ABSTRACT
How do we reconstruct our world so that it not only meets people’s needs, but also creates new wants and needs? This chapter addresses the necessity of challenging the authoritarianism of not only Western epistemology but all epistemology as part of the process of both local and global social transformation. Well aware that there are many ways of knowing other than those of the West, the argument will be made that being guided (consciously and unconsciously) by a paradigm so that we can and must know what is, what to do, who we are, how we feel, what is real, and what is true puts constraints on people’s ability to imagine and create a new world. The human desire to know and our concomitant capacity to authoritarianly commodify ourselves is in constant struggle with the human desire and capacity to exercise power without commodification, i.e., freely.
Put another way, we all live in the dialectic history/society and yet in the current super-alienated and super-commodified world, few people experience their world-historicalness. They experience only their societal location temporally, spatially, culturally, etc. The social-cultural identities we are given and that we ourselves create are one version of the many ways there are to be alienated, commodified, separated, and objectified. Our historical identity is as revolutionaries, that is, as social, cultural, historical creators of something new out of what exists. This chapter raises the question, “Has knowledge reached its limits for the human race?,” and offers a non-epistemological way forward, known as performed, practical-critical activity, that can bring out of hiding our historical identity as revolutionaries.
