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Transcendent Philosophy 1, 47-116 © London Academy of Iranian Studies

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

David Kuhrt, [email protected]

Abstract Normative discourse between people is possible only because the

existence of the world to which each party refers is assumed to be

self-evident. But although this self-evident reality is also the

substance of all traditional knowledge about that reality, and

about the location of the human within it, and although in thenormative occidental discourse of everyday life the world

continues to exist self-evidently (if not, everyday life wouldcollapse), purely theoretical accounts of reality derived from the

empirical sciences have prejudiced normative common sense

perceptions of the world to the degree that word and world are

scarcely joined. Institutions of state capitalise on this disjunction between thought and reality because the resulting loss of common

sense knowledge in the community accords priority to the

specialised narratives of professionals, within institutions, who

are assumed by the man in the street to know best. This process,

whereby the state suppresses the narrative of common sense

reality, is founded on an epistemological error about the nature ofintelligence. Intelligence is assumed to be the property (literally,

the possession of) individuals, whereas an understanding of the

cognitive event, in which representations of the world arise asthoughts, shows that thought (and therefore 'intelligence') is the

product of a conformity between the innate structures which

permit perception and subjective consciousness and the objective

structure of logos which once shaped and now formatively

sustains the created world. That is, the intelligence is given in the

structure of the world and mirrored in the cognitive acts of

individuals because evolution has predisposed them, subject to

their degree of self knowledge, to apprehend it.. Because



48 David Kuhrt

common sense perception of foundational problems in the

conduct of nation states is marginalised, contemporary crises in

occidental societies, are not resolved or confronted but

compounded. No resolution of this problem is therefore possible

without a revision of the epistemological preconception on which

it depends. The premises of the epistemological argument which

supports this analysis are supported in a concluding Appendixwhich symbolically represents the objective (given) relations

between knower and known in the movement of Being towards

existence. Within that framework we experience the logos which

determines the human as the narrator of an evolutionary process

which has become conscious.

Our knowing subject is not only the final link. It also holds the whole

chain together. It is the bearer of the whole development, and

materialism is thus an absurd attempt to deduce that which does the

representing from its own representation.1

Vladimir Soloviev

IntroductionIn informal conversation we hear it said that “the reality” is

known to this or that person “in his heart of hearts.” Yet, as far as

knowledge is concerned the general consensus on knowledge in

societies whose culture we call modernist, is, in the first instance

cited, that reality is not something we may legitimately claim to

know; and in the second instance, that knowing with the heart is a

meaningless figure of speech, since cognition takes place in the brain.

The fact that something exists as a matter of consensus in ordinary

discourse to explain, in pragmatic terms, the usage which gives

meaning to both “the reality” in which existence and events occur,

and to “the heart” as an instrument of knowledge about that reality,

does not breech the wall of prejudice behind which those with

professional claims to knowledge continue to elaborate rational

constructions demarcating theory from common sense and modernist

societies from the collective resources of knowledge in human history



The Social Construction of Reality 49

on which others still profitably draw, even as the crises of modernism

become increasingly apparent.

That, due to those same prejudices, the causes of crisis are not

apparent in reality, concerns that discipline of philosophy called

epistemology, which examines the problem of knowledge. As our preliminary remarks imply, this is not a purely theoretical problem, or

there could be no disjuncture of the kind implied between notions of

knowledge and reality in ordinary linguistic usage and those current

in the language of the élite we judge professionally competent to deal

with such issues; which we do in spite of the fact that opinion in that

sector on every subject, whether of the nature of the human, the

causes and remedies of social unrest, or of the reality itself of which

they are part, is no less conflicting than the opinion of a supposedly

inexpert majority on the same topics.

The complexity of the reality is thus evident in that objects

(including the objects of informal discussion and of scientific

enquiry) appear to have an indeterminate existence which depends on

their different appearance for each observer. In both informal

discussion and in scientific enquiry, indeterminacy can be removed to

establish generally agreed principles only by shrinking, or by limiting

a priori, the context of the reality in which the objects are comprised.

The notion that the reality in which objects are comprised can never

be directly addressed is the main premise on which the methodology

of science has hitherto depended in attempting to circumvent the

problem of subjectivity. In consequence, defined objects and theregularity of their phenomenal appearance, are taken to be more real

than the reality of which they are part. That reality, however, in

which even scientific discourse must take place, includes subject

thinkers who argue, presupposed objects of discussion, and the

antecedent history of human knowledge in time and space which

determine the viewpoint, circumstance and outcome of discussion.



50 David Kuhrt

In practice, neither this context, nor objects of discussion,

could in reality, be indeterminate or fluid and infinitely variable, for

no stable continuum could then exist of the kind which presupposes

the existence of the world and of ourselves within it as a transcendent

and referential context. In other words, it is against this primary

intuition of an existing world that, in practise, we validate or disproveour experimental notions of reality. The existence of this common

sense world in reality provides the stable continuum to which all

argument refers; to this reality, even the most radical sceptic defers in

his practical conduct of everyday life.

It follows that if the reality, the being in and for itself of the

world we ordinarily suppose, were an object of direct perception

which could be quantified, nothing would need to be argued and

language could not exist. Neither could that being we call human

have evolved. Both existence in reality, and thought about it,

therefore presuppose, and are presupposed by our limited sentient

perception of an existence which necessitates language, the

instrument by which the reality, as far as knowledge is concerned,

becomes subject, in existence, to consensual agreement.

In ordinary discourse we call that presupposed existence,

nature; an existence which subsumes our own and all other

existences, the reality of which is only partly conscious. That part

consciousness is contingent on the being of the whole which is inter-

related, so that intellectual or rational knowledge is physically

determined by standpoint, including the predisposition we call personal. Fluidity and variability in the appearance of reality is

therefore the attribute of the uncertain relations of human cognition

with time and space in a created world whose form must be

objectively stable. The indeterminate is not an objective attribute of

reality but of our relations with it.




The nature of the relation between human cognition and its

perceived objects is thus the kernel of the problem of knowledge. In

this essay we therefore examine the social relations in society which

determine the product of knowledge. If rational presupposition limits

the imagination on which even acts of rational knowledge depend,

knowledge increases in inverse proposition to any ability to apply itin practise. For we maintain that the activity expressed in the

grammar and syntax of language, articulates an objective intelligence

within the created order to which It refers, but which is reduced and

limited in its referential scope as far as knowledge is concerned by the

rational constructs of intellect. Then, acknowledgement of the

primary intuition of existence in reality from which language emerges

to define that reality is deferred, pending a so-called empirical

corroboration by scientific methods.

On the contrary, we maintain that even a scientific proposition

makes sense only if and because the existence of the world we

ordinarily suppose is already predicated in the linguistic form of the

proposition. The grammar and syntax of language necessarily refers

to a stable structure which is a continuum in human experience; it

does so because that structure is given in cognition by the same

formal presence of Being which is expressed throughout time in the

evolution of the creation; this Being is articulated in the human in

consequence of that evolution. Our essay therefore concludes with a

description of the structural relations between Being and existence

which articulate the human within the creation so that the thinking

activity which imagines it first, before rational analysis, joins andcoheres what otherwise appears to intellect in a fragmented and

arbitrary form.

We shall validate this conclusion by showing that the primary

elements which order the appearance of the world and of ourselves

within it are time, space, form and movement. These elements inform

both the grammar and syntax of the language in which we express our



52 David Kuhrt

perception of the world and our being within it. These primary

elements are then constituent parts of that Being from which the

creation in time, in which the human evolves to articulate it, proceeds,

through the obscurity we call material, towards light. For light is, in

fact, present both in matter and in the cognitive activity of our

thought.

The reality we ordinarily supposeThe reality we ordinarily suppose is predicated, but not

expressly stated, throughout the grammatical structure of a discourse

which is specific only about parts of reality. In reality, things or

events are understood in a given relation, a relation which is assumed

because a greater, contextual reality is known by experience to inform

it. For example, the syntax and grammar in which a farmer expresses

himself about weather conditions when he feels like passing the time

of day with a neighbour, assumes the existence of the greater reality

within which both their lives are conducted. The reality of the world

they ordinarily suppose does not need to be argued on positivist lines

in order to validate the empirical verities which enable their

communication about the normative activity of farmers; each knows

from experience that every sub-set of facts assumed in their discourse

has been previously encountered in the unitary experience of a reality

which makes all knowledge relational. The meaning of a remark that

there will be a radical change of weather in a day or two is given,

among other things, by the mutual understanding of plant and animal

responses to atmospheric changes which are common experience;thus the knowledge which falls (from the point of view of

professionalism) into the limited remit of the meteorologist, the

biochemist or the molecular biologist (while the vet takes care of sick

animals) is necessarily assumed; the vet himself is entitled to practise

(and to speak shorthand with both farmers on the basis of commonly

assumed knowledge) without reference to nutrition experts or




astronomers, even if the focus of discussion is breeding on which

such expertise may impinge.

In conversation, all three will suspend the theoretical problem

of knowledge because the common interest in stock-breeding crosses

the specialist boundaries. Moreover, it is informed by a tradition ofexperience which is pragmatic: each employs short-hand syntactical

limits in expressing himself which assume more relevant knowledge

than is given in separate specialist discourse, and this common

knowledge predicates a reality which is understood by all three.

