commentators on international affairs have to recommend only a compelling image and the circumstance that they “have been there.” Direct experience is not sufficient for knowledge; it is only an opportunity for knowing. Participating in demonstrations does not make a student an expert on either politics or violence. We have all spent lifetimes in a gravitational field, but it takes more than a falling apple to make a Newton. Knowledge of a language is different from fluency in speaking it – children are not linguists. Nor is direct experience necessary for knowledge. A male can be a knowledgeable obstetrician; a good psychiatrist need never have experienced a psychotic breakdown. One need not be something in order to know it. Direct experience cannot be taken as its own validation. We may be blind to what is there to be seen, and see phantasms which are only projections of our own disordered minds. The axioms of direct experience are nihilistic because they negate in principle the whole of human culture: culture consists of all that is learned from the experience of others. Political scientists understand terrorism all the better for not being terrorists themselves. What terrorists say about what they are doing is raw material for the political scientist but it is a far cry from already being political science. The vulgarization of pragmatism is complete. From the insight shared with empiricism, positivism and early Marxism that thought can be understood only in its implications for action, the pragmatic principle has been perverted to a rationalization of unprincipled opportunism. Truth makes sense only because of possible verification in contexts which implicate human purposes. This has been transmogrified into the doctrine that there is no truth but usefulness, in the narrow contexts of the political causes espoused by those proclaiming the truth. The illogic of the conclusion does not detract from the importance of its premises. The act of knowing, like virtually every other action in a politicized world, takes place in a political setting, and may be profoundly affected by this circumstance. Power is widely used nowadays to conceal and distort political data, to suppress the inferences such data invite, and to prohibit or postpone publication of scientific findings. Access to data and freedom to exchange ideas about their significance are basic to every science; however, for political science, both have become increasingly problematic. Even research techniques may be subjected to political constraints – for instance, the use of projective tests or psychoanalytic interviews in countries where these are ideologically suspect, or of electronic eavesdropping devices in countries where privacy is protected. Less noticeable but no less important is the bias politics gives to the conduct of inquiry into human behavior. Whether as a matter of explicit party lines or of unconscious predispositions of the researcher, hypotheses are considered, tests are devised, observations are made and conclusions are arrived at in ways that reflect the political situation. Political commitments of the scientist may contribute to making some of the data invisible, unseen until insistently pointed to by other observers. Thereafter,
the data appear so obvious that it is hard to believe that they had ever been overlooked. Male hysteria and infantile sexuality were invisible data for psychiatrists until Freud; what was happening in Stalin’s Russia was for long invisible to many political scientists even with regard to accessible data. Only the issues have changed, not the subjection of knowledge to politics. Politicizing the act of knowing does not solve the problem but constitutes it. The Kantian teaching that the mind is the law-giver to nature means, in the current idiom, that we can ask questions of nature only in a language with some definite structure.1 This predetermines the form of the answer but not its content. Nature might even reply, “None of the above,” thereby inaugurating a scientific revolution. Post-Kantian idealists took mind to be the source of the content of knowledge as well as of its form. If Marx stood Hegel on his head, the ideologues of the New Left put him and his subjectivism back on their feet. Nietzsche expounded pragmatism of sorts, directing attention to the human significance of the concept of truth. But “human” he construed in terms of a romantic individualism also characteristic of contemporary rationalizations of political action. “We can only take cognizance of a world which we ourselves have made,” Nietzsche paraphrases Kant, doing so, appropriately, in his Will to Power.2 Nietzsche knew well what it is to mistake oneself for God. A scarcely muted megalomania is much in evidence in modern politics. Nietzsche rightly emphasized the human element in observation, memorably condemning the naive empiricist view as “the dogma of immaculate perception.”3 What we see anywhere, not only in the political domain, is not a pure sensum to be interpreted subsequently. Seeing is the apprehension of an already meaningful datum; things are intelligible through the funded meanings embodied in them. Meanings may afterwards be modified as data are processed. Meanings do not necessarily make experience subjective; they make it cognitive. Subjectivity is the failing of meanings uncritically and inflexibly adhered to. In politics, armies and police, for instance, are still widely viewed as agents of repression; the extent to which they are protective or involved with crazies has not yet been absorbed into the funded meanings with which they are perceived. Interpretations, in a word, need not be projections. They may be well grounded in empirical data. Private worlds become a matter of public record with the disclosure of correspondence, diaries and tapes. Interpretations are the more objective the more comprehensive the set of data they can accommodate and the more coherent the accommodation. An interpretation may have predictive force. Where prediction is impossible because factors are too complex, too much out of control, or because the required observations are too subtle or too inaccessible, an interpretation might still be validated by the meaningfulness of the pattern of explanation it provides.