The common sense knowledge we oppose to the claims of

scientific knowledge, is therefore not only the consequence of

observation: it is also instinctual in that it issues from the radical

desire of a species to survive in an unalterable form given by nature;

an instinctual knowledge, moreover, which is necessarily intelligent,

and whose formative structure (discussed below), necessarily

antedates the appearance of the human; for we maintain here that this

intelligent structure, which is present also in the human cognitive

apparatus, determined the emergent life-forms on whose development

the evolution of the human was, paradoxically, based.

The paradox, in this retrospective (teleological) sense, is that

while the human form evolved its antecedent morphology, and before

it emerged with that self-conscious capacity for reflective thought and

language which equips it to describe and know that reality, it did not

(could not) think. This formulation only seems absurd to the modernmind because we have forgotten that the perception of chronological

time is contingent on a form of cognition separating a reality which is

a continuum into intellect components. In non-human reality, the

before and after of evolution do not exist, so that the logic or form of

the creation which, in the experience of existence, evolved towards an

optimal expression in the human, was present throughout time as pre-

disposition and cause. Now that this form, on which self-



54 David Kuhrt

consciousness depends, has been established in existence, we are

entitled to suppose that the public reaction to genetic science

programmes manifests a normative instinct for self-preservation

which is intelligent. This instinct, however, is not selfish, for Being

contemplates its own existence as subject in a network of contingent

existences. Thus the reality we ordinarily suppose depends not onlyon personal survival but the survival of all other beings whose

existence we recognise consciously by virtue only of the human form.

Although as individuals we do not manage to live as

exemplary forms of the human, the exemplary form is instinctually

present, and from this half-conscious knowledge the taboos, customs

and moral codes which preserve and differentiate societies issue.

Naturally therefore, the production of all kinds of knowing, without

exception, is determined not only by objectively existing phenomena

but by a partial selection of phenomena which suits the intention of

the practitioner. The so-called “scientific method” of obtaining

knowledge may be more rigorously controlled, but it does not differ

in principle, or categorically, from the pragmatism demonstrated in

the acquisition of knowledge about reality by non-specialists. It has

been a consensus of non-specialists, and not the scientific community,

which drew public attention to the fact that neither the wind, nor

insects and birds which carry seeds, will respect a Ministry of

Agriculture ruling on the distances over which seed is carried to cause

cross-pollination between genetically modified and other crops. All

normally intelligent people know that such a ruling is nonsense

according to common sense, yet that knowledge has no institutionalmeans of representation which will affect policy before it comes into

effect.

Let us suppose therefore, as far as the problem of knowledge

is concerned, that all normally intelligent people know that the world

exists, and that argument to the contrary cannot adduce positive

evidence: the terms employed to disprove existence must presuppose




it in reality. Such argument does no more than expose ontological

doubt (which is a personal problem) in the speaker about himself and

his relations with the linguistic community of others who, like

himself, address every eventuality which confronts them in practical

experience as if the existence of the world and themselves within it is

given. They know this because every previous act of pragmatism produced results which confirmed that conviction, even if it did not

confirm the wisdom of their intention or if the action proved

misguided.

They also know that the personal identity from which both

wise and misguided action issues is not given but plastic and evolving

in relation to the unknowable whole they loosely call “life”, from

which the objective reality of the world issues towards them. This

unknowable whole includes the tentative actions of others for whom

the mystery of life and their role in it is also seen “as through a glass

darkly”, and in the course of a personal evolution towards the

completion of knowing in which “I know even as I am known”.

Further, though the apprehension may not be clear, in passing through

the flux of events which I witness, there is, in normative experience

(though it may be obscured in the pathological condition by which we

accommodate to what is called “stress” in urban societies), an

intuition that the foundation of being on which ones own existence

and all others depends, is sustained by an objective intelligence. That

something of this sort inheres in the creation in spite of human

ignorance is, after all, also the theoretical premise of reductionist

argument in the field of molecular biology. The notion that geneticmechanisms which transmit biological forms constitute a river of

information “Out of Eden” presupposes that the mechanism is

intelligent, even if, prior to the advent of our species, that intelligence

had no human agent. Cognitive acts by human beings do not produce

intelligence, they manifest it (or not) depending on a quality not given

by the intellect: that is, a degree of elasticity in the psychic make-up

of the individual enabling him, in the moment of cognition, to bracket



56 David Kuhrt

presupposition and conform himself mentally to the objective

phenomena, to conceptualise it, and act accordingly. If his concept

manifests intelligence, we attribute that to the reality thus perceived,

and not to a personal intellect which distinguishes one brain from

another, for the existence of which there is no evidence whatever.

The elastic faculty we have called psychic, which is confused withintellect, is the individualised existence we call, in ordinary discourse,

the soul. The objective intelligence is neither in “the intellect” (where

is it, by the way?), nor in the soul, but in the creation. Thus far we

agree with the reductionists. However, since their theories fail to

account for the autonomous presence in human cognition of the

intelligence they ascribe to the objective being of nature, except as

hereditarily or environmentally determined brain functions, they

cannot escape the absurd conclusion that, as authors of their own

theoretical perspectives, they do not exist. The option of elective

non-existence is therefore a pre-condition of that precarious

autonomy in the creation which distinguishes the human from an

original – and still present – reservoir of non-being in the material

firmament from which Being emanates in Time.

Meanwhile in the reality we ordinarily suppose, we should

know that other communities elsewhere still enshrine in their oral

traditions, and in the ritual practises of received wisdom which

inform the fabric of daily life (and are therefore not “religious” in the

western sense of that word), concepts which enable them to grasp the

nature of Being which is and was active in the creation, and whose

intelligence both upholds the structure of the evident world andinforms the dimension of the human within it.

From such traditions we learn that no human being is one-

dimensional, even if he inhabits a materialist monoculture which

targets bodily needs as if no other dimension existed, and which turns

his interior substance into entertainment which passes as culture.

Both the former and the latter targets signify the human function as a




consumer whose reliable conformism will generate a gross national

product on which the institutions of society and nation state may

depend to survive.

The function of individuals in that one dimensional scheme is

seriously in conflict with both personal satisfaction and the nature ofthe reality each ordinarily calls “the world”. In this moment of crisis,

the news that the normative order to which one’s own society once

subscribed has been sustained by others elsewhere will not reach the

headlines, especially when it concerns a whole continent, its human

and material resources, which has been systematically exploited

during four centuries to support development and progress in the

West.

Speaking of the tradition handed down by the griot-shaman in

the linguistic community of the Peule people in Africa (who are

dispersed throughout a territory which extends from Guinea to East

Africa), Amadou Hampaté Bâ explains that:

The notion of a person is thus highly complex. An interior

multiplicity is implied of concentric or superimposed levels of

existence (physical, psychic and spiritual on different planes), which

is therefore an un-interrupted dynamic.

The existence which starts at conception is preceded by a

cosmic pre-existence in which the human being belongs to the realm

of harmony and love, termed Benke-so [in the Peule language].

The birth of a child is considered the palpable evidence that an

anonymous constellation, a part of existence, has detached itself and

incarnated in order to accomplish a mission of some sort on our earth.

Particular importance is attached to the ceremony of baptism when

the “togo”, or forename, is given to the infant … He has been situated

within the whole community.



58 David Kuhrt

… At no time is the human being ever considered as a

separate entity, limited to a physical body, but as a complex being,

inhabited by a multiplicity in permanent evolution or movement. In

no sense is this being static or complete.

The human being, like a plant seed , is evolving from an initial

capital which is his own potential . This will develop throughout the

ascendant phase of his life, as a function of place and encountered

circumstance. The forces released by that potential are in perpetual

movement , as is the cosmos itself.

Maa-Ngala (the Lord God) is self-created … the name Maa

being given to the human; that is, the first word designating his own

divine name.

As a vessel of Maa, the being of all-in-one, Maa-Ngala

conceived a specific body, vertical and symmetrical, capable of

receiving a distillation of all other existences. This body, called Fari,

represents a sanctuary in which the whole of existence finds itself

circumscribed …

… The soul of man is thus a complex unity. Like a vast

ocean, his known dimensions are as nothing compared to the

profound unknown.

… The great drama of humanity derives from his being situated at the nexus of forces in permanent movement which appear

contradictory, which only an evolution accomplished on the path to

initiation will permit him to resolve during the phases of his life.

… According to the measure that he integrates his true nature

(that of the primordial Maa), the human being becomes, within the




creation, as an axis, one who is called on to preserve the exterior

multiplicity [of existences] from falling into chaos.2

From Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s account of the Peule people’s

knowledge traditions, we learn that the cosmos stands in a timeless

and dependable relation with the individual human being whoseexistence emerges from that greater context in spatio-temporal

circumstances which permit his development as a consenting agent of

a benign order; a cosmology which does not differ from the essentials

of knowledge traditions in Europe which modernity has displaced.

The knowledge that we have of the world and of ourselves in ordinary

experience, leads us instinctively to suppose that though we may be

physically limited to place and time, the reality of our being is

extensive through time and space, as it is indeed in memory and in the

experience of other beings physically elsewhere as immanent in

consciousness. Thus we may suppose that the ascription of the term

“modernity” to describe the particular set of cultural assumptions

which now characterise so many contemporary societies is not

accidental: “modernity” is the expression best suited to an ideology

of the human which limits being to a continuous present. From its

dominating parameters we escape in fantasy, and within them

(paradoxically, because the imagination seeks to combine, not reduce)

the exercise of the imagination leads, under conditions of modernity

which oppose and limit it, either to a painful isolation or to

intransigent fundamentalism. It does so because the imagination of

the human itself (of which the Peule tradition speaks so eloquently)

has been reduced to suit the profitable perspective of materialism.This contradicts the reality we ordinarily suppose until, in the

conversation with others which generates the vernacular and

determines the notion of reality which will characterise our epoch in

posterity, we deny or hardly dare admit its existence. We also fail to

deny the intellectual constructions which subvert it.



60 David Kuhrt

The separation of instrumental and consensual realitiesIn confronting those cultural norms of western societies which

we are used to calling modernity at the turning point of the

millennium, no-one can overlook the fact that though “modernity”

may have seen an explosion of knowledge, there seems to be a

decrease in the ability of social institutions to apply it in the interestsof the common good. This development is compounded by the fact

that a consensus of intellectuals, commentators and scholars has

subscribed to the now prevailing notion in western societies that no

common good can meaningfully exist on the grounds that, being by

definition universally true, ‘the good’ cannot, in any meaningful

sense, be known and determined in particular cases, ‘the good’ being

always a matter of expedient settlement between opposite interests

and not a prescriptive universal from which justice can be adduced in

particular instances. The notion of the wise man or the elders in a

community to whom, as repositories of tradition and collective

experience, the commons might appeal, has therefore no foundation

in western judicial procedures, so that the burden of judgement is

carried by bureaucratic legislative procedures of ever-increasing

complexity. Yet it is clear from an understanding of science that

known laws defining the regularity of phenomena do not apply

themselves, and that therefore a selective judgement is required in

formulating the relational contexts within which ‘the good’ exists and

within which such laws may or may not apply, so that a priori, all

scientific laws are, as universals, not more meaningfully or

universally valid than abstract notions of the Good.

This epistemological impasse now also applies to all general

concepts of formal being which might be supposed (which once

generally were in Christendom and still are in Islamic thought) to

inform and explain our perception of specific existences in a real

world. Fortunately, in common sense ordinary discourse, this world

is nevertheless assumed to exist, notwithstanding the theoretical

objections of scepticism. In order to understand how such a conflict




between positive and instinctual knowledge arises, it is necessary to

recognise that linguistic forms are the vehicle for the expression of

both, and to examine the issue of whether language is a self-enclosed

system of representation whose relationship with reality is therefore

arbitrary, or whether there are structural forms in linguistic usage

which necessarily predispose cognitive habits towards a reality whichunifies word and world.

In an essay on the failure of mechanistic explanations of mind

to account for the creative enrichment by language of the reality

mediated in sense perception, Noam Chomsky proceeds from

Déscartes’ description of language as “a specific human ability,

independent of intelligence”, to outline the notion of a “deep

structure” in the thinking substance, which generates language, a

structure whose grammatical forms necessarily answer the evident

formal structures of existence in the real world. “Mind”, conceived

as a passive instrument which records sensory stimuli, could not

generate language; it could not, merely by replicating sensory in-puts,

either combine these to correspond with the complex reality

denominated by language, nor elaborate on it creatively.

In the course of his discussion, Chomsky adds this footnote:

The idea that the “cognitive power” is properly called “mind”

only when it is in some sense creative has earlier origins. One source

that might have been familiar to Déscartes is Juan Huarte’s Examen

de Ingenios (1575), which was widely translated and circulated (Iquote from the English translation by Bellamy, 1698). Huarte

understands the word Ingenio to have the root meaning “engender”,

“generate” … Thus “one may discover two generative Powers in

Man, one common with the Beasts and Plants, and the other

Participating of Spiritual Substances, God and the Angels.”3



62 David Kuhrt

which is the difference, in our ontology, between rational

intellect and that knowing with the heart whose object (the logos)

comprises word and world within one order of which the human is the

articulate agent.

In closing, Chomsky says of his subject (the “renewal of thestudy of universal formal conditions on the system of linguistic

rules”) that it now becomes possible “to take up once again the search

for deeper explanations for the phenomena.” In this vein our

discussion on the production of knowledge will proceed from

observing the contradictions (which we have already noted) between

expressions of knowledge in the community which are instinctual or

common sense and those instrumental forms of knowledge which are

the production of institutions and civil powers. We shall do so by

examining the concepts of knowledge presupposed in both cases, and

concluding with an outline structural description of the reality

explored by language. We shall then represent the concept logos as

the being-in-us of the reality we ordinarily call “the world”. We also

say that this being structures language, because whatever informs the

structure of a creation which has evolved in space-time also informs

the language which denominates it. In other words, we are obliged to

recognise that whatever is known about the structure of that creation

can only be known by the being-within-it which articulates such

knowledge. Therefore the parameters of the language in which it is

formulated are necessarily determined by the structural intelligence

which is manifest in that creation; for if we cannot have recourse to

this certitude, all description is endlessly arbitrary. On the contrary,in the reality we ordinarily suppose, we can, in consequence of

antecedent experience, depend on the reliability of our utterance and

the expectations which shape them, as referring to that field of

phenomena we call “the world”, knowing that it exists consensually

for others and is not a figment of the subjective imagination which

needs experimental proof in advance of the unpremeditated actions

we normally undertake on the basis of prior and experientially based




knowledge. This normative conjunction of unpremeditated

experience and the reality we ordinarily suppose, is necessarily

explained by a structural correspondence between intuitive thinking

and the objective facts of an evolving creation. For this reason, we

are calling this objective structure which is common between two

bifurcated spheres of a unitary existence (ie between the subjectivelyhuman and the objectively inhuman creation): logos, meaning the

denominator. That is, the active creative principle which expresses in

space-time the enduring structural intelligence to which the creative

evolution of space-time in the material world answers.

We represent this concept (logos) as the justification for

asserting another: that the intuitive or instinctual apprehension of the

reality, which is experientially known to be common, is given by the

logos in the human organism. It is therefore the foundation of the

reality of which each existence is part, but of which conscious

knowledge perceives only part due to the condition of the individual

will and ego. The ego circumscribes that being-in-us with subjective

self-interest. It may also, however, choose to subordinate self-interest

to a longer term in which the interests of self and other are

reciprocally and consensually determined.

For the time being, the corporate interests of policy-makers

and institutions in nominally democratic societies are the collective

expressions of minority self-interest whose vehicles are lobbying

procedures circumlocuting (or short-circuiting) the nominally

democratic process. Against this the scepticism of ordinary commonsense and its hidden discourse seldom prevails because it has no

institutional (that is, political) means of expression. This problem has

been thoroughly analysed by Pierre Bordieu: “ … at least outside

periods of crisis, the production of politically effective and legitimate

forms of perception and expression is the monopoly of professionals,

and is thus subjected to the constraints and limitations in the

functioning of the political field … the paradigmatic example of this



64 David Kuhrt

… is the competitive academic examination (concours): between the

last person to pass and the first person to fail, the competitive

examination creates differences of all or nothing that can last a

lifetime.”4

The effects of competition in the production and judgement ofknowledge have recently been illustrated in the United Kingdom in an

admission by the Lord Chancellor's department that allocation of key

posts in the legislature, such as Queen's Counsel, are, and have been,

effected not by ballot but by “secret soundings” among barristers and

judges; those consulted would, of course, be those whose conduct of

cases best suits the interests of the establishment.5 This circumstance

(the professionalisation of knowledge) is the cause of the tension we

have already seen exists in contemporary urban cultures between two

distinct kinds of knowledge whose realities do not match: one

informing ordinary discourse across professional and class boundaries

on important subjects of public and private concern, on which the

mediated pronouncements of specialists, scholars, politicians and

lobbyists have a determining influence; the other being the province

of public policy and corporate interest and investment, which together

engineer social progress to achieve what is called ‘growth’ (of which

‘modernity’ is the cultural product). The Gross National Product is

created by an inertia towards restructuring, re-building, re-educating,

re-defining, so that profit is created by making existing norms (and

products) redundant.

This process attacks the sources of instinctual knowledgewhich govern the ability of the human being to read and interpret the

data impinging on him from the environing world so as to make sense

of it, for when ordinary common sense is contradicted by public

policy and specialist claims to knowledge which disguise self-

interest, then the capacity for instinctual knowledge atrophies: the

will to believe in oneself withers. In consequence, individuals lose

their sense of identity, invent spurious personas, emulate super-stars




and celebrities as role-models, or create a compensating notoriety in

anti-social acts of violence; normative conduct and normative

knowledge is forever called in question in the interests of more

progress and the profit derived from it.

Conflicts between intuitive, ordinary acts of knowledge andinstitutional positivism therefore presuppose an extension of

knowledge about the contextual reality in which such contradictions

are resolved. Acts of knowledge and matters of fact are true or false

in contexts limited by the expectations and intent of a proposition.

Hence leukaemia in infants near the nuclear processing plant at

Sellafield is said not to be caused by radiation levels from that

establishment because the statistical incidence of cases, measured

against national averages, does not match any measured increase in

radiation which is sufficiently higher than levels of so-called natural

radiation to justify the assertion. However, the hidden preconceptions

which govern this conclusion are themselves not scientifically

proven: a safe threshold of radiation has been assumed on the basis

of safe and unsafe quantitative levels of radiation for which there is

no proof. The absence of proof is then taken by scientists to deny the

claim that a causal relation exists in spite of the fact that the human

organism is so delicately balanced between health and illness that a

body temperature increase of only 0.3 degrees may signify a serious

illness. Crucial consequences for the product of scientific knowledge

are therefore contingent on prior assumptions about the nature of

reality, human and not human.

It is evident then, that institutional science does not

acknowledge the existence of any structural foundation in thinking

which is given by, and corresponds to, the structure of an objective

reality which it predicates; instead the latter is presupposed to consist

of experimentally verified ‘facts’, even though the definition of facts

necessarily depends on unverified preconceptions about reality. The

structural foundation of thinking requires the notion of the being of



66 David Kuhrt

those structures in the reality and within the phenomena, in order to

penetrate the nature of the epistemological prejudice thrust upon us

by the proponents of modernity. According to this prejudice,

although we experience ourselves as being , the phenomena we

represent and contemplate are not being but material aggregates, in

which case there is no reality: what is, and has being, inheres in andinforms matter, but the notion of being is a pure abstraction when

removed from the existence it supports in space-time. As Soloviev

observes (in our opening citation): we cannot “deduce that which

does the representing from its own representation.” The

entrenchment of scientific prejudice against this evident fact is

nowhere more evident than in the prevailing theoretical premises of

the biological sciences.

Whether we are speaking of the natural environment in which

our food is produced (including crops and livestock) or of the

environment of the body, the main opposition to the notion that

genetic mechanisms determine life-forms finds expression less in

theoretical debate than in public opposition to the application of

derived technologies; that is, we see clearly that though social

institutions and the production of knowledge within professionalised

compartments isolate theoretical debate about knowledge from the

reality which it is à propos, and although it may seem beyond public

competence to arbitrate between conflicting theoretical viewpoints

(indeed, both professional interests and the state which thrives on

them insist that this is so), public reactions to the consequences of

applied theoretical knowledge are cannily à propos and intelligentlydirected, in spite of presumed academic ignorance, at the reality. We

may claim therefore that this reality, predicated secretly in the

abstruse jargon of theoreticians and their dependent executives, who

would implement technologies which promise increased productivity

and profit as if there were no theoretical debate, is instinctively

known by the community on whom the effects of inconclusive debate

about its nature will impinge, so that the reaction, à propos the




reality, is not arbitrary at all, but follows logically from hidden

premises constraining theory towards a definition of a reality which

unifies word and world coherently. Since instituted knowledge

militates against the emergence of that consensual knowledge which

optimally represents reality (and does so because the political norms

of representation we call ‘democratic’ are in practise inequitable),theoretical viewpoints which would support public misgivings are

aired far less frequently in the press than the views of scientists who

believe that genetic explanations for life forms are sufficient.

Furthermore the same scientists argue that philosophical debate about

the evidence is invalid, in any case, on logical grounds: genetic

knowledge (it is alleged) shows thinking itself, and consciousness, to

be the product of brain chemistry. Since the latter can also be

genetically explained, theory (and philosophy) must defer to

conclusions which are given by the phenomena themselves in

controlled experiment. The fact that “the phenomena themselves”

have, in reality, no voice but that of the scientist who proposes their

existence, escapes these theoreticians; they are not the philosophers

their claims imply, for without the subjective experience of being

which informs the phenomena in our thinking “the phenomena” could

not be perceived; with regard to knowledge, they can be known only

in cognitive acts by thinking subjects.

In consequence, as far as dissenting theoretical viewpoints are

concerned, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake is now more widely read

among those for whom publishers cater under the rubric ‘mind-body-

spirit’ than among those professionals who read scientific literature.Yet Sheldrake’s work is the continuation of work done on life forms

by a community of scientists and researchers which is supported by,

for example, a collaboration in the 60s and 70s between the biologist

C H Waddington and topologist R Thom6. From this work it is clear

that if biological forms endure through time, neither the behaviour of

discrete molecular entities nor encrypted genetic coding explains the

endurance; for duration, as Bachelard marvellously explains, cannot



68 David Kuhrt

inhere in a succession of separate instants: it is the will in our

thinking activity which discovers (or recovers) the unity of being

which cannot inhere either in a succession of separate instants nor in

the molecular substratum of physical reality. It does so, according to

Bachelard, because the enduring forms of our thought world are given

“in the grammar, in the morphology as well as in the syntax”;7 for, aswe have observed, both the sentient created world and our

corresponding thought world are informed by this logos. In the

activity of thinking, we literally correspond with the reality of which

we are part, and in a dialectic which gives the root Latin meaning of

conscience: con- (with) science (scientia, knowledge) knowing with.

If therefore the existence of normative biological forms in

evolution has no material explanation, then structural phenomena

must exist to inform them which are atemporal and immaterial, and

which explain endurance, for the material constituents of all life

forms are continuously in flux, so that they would otherwise be

imperceptible.8

If it is precisely those people who have no pre-conceived

prejudices about the nature of reality who provide Rupert Sheldrake’s

popular audience, it is because they are disposed to recognise that true

knowledge cannot be contrary to normative intuitions derived from

ordinary experience, for whatever the mediated consensus on

knowledge may be, and however it may depend on the experimental

evidence of professional expertise, the instinctual knowledge which it

invalidates is also gained empirically in the course of an experiencewhich is conducted pragmatically (of the kind which takes place

between farmers and vets).

Knowledge of this kind is communal; it is not the product of

arbitrary individual guess-work but the product of experience

accumulated and transmitted over generations. This reservoir of

memory has been objectified and stands in accord regarding the




essential ontology of the creation and of the human, across all

cultures and throughout time. In relation to the resources of this

reservoir, the products of the individual imagination have the same

knowledge status as do the experimental conclusions of scientists

whose fantasies have generated monstrous technologies in the name

of progress, for their methodological premises are necessarily limitedto exclude any reference to the nature of the human and the meaning

and the ontology of the creation. Their conclusions therefore, also

necessarily, are neutral with regard to all knowledge of those three

factors because all positive proofs apply only within limits imposed

on the field of phenomena by experimental conditions whose

premises exclude such knowledge. It cannot therefore be the business

only of scientists to make judgements about the relevance and

application of such limited knowledge which will have important

social and political consequences. Only within the framework of a

democratic consensus which is independent of economic and political

influence can judgements be made about knowledge and reality

which, for better of worse, will determine the social future. The

social and political crises of modern and post-modern societies are, as

proofs of the failure of positivism, proofs of exactly the same order as

those which Bacon offered against what he presumed to be the

obscurantism of the religious knowledge which prevailed during the

Middle Ages whose thinking had failed to keep pace with reality.

The turning point or revelation which confronts our age is that

the instinctual or common knowledge of the kind which still prevailed

in Europe prior to the Renaissance and the New Knowledge of thenatural sciences, which we have been pleased to call ‘empirical’ (of

the kind which dominates our age), evidently do not stand in

contradiction: there is but one reality in which their respective

cognitive norms are joined. That they continue to stand in

contradiction is a consequence of the fact that, due to the political

structures of nominally democratic societies, the product of scientific

knowledge is appropriated by the state in the interests of what its



70 David Kuhrt

institutions deem to be the common good: “I am labouring”, Bacon

said, “to lay the foundation not of a sect or doctrine, but of human

utility and power.”9 He did so in the belief that the resources of the

ill-educated commons were too feeble to deserve any franchise in the

exercise of power. He did so, moreover, believing that by virtue of

those privileged to acquire power as the natural consequence ofsuperior knowledge, the state would necessarily benefit all. It would

exercise a power delegated to it by the powerful, who were

necessarily the instruments of the New Knowledge as he had defined

it. For this reason, in spite of the privilege of political

enfranchisement which is ours in democratic societies today, the

relationship between the production of knowledge as Bacon defined it

and power has scarcely been modified. The professionalisation of

knowledge has simply overseen the transfer of its prerogatives from

the privileged institutions of the medieval world to those of the

modern state.

By contrast, in Muslim and African traditional societies, the

role of the umma and the madrasa, the griot-shaman and village

assembly in transmitting received knowledge, has permitted (and

permits) the rehearsal of established traditions and expressions of

common knowledge in public spaces where dissent, the departures

from accepted norms of the gifted and the marginal, can be

assimilated to the consensus. Discussing knowledge and social

practice in Mediaeval Damascus, Michael Chamberlain notes that:

“Although the a’yan [civilised élites, who “had little of the ‘natural’

taste and ‘good breeding’ of hereditary aristocracies, nor the ideologyof bureaucrats and professional associations”] often punished

severely transgressions of their control over ‘ilm [knowledge] and the

adab [exemplary comportment] associated with it, a group of

marginal holy men known as the muwallahin lampooned their

dominance with impunity.” Further, in this society, neither could

“Law, institutions, even knowledge itself … be thought of as formal

domains … they did not possess the institutional means” (described




by Bordieu as cited above) “of limiting to a small number the socially

recognised capacity to articulate truth through degrees, certification,

or ordainment.” In such societies, a structural relation of divorce

between knowledge as power and the general intuition of common

knowledge in the community, did not and does not exist, even if the

exercise of political power (as in the case of medieval Muslimsocieties) is despotic: “throughout the period … , rulers never had the

knowledge, the agencies, and the independent coercive power to co-

ordinate and control the subordinate élites upon whom they depended

to rule.” Although it belonged to the mosque, the madrasa was a

meeting place “for the transmission of knowledge”. But “madrasas

did not create or train an institutional élite, still less a bureaucratic

one. They were not the means by which the state trained its cadres or

by which civilian élites transmitted social and cultural capital to their

descendants. Instead, to the civilian élite, madrasas represented …

spaces in which they interacted.”10

Knowledge formation in Islam and the institutionalisation of

knowledge in the West

We have distinguished between two kinds of knowledge

which, under certain politically determined circumstances, appear to

conflict: ordinary common sense knowledge and institutional

knowledge; the one related to the language of unpremeditated

ordinary discourse, the other to the language of professional expertise

and institutions. As we have seen, it is noteworthy that although

authority, in western societies, is allied almost exclusively with thelatter, in Muslim societies this has not been the case.

This has been due to two related factors: on the one hand to

the determining effect on philosophy and jurisprudence in the Islamic

world of the revelation of the Qur’an; and on the other to the role

played by the preservation of traditions about informal utterances of



72 David Kuhrt

the prophet, and by commentaries on them, which have been held by

scholars to clarify the sense of the Qur’anic Suras.

The importance of this on-going reappraisal and interpretation

is twofold: first, it cumulatively defines that body of knowledge

which, in Islam, is called ‘hadith’, and whose definitive state remainsopen to debate within a community of scholars agreed by the

community to be qualified. Secondly, the revelation of the Qur’an

was given by Mohammad at a moment in history when he judged the

communities of both Jews and Christians to have failed in their

testimony, so that his followers perceived Islam to be the continuation

of a single knowledge tradition which began with Abraham.

Furthermore, Mohammad’s revelation was given at a time when

traditions of knowledge which had remained in a certain sense stable

during the Roman Empire (due to the continued influence of Greek

philosophy), were being destabilised. Following the closure of the

school at Athens by Justinian in 529 AD, latent Neoplatonic,

Zoroastrian and Manichean undercurrents, and imported narratives

from India, exerted an increasing influence in a region which had so

recently seen radical political upheavals. Although Mohammad had

not been educated as a philosopher, his singular attribute is reputed to

have been the gift of inspired eloquence. As a merchant, he travelled

and is known to have consorted with sages, so that if the language of

the Qur’an is not that of intellectual philosophy, its discourse is

wholly informed by the substance of contemporary debate which

prevailed in the region. This substance included, of course, what

Mohammad perceived to be a common standpoint in both Judaismand Christianity with regard to their insistence on the moral

responsibility of man, according to the Covenant, for the husbandry

of the earth, and to make the unitary nature of the Godhead visible in

the fabric of society. This moral imperative – that sacred and secular

be unified - being precisely what, as it seemed to him, the practise of

contemporary Jews and Christians conspicuously lacked in a post-

Roman world of commercial self-interest, a world in which those




civic postures and customary assumptions on which Roman secular

power depended still prevailed: “For … men did bend the knee – if

not to the ancient gods, at least to other men, to the emperor and to

the powerful, for whom adoratio, full-blooded reverence, was

deemed an utterly appropriate gesture … The ancient collective

representation of the mundus gave to such people – to Christians asmuch as to pagans – imaginative room for manoeuvre. Its many

layers reconciled faith in the One, High God with dogged, indeed

reverential, concern for things of the saeculum ...”11

As we have seen above, in the 13th Century Arabian Middle

East, the process by which a consensus of knowledge and a dependent

social order was established in communities was not institutionalised

and remained informal. By contrast, “In the Latin West documents

were unmistakable proofs of privilege, exemption, competence,

precedent, honour or possession … nations, classes, corporations,

religious bodies, families, status groups, and factions fought out their

struggles with documents …” Above all, “The most sensitive studies

of the period have realised that formal entities, agencies, institutions

and groups did not determine social relations in the Middle East to the

extent that they did in the Latin West."12

The parallel development in Europe of institutions and trained

élites on whose production of knowledge the state depended,

contributed incrementally to the gradual erosion of traditions of

communal knowledge in western societies. It is difficult to appreciate

the scale of this transformation, its effects on political conduct, andthe degree to which this loss is conducive to social conformity in a

society professing the protection of individual liberties as its

foundation. However, keeping one’s eyes open, one may witness the

operating pressures which induce conformity and ensure that the

sectarian interests of the professions dominate, so that, in

consequence, communal knowledge scarcely thrives. A poster

currently advertising the services of a head-hunting employment



74 David Kuhrt

agency to commuters awaiting their trains shows the tail of a

tyrannosaurian trapped in a closing lift door, below which is the

legend: “Waiting for home time? You’re on your way out.

Evolution favours the professional.” The message is that

advancement depends on dedication to objectives which require the

suspension of any reflection about the nature of the reality determined by existing norms which presuppose purely instrumental goals for

individual existence. With regard to the alleged (by Francis Bacon

and the rationalists who pronounce in the same vein against religious

knowledge now) superstition of medieval beliefs, if, in consequence

of Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolved round the sun (a fact

which had been previously known to Indian astronomers for several

millennia), attempts had been made to persuade his contemporaries

that they did not see what they saw (the sun rising above the horizon

and appearing to revolve round the earth), there would have been a

conflict of knowledge of the kind now endemic in contemporary

urban cultures. Fortunately, the man in the street in Galileo’s time

was not on his way to the office or, rarely witnessing either sunrise or

sunset, he might also have been disenfranchised of the common sense

knowledge which puts Galileo’s discovery in its proper perspective.

For though we know that it does so, and no-one has actually seen the

earth revolving round the sun while standing on earth, only the blind

have not seen it roll up over the horizon, incontrovertibly circling the

earth in human experience.

The consequences for knowledge of industrial revolutionThe institutional changes in European societies which saw the

eclipse of common sense knowledge, proceeded slowly: the

opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to the New Knowledge of

natural philosophy succumbed by degrees to an accommodation with

the political power of the new nation states, whose institutions thrived

on the New Knowledge and its derived technologies at the expense of

the old, as if the natural discourse of ‘the old’ had belonged to another




planet; as if, in spite of Galileo (whose knowledge does not contradict

it) we did not stand on the earth witnessing the passage round it of the

sun; as if, with so much knowledge, we could not educate our

children to understand both viewpoints without contradiction so that

we lie to them about the status in reality of their subjective experience

before they begin to acquire knowledge.

The impact of this development and its contribution to

modernity cannot be underestimated: recalling how Francis Bacon’s

“The Advancement of Learning” pronounced that experimental

knowledge had superseded the “superstitious” knowledge of tradition,

we may be reminded that pharmaceutical companies are now

discovering, and capitalising on, the accuracy of pre-Renaissance

traditional knowledge of plant remedies in Europe; yet Francis

Bacon’s views prevailed until, and beyond, the Industrial Revolution.

As Vladimir Soloviev explains in his remarkably prophetic analysis –

written at the end of the nineteenth century – of the import of the

positivist philosophy of le Comte, Saussure et al, in the nineteenth

century, the nominal materialism of the preceding centuries took a

new turn towards what William James called the “stubborn and

irreducible facts” of empirical science; for objective processes in the

material world could no longer be represented as if the scientific and

philosophical propositions which entailed them had no foundation in

the thinking subject.13

The twentieth century discovery that the perception of matter

itself at indeterminate levels in particle physics, must answer to theviewpoint of the observer, nurtured the emergence of a new tendency

in the philosophy of science in which, it seemed, the empirical

certainties of the material world depended on the ontological relation

of thinking in the human subject with its objects: the field of material

process which pervades every phenomenon (in the reality we

ordinarily suppose) is also constitutive of the human body, whose

location determines the physical position in that field in space and



76 David Kuhrt

time at which we are cognate with it in our thinking. The realisation,

of moral autonomy by the thinking subject, is the consequence of the

social transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution of

relations between the product of individual labour and the gross

national product on which the community depends.

The creation of what Marx called “the urban proletariat”

effectively suspended any linkage between ordinary perceptual in-

puts about the reality of the world on the part of the majority who

were producers, and the consensus of knowledge in the executive.

Hitherto, the means of production had been commonly owned, and

production depended on traditionally transmitted skills. Now, the

thinking of this “urban proletariat” was precipitated by political

enfranchisement into the realm of institutional political discourse

whose agencies were the professions, for which, first, ordinary

common knowledge, and then later the specific knowledge of

tradesmen’s guilds became, by degrees, redundant. The Industrial

Revolution interposed mechanical processes of production between

the subject consciousness of individuals (who, hitherto, formed

communities of producers), and the objective world of raw material

which they previously transformed with manual skills and simple

technologies. The Industrial Revolution, therefore, situated the

community (including the complex linguistic usages of its

tradespeople), at one remove from the real world as far as the exercise

of common knowledge was concerned. This interruption of servitude

in the natural economy is the cause of that augmented sense of moral

autonomy in individuals which distinguishes post-industrial urbansocieties from all historical precedents.

But the political enfranchisement of the nineteenth century

which followed those changes in the social relations of production

carried with it only the semblance of democracy. Although the

activities of reformers and philanthropists contributed to the

atmosphere of liberalism in which the lot of the commons improved,




following the injustices attendant on unprecedented urban growth and

industrialisation, the Education Act of 1890 in the United Kingdom

(to take one example) was not instituted by Parliament with

disinterested concern for the democratisation of knowledge:

“education for all” would ensure the ready availability of the skilled

labour on which the success of the economic growth promised by theIndustrial Revolution depended. According to the report to

Parliament of the Cross Commission of 1888: “We do not profess to

give these children an education that will raise them above their

station and business in life – that is not our object – but to give them

an education that may fit them for that business … indifference in this

matter would seriously affect the commercial prestige of the

nation.”14 This concept of education hardly comprehended the

underlying social pressures towards democracy. In fact, whereas the

increased wealth which might release the majority from poverty

depended on the fact that one man’s productivity, with mechanical

intervention, could generate a value previously requiring the labour of

one or several extended families, no legislation was enacted to ensure

the equitable distribution of that augmented productivity as far as the

creation of wealth was concerned. Those who invested the capital

therefore continued to reap proportional benefits which reflected a

social status quo obtaining before the Industrial Revolution. Thus the

proclaimed emancipation of the labouring classes proceeded within

limits determined, with regard to the prerogative of knowledge

distribution, by privileges concerning access to political power which

had accrued during the previous four centuries.

On the evidence of the relations between communal

knowledge and political power in the recent history of democratic

societies in the instances cited above, the compulsory education and

nominal political enfranchisement of the majority in urban societies

since the Industrial Revolution has resulted in increasing and

dangerous tensions between the individual’s augmented sense of his

potential value to the community and his actual ability to impinge on



78 David Kuhrt

or affect the social, ecological and environmental policies of

democratic states. That is, there has been an ontological reduction in

the dimension of the self which the creative power of language and

the imagination presupposes.

Once, self-esteem was measured by the degree to which theindividual distinguished himself in an hereditarily-determined social

structure as a valuable member of a community whose belief systems

(including acceptance of his circumstances of birth as divinely

ordained) were universally shared; even if, with regard to ‘upward

mobility’, few enjoyed any measure of enfranchisement. Political

enfranchisement in the nineteenth century, might therefore have been

expected to augur a society in which the true dimensions of the

individual, from the point of view of the proclaimed ideology of

democracy, found expression in his ability to participate, equal with

all peers, in the creation of a future foreseen as the product of

common knowledge, within the framework of new institutions whose

democratic intent was to enable precisely such a degree of

enfranchisement. This did not occur, so that the contradictions we

have cited between common sense knowledge and the instituted

policies of state, now invalidate common sense and serve the

privilege of those interest groups on which the state depends. Clearly

the nominal idea we mean by “democratic progress” depends on a

preconceived and invalid concept of both knowledge and the nature

of the reality to which it refers. It is then evident that although a

social future might be commonly foreseen, the nature of the reality

which answers to our crises remains unforeseen and pre-determinedin advance by the vested interests of the institutions which shape

presently expedient policy. From such forlorn perspectives we then

permit so-called experts to extrapolate our futures.

If the immaturity of the democratic process at the time of the

Industrial Revolution secured the increased value of one man’s

production only for those empowered by capital to sponsor its




creation, the disparity of wealth which existed then between rich and

poor has scarcely changed, a fact which improved living standards for

the majority conveniently hides. The price paid for the generally

increased wealth of the community has therefore been the surrender

of independence on the part of individuals as knowing beings; for

these injustices are articulated, if at all, by parties whose ideology polarises responsibility between oppressors and the oppressed, as if

the dispossessed and underprivileged were incapable of any remedial

acts themselves without institutionalised leadership. It is on the

premise of such predicated powerlessness that democracy survives in

the variety of its presently haphazard forms across the globe.

Paolo Friere explained the realities of instrumental political

power in his literacy projects among the Peruvian poor in the 60s and

70s: that the structural relations between governed and government

depends on “manufacturing consent” (to use Chomsky’s apposite

expression), so that the oppressed internalise those norms which

maintain power by representing themselves, in imagination and in

their discourse, as powerless.15 It is a tribute to the ingenuity of

human intelligence in justifying the necessity of a status quo dictated

by forces outside its practical control, that intellectuals and the

majorities they speak for in Western societies fail to perceive the very

limited nature of a democracy which is enjoyed at the expense of the

poor in societies elsewhere which they deem undemocratic, failing to

perceive also that the relations of instrumental powers with subject

populations are, in principle, the same, whether those populations

consent or are coerced. Thus J K Galbraith, discussing the structuralnorms by which post-industrial capitalism determines consumer

habits, refers to “the techniques by which the individual is made to

conform to the planning process – how our behaviour is guided so

that we will not, by undue independence of will, upset the

convenience of those [corporate interests] who serve us.”16



80 David Kuhrt

If the majority, on whom we wish to confer a responsibility

equal to that of a minority who determine their future within

institutions which effectively remove power from democratic control,

continues to adjust its purchasing habits to suit marketed trends, so

that this year’s product or fashionable commodity is either redundant

or unavailable next year (because statistically projected returns on thecapital investment have been secured and redundancy of the product

will ensure next year’s returns), it does so (we do so) because

together with its monopoly of power, the state also acquires a

monopoly on knowledge. We refuse to contemplate the fact that

whereas before the Industrial Revolution only a minority went to a

tailor for their clothes, we, the majority have become incapable of

making our own. That is to say, we have no democratic control over

the means of production, nor over the distribution of the increased

wealth which industrial revolution has made possible. The freedoms

thus acquired (energies released from the effort of manual

production) are not communally directed to secure optimal benefits

locally and globally, for these are not the goals of institutions without

democratic controls; instead, those released energies are literally

spent on and absorbed by the growth of leisure industries and

entertainments which distract our attention from the reality. Hence

Gurvitch observes that political knowledge (he means the institutional

product of plural democracies), “is legitimised by, and manifests in,

the reciprocal relations which operate within the associated functions

of a system of economic production … and are inherently disposed to

maintain an equilibrium whose component elements constantly renew

each other … here, the knowledge we call common sense is accordedthe lowest priority. Given the wider diffusion of philosophical,

scientific and technical knowledge, thanks to compulsory secondary

education for all, common sense knowledge normally plays almost no

part whatever in education except at primary levels.”17

The notion that democracy is derived from enfranchisement

only, is not a socialist but a fundamentally conservative doctrine




which suits the competitive practises underpinning capitalist growth;

a premise which has survived in democratic institutions from the

nineteenth century in that form of pseudo-Darwinism known as the

doctrine of the survival of the fittest. According to this doctrine, once

upward mobility becomes a statutory right, all those who have been

suitably equipped by nature, will, all things being equal and given the ballot box, rise to occupy positions in society which enable them to

contribute their best. This doctrine is conservative in the sense that

whereas the law of natural selection may have applied to the

evolution of the human in competition between species for optimal

adaptation to the global environment, once the human has emerged,

real progress depends not on competition but on fraternity; that is,

neo-Darwinism is retrogressive. It is so because that progress which

is purely material, which produces the growth of the state at common

expense and depends on competition, is incompatible with fraternity

except in a social context where production, distribution and profit

(which benefit from competition) are subject to consensually agreed

social controls. Therefore, if societies do not legislate to compensate

for inequality of access to the institutions which confer power on the

state, there can be no consensus of knowledge from which fraternity

might derive. If within nature a predatory order does exist, it is

limited by the laws of evolution which favoured the appearance of the

human. This being, unlike its predecessors, thinks and acts

autonomously and not necessarily in conformity with the laws of

nature it still depends on. It must therefore think what kind of social

order must be given by legislation in order to provide, in education,

for the production of that knowledge which enshrines those principles.18 For those principles are derived from a hierarchy of

being within which the human has achieved an ascendant position,

the cause and consequence of which is a reflective capacity to think

and to articulate a position of responsibility within the creation. That

responsibility is his, but the creation itself is not. Hence the

intelligence which recognises this contingence is not his either. It is



82 David Kuhrt

the gift of that creation; whether or not its origins are accidental is

irrelevant.

The paradox cannot escape us that the ability to think confers

upon the human simultaneously a consciousness of dependence on

nature, common to all other beings, and a capacity to operateindependently of nature and to transcend it. If we are constrained in

society to consolidate self-interest in competition with others, the ego

which benefits becomes incapable of transcendence. Plasticity in

thinking, empathy in social conduct, love which binds and is

voluntarily bound, become redundant capacities. This suits the

interests of state: that is because the corporate state depends on a

Gross National Product which increases optimally on the basis of

competitive egoism. There may therefore be a case for saying that the

gross national product of the institutional economy in nominally

democratic societies stands in inverse proportion to the loss of

communal knowledge, and that the effect of political enfranchisement

is to have enabled the capitalisation of the state on the basis of that

loss.

If, following political enfranchisement, the democratic process

had not been subverted by the interests of commerce and economic

growth, a process which began in the urban centres of commerce

throughout Europe at the end of the nineteenth century,19

enfranchisement of majorities within nation states would have

provided the occasion for the evolution of a trans-national social

order rooted in locally controlled democracies whose independent political controls would have been compatible with cultural pluralism.

However, failing the enactment by political states, to which the

enfranchised majorities were subject, of legislation which guaranteed

democratic equality independently of inequality of economic or

professional status, the powers invested in aristocratic oligarchies

prior to the Industrial Revolution were simply transferred to a new

managerial class. Nation states therefore continued to exist as powers




competing against each other in the economic sector; and if the nation

state is now called in question, those global and corporate interests

which will, in turn, displace their waning powers, are already in place

threatening a further escalation of political disenfranchisement so that

seething and increasingly migrant populations can be effectively

managed.

In this situation of dynamic conflict on which nation states, or

the corporate interests displacing them, continue to depend,

participating individuals who might have been expected, following an

enfranchisement called ‘democratic’, to enact a consensus, within an

appropriate institutional framework, in which each contributed to the

formation of a commonly foreseen future, are permanently exposed to

pressures towards a conformity which is effectively opposed to true

enfranchisement. Now that the means of immediate global

communication exists, an awareness of the proximity of others is

enhanced incrementally, so that internal social tensions increase

accordingly. An endemic political quietism appears to have replaced

the political activism of the 60s and 70s which responded to the major

injustices of a now terminated Cold War.

Although the overtly political quiescence of the majority

guarantees its material reward, the ordinary discourse of informal

relations between individuals in democracies reveals the scepticism

with which the majority views both the activities of the politicians

who, nominally, represent them, and their conduct of the state. The

existence of this undercurrent of dissent does not need documenting.It is a main source of income for journalists who do so; however, the

idea, which may cross a journalist’s mind, that the uncensored

existence of media forums, precisely de-marks democratic from

undemocratic societies, is, of course, an example of the self-induced

myopia which keeps the juggernaut of progress going, for there are no

public forums in democracy (excepting those controlled by the

media) within which any true consensus of knowledge might find



84 David Kuhrt

expression. In default of the existence of any such forums, the social

future cannot be other than an extrapolation of existing norms which

are the evident cause of recurring crises.

The social future therefore cannot be deduced from those

norms. A society which is functional in relation to rationallyconceived aims does not suffer recurring crises. Individuals are not

predisposed to serve purely personal and competing interests on

which the corporate profit of states depends: there is a supra-sensible

dimension to human existence in which each experiences the

limitations of his present existence in the context of a being-together-

with-others in one world. By “supra-sensible” we do not mean here

an intangible spiritual dimension, but the actuality of an all-inclusive

reality which includes the existence and perspectives of other beings -

from the inanimate to the human. The spiritual dimension is that

realm of reality which structures the unity of the whole which

individuals, within different consensual norms, will perceive only in

consequence of moral effort. Whether they express it in disinterested

political activism or in the acquisition of esoteric knowledge has to do

with the chosen quality of their relationship with time, for the same

unitary reality is expressed throughout every level of being. Hence,

in spite of the existence of divisive political states, the experience of

being-together-with-others in a unitary reality is an instinctual and

half-conscious form of objective knowledge which is common to

individuals in all cultures. This experience is an extension of feelings

generated first in local communities; the extension (beyond clan and

tribe and race) is given in the discourse of received traditions byelders, griot-shamans, if not by teachers in schools, and has nothing to

do with the narratives of a demagogue who subverts popular epic

tradition to purely ethnic goals which are irrelevant in our time. The

instinctual sense of being-together-with-others which generates local

knowledge traditions is, on the contrary, supportive: the

disappointments of immediate circumstance are perceived in a long-

term perspective which is universally human, and which is hoped for




and expected in oral and written forms. This unfulfilled expectation

is called Zion in Jewish literature, where it is represented as the goal

of humanity. The same expectation informs the narrative of the

Qur’an, and in both its given outline determines a tradition of

knowledge concerning the ideal state of the human. It is also

consonant with the English libertarian tradition which is expressed inthe notion of a commonwealth we have yet to see. It is therefore,

being in this sense universal, the product of a structurally existing

reality, from whose formal constraints proceeds both the created

world we ordinarily suppose and the cognitive forms which enable its

expression in language.

Material reality: the intellectual obstacles of knowledgeIf no social forms have yet evolved which answer to that

structural reality, that is because preconceptions exist about the nature

of knowledge which determine the product in favour of instrumental

power and marginalise the sources in communities which nurture

such knowledge. Through the foregoing, we have therefore posed the

epistemological question which is fundamental to all notions of

knowledge: by what criteria do we know, and what qualifies all

claims to knowledge?

There is an apocryphal story in the Upanishads about a sage

who proposes to his acolytes that reality – what the world is really

like – cannot be the subject of positive knowledge for the same reason

that the blind, having been brought to an elephant and feeling whatconfronts them where they stand, would deny the reports of their

fellows differently placed round the animal, each being unable to see

that all were addressing the same object. Each individual knower,

being human, is likewise limited in his knowledge of the universal to

a spatio-temporal location which is unique, specifically his own, and

given by the body.



86 David Kuhrt

The purpose of this parable is to show that no positive

knowledge is absolute: even though “we must bring men to

particulars, and their regular Series and Order” as Francis Bacon’s

inductive method recommends,20 “and must for a while renounce

their Notions and begin to form an acquaintance with things”, the

things which are ordered in their series by the inductive method are soordered by that method to suit preconceptions about the nature of

reality which are not necessarily closer to truth than the preconceived

“Notions” they are designed to displace. Hence, paradoxically, even

the meaning of the parable depends on the empirical fact that the

existence of elephants is presupposed, in a consensus given by others

who have seen them, or the parable would not be understood.

The tradition of knowledge from which this wisdom comes –

the Vedas – predates the classical period of Greek philosophy, but we

cannot, in spite of later Greek philosophical scepticism about received

knowledge (of which ‘modernity’ is no more than an elaboration),

escape the fact that all knowledge is relational: we can know nothing

in particular absolutely until we know all things generally in relation.

Though positivists who claim to know particulars absolutely are

therefore closer to God than they thought, the reality itself of which

they know particular parts, can only be half-consciously intuited in

the premise of an experimental proposition. In ordinary discourse

that proposition remains a generally given conceptual framework no

different from the “Notions” which Francis Bacon, who founded the

method, disparaged. Propositions are elaborated in argument between

opposed viewpoints in relation to particular experiences seen, by eachspeaker, as à propos a reality which no-one quite grasps. The

conduct of argument in the vernacular, when each (if he hears what

the other is saying) replies: “Yes that may be true but it is also like

this”, nevertheless reveals the degree of common understanding about

the necessary existence of a contextual reality which unifies their

opposing perspectives.




This contextual reality, which necessarily informs all ordinary

discourse, we are entitled to call supra-sensible. Although this reality

manifests in particular circumstances and, in ordinary discourse, is

subject to a plurality of standpoints, there are esoteric traditions in

which it finds complete symbolic forms of expression. In traditions

which are communal, and where knowledge and power have not beenconflated by the interests of state, this knowledge exists not

esoterically but as received and transmitted structural explanation

which situates and orders the individual within the cosmos, as in the

case of the Peule people reported above by Amadou Hampaté Bâ.

Where such knowledge exists within established traditions,

the nature of the reality itself, by contrast with modernist societies, is

seldom called in question, and it has therefore been the burden of

such traditions in every culture throughout history, to articulate a

structural foundation for knowledge which unifies and explains the

divergent viewpoints expressed informally in ordinary discourse.

From this point of view (of symbolic knowledge about reality) both

the utility and also the limitations of scientific knowledge, are derived

from its capacity to define the particular knowledge of things and

processes. This enables an intervention in nature which may serve (if

democracy exists) human welfare. Such positive knowledge is,

however, veridical only in strictly delimited experimental conditions.

It follows therefore that, as we now understand it, science has

nothing to say about the nature of reality, and that it is not normally

the business of religion and of esoteric traditions of knowledge toargue between standpoints which are clearly opposed only in

consequence of the material limitations of accidental physical

existence. However, in the present century, humanity has entered a

new dimension of experience: viewpoints which, in previous history,

seemed incommensurate have been radically juxtaposed; a

circumstance caused first by the social transformations attendant on

the industrial revolution, and second by developments in scientific



88 David Kuhrt

knowledge which have breached the notion of predictability and

precipitated the subject observer into a realm in which all perceptions

of the reality clearly depend on an understanding of the relation

between knower and known in all acts of cognition. The very notion

that scientific and religious knowledge stand in contradiction

suddenly appears untenable.

In consequence we may conclude that knowledge does not

exist independently of thinking beings who know, neither does it exist

in thought alone independently of the language it must inform for the

purpose of communication. If I know in my mind that something is

the case before saying so, that is because the language which makes

the thought conscious has normally been previously acquired. If the

structure of language and thought seems inseparable, then we must

also conclude that the structure which is given (as previously

described, by the logos) in the reality of the world we ordinarily

suppose, is present throughout all the existences which combine in

the human to compose both the subjective being which refers to its

object and the existing object; then, whether or not they speak, all so-

compounded existences participate in the being of both the subject

who speaks and the object, which may or may not be animate, and

may or may not also be a speaker. If not, the fact that human beings

who are deaf and mute but clearly comprehend the reality which is

common to others and signify their consensual participation in it,

could not be explained.

It is in arguing the evidence for “deep structures” whichinform human cognitive activity and generate grammar that Noam

Chomsky cites Déscartes’ reference to the example of those who,

“being born deaf and dumb, are in the same degree, or even more,

than the brutes, destitute of the organs which serve the others for

talking”, yet “are in the habit of themselves inventing certain signs by

which they make themselves understood.” That they do so, Chomsky

takes to be evidence that man has “a unique type of intellectual




organisation which … is undetermined by any fixed association of

utterances to external stimuli.”21 That thought forms in

consciousness are given, and therefore predisposed to apprehend the

objective reality presupposed by the use of language, indicates that

the cognitive threshold of consciousness is not established in

individuals by the habit of acquiring language but by the conjunction,consequent on the fact of birth, between a structural form common to

the species and the specific being of the individual, irrespective of

both the particular intelligence he develops and even his capacity to

articulate it verbally.

This structural form is not only present in the generic being of

the human, but the structure of the generically human focuses and

centres within consciousness the whole of being which is other than

human, and which radiates from that center. It radiates both

downwards (so to speak) through the animated organic, the sentient

and mineral realms towards the non-being of the materia prima, and

upwards, returning and referring, in acts of cognition which are

redemptive as far as the limitations of time and space are concerned,

the accidental and specific existences which are comprehended, to the

essential, the one unitary Being from which they proceed. This

generically human form, which has passed through all other existing

forms in evolution so that they are constitutive of that whole, this we

call logos, following the tradition of knowledge elaborated on the

basis of Greek and Jewish esoteric traditions in the early Christian

world.

The activity of thought is therefore a vehicle for the

expression in consciousness of Being itself as contingent in space-

time; that is, dependant on, or surrendered to, separate and accidental

existences. But the space-time which governs the created world

within which that Being is contingently present in existence, is itself

the product of that contingence, in that human consciousness

perceives it only in consequence of a conjunction (which we have



90 David Kuhrt

already described) between the being which is present throughout and

the specific bodily standpoint of the human. Outside that human

existential context given by cognition, which separates the component

parts of existence according to time and space after the fact of its own

embodiment, there is but one omnipotent Being. Thus, in reality, the

being of the whole endures in spite of spatio-temporal contingenceand the existence of the human which might upset it.

All contingent existence throughout time is therefore coeval

and co-present as far as Being is concerned, and it is this co-presence

which is reflected in the structures of cognitive activity we call

thought. That logos, to which Chomsky’s “deep structures” almost

refer, therefore sustains and underwrites the enduring generic form of

the human while individual thinkers fail, in personal existence, to

bear it out and enact it; for if a recovery of the unitary nature of being

in personal existence is consequent on the consensual will of

individuals to achieve it, then the thought activity which bears that

will is the highest possible expression of love; that is, coition. It is,

however, impossible to understand either the use of such symbolic

terms in an epistemological context or the role played by

metaphorical usage in ordinary discourse (including poetry) without

revising the current philosophical usage; for here, we accord reality to

non-being in the physical realm of space-time and non-being to the

realm of thinking activity. For if not here, where else can we be

cognate with the world we ordinarily suppose exists?

The structural phenomena in thought activity which areexpressed in the grammar and syntax of language are not material

beings. The existences in the phenomenal world to which language

refers are spatio-temporally present in matter which is in a state of

permanent flux, so that the formal entity we recognise is perceived

only because its existential presence elsewhere answers to the

corresponding presence in us of the same being. The so-called

problem of knowledge, which turns on the question of how and in




what sense an entity which is spatio-temporally present elsewhere can

be ‘in’ consciousness, does not arise once the difference between

being and existence on the one hand, and the absence of stability with

respect to time and space of the phenomenal entities we perceive on

the other hand, is reconciled in a redefinition of terms which admits

those realities. In failing to do so, we are confronted with theintellectual absurdity of a denial of both personal and objective

existence; a denial which, in the prevailing tendencies of

contemporary philosophy, separates language as a closed system of

inter-related terms from its referential objects. This account of

knowledge is then obliged, in logical consequence, to explain all

mental phenomena as self-organising neurological constructs without

reference to the ontological problem of the speaker who proposes the

narrative in the first place.

Thus the reality we ordinarily suppose is divided into subject

and object only in human acts of cognition and not in reality. The act

of cognition (which we have said is an act of love which engenders

co-presence) produces a concept which, as such, forms part of that

structure we call mental, and which operates as a unity; from which

also personal identity and existence is derived. It (the act of

cognition) joins together in conceptual form the being of subject and

object which is separated at birth by physical embodiment together

with the memory. The illusory veil which divides reality between

subject and object in cognition is a consequence of the failure in

thinking to confront the moral dilemma posed by the existence of

others whose assertions about reality are prejudicial to pre-conceived personal interest. The agent which subverts the mediated reality in

which other existences and our own are joined into an interpreted

representation favouring ourselves, or those institutions to which we

belong, at the expense of theirs, is the intellect. The intellect is not an

impartial provider as far as knowledge is concerned but an

entrepreneurial and creative spirit, a usurper, whose activity is

divisive. This agent in us of the intelligent world is, however, neutral



92 David Kuhrt

with regard to the outcome of this conflict in that, once its role has

been identified, the same instrument must also serve the moral

intention of the thinking subject. Until then, the intellect obscures the

reality in favour of a partial view suiting undeclared personal interests

which, in a social context with others who are like minded, are also

political interests.

The focal point and mirror of realityThe four principle components in that realm of being, logos,

which shapes and sustains both language and its referent world are

Time, Space, Form and Movement. In time, each of these is a being

in itself whose activity is given by the being it answers to: the logos.

Time is given in the interval which separates being-at-one-

location from being-at-another. The passage between becomes

conscious only in human consciousness, and only then because it

inhabits a body defining viewpoints, so that one location is ‘here’ and

another is ‘there’.

Space, the composite entity encompassing all separately

perceived locations given by the body, is the external correlate of

internally perceived time. But both space and time are the product of

a separation in Being itself caused by the intervention of

consciousness, since individual existence (and therefore

consciousness) is caused by being at, and in, the specific location of a

body. The twinned constraints on Being itself of time and space, both

derived from incarnation, are related to the twinned functions inreproduction of (respectively) the female and male genders, the one

essentially (that is archeptypically) disposed inwardly towards

temporal extension in time; the other outwardly towards spatial

extension. The product of time and space together, both structurally

in the hierarchy of the logos which operates between being and

existence to reconcile being and non-being, and biologically in the




reproduction of the species which mirrors that structure, is Form,

which becomes the object of sentient experience in creation.

Form thus appears to sense-perception in consequence of the

re-cognition of Time and Space in matter. But the presence in matter

of form is not immutable: every formal existence is inmetamorphosis as far as its being in matter (which is governed by

Time and Space) is concerned, for every existence passes through,

and is in, the material fundament. Existing things have duration

which mirrors their relations with Time and therefore determines also

their existence in Space. Thus mineral formations are more enduring

than botanical ones, although the appearance of flowers depends on

the transformation of minerals which otherwise, without the being

and essence of the plant, are differently subject to Time, and may

appear in another Form. That is, minerals may appear in anything

from rock formations to human excrement, depending on their formal

content, which in turn depends on their relations with Space and

Time.

The conjunction of Time and Space in matter which produces

Form, is therefore also the cause of Movement, in consequence both

of the volatility of the matter in which forms reside and of the

different relations of Form with matter which are consequent on

Time. Movement is therefore that realm within the structure, the

logos, which is closest to the operation of the thinking activity in

human cognition: we re-cognise the world because, in thought, the

spirit (Being itself) is con-formed to its objects. As AmadouHampaté Bâ puts it, the evolving human being, the cognate thinker, is

“in perpetual movement , as is the cosmos itself”.

The being within that realm of non-being we call matter, of

Time, Space, Form and Movement is therefore the condition of the

human. The human re-cognises and re-members the passage through

Time of those antecedent evolutionary forms on which its own



94 David Kuhrt

depends, and which are perceived in the externalised form of the

world, the world we ordinarily presuppose in cognition. This world is

apprehended prior to ontological doubt and prior to any theoretical

scepticism about existence which uncertainty with regard to positive

knowledge might generate. Thus the universally human is formally

present, following the interaction of Time, Space, Form andMovement which mediate between the ascent of the purely material

and the descent into it of Being itself. The logos therefore irradiates

the whole of Being from that symbolically conceived center. This

Light, as opposed to that of the intellect, therefore reconciles what, as

far as positive knowledge is concerned, would be an anomaly

between Being itself, present throughout time, and its formal presence

in spatio-temporally determined existences.

Below that realm of the definitively human are the envelopes

of being which are derived from those forms of existence in the

material world which preceded the human: animal, plant and

mineral; each of which are radically distinguished by their relations,

as existences, with Being itself, even if contemporary science has

disappeared the ordinary, sentient realities which distinguished

sentient and vegetative existence in previous classifications. For the

existence of objectively separated realms of being corresponding to

ordinary reality is logically prior to any understanding of our

subjective relations with the whole Being within which we must

suppose, the separate existences we perceive exist in concert. Thus

the relations established in thought between the human and the

antecedent forms of existence on which its own depends, illuminatesthe path by which the knower ascends towards and recovers his

identity with Being itself. That is: the source both of the human and

of the reality expressed in the sentient world which preceded it in

Time, which continues, and in which the human participates, through

the material substratum, in consequence of his body.




In those realms below the existential being of the human

existence in consciousness, the animal is elevated in Time above the

sentient; the sentient in Time above the mineral and the mineral in

Time above the formless realm of pure matter, in which every

existence passes from non-being to Being, before, during and after

Time.

The animal is elevated above the sentient in consequence of

Movement, which in the human is expressed as desire, to which

sentient existences in the rooted plant realm do not aspire.

The plant, which inspires and inhales to stabilise its existence

between the light of space and the darkness of matter by

photosynthesis, is elevated above the mineral, as Form, without

Movement which, in animals, is caused by desire.

The mineral is elevated above the pure plenum of the material

in consequence of Space, for spatial entities which have physical

extension are the product of molecular association which manifest the

material in extension as solids.

Finally, matter itself is distinguished from, and subordinated

in opposition to Being itself, by Time, since no duration within its

undifferentiated state is possible without the intervention of Space.

But Space, as extension, is the consequence of formal presences, and

Form is dependant on Movement, so that the being together of these

elements constitute the logos, of which the human form is the radialnexus of the created world. That they are so together in Time, and

that matter, as non-being subordinated to it, becomes the matrix from

which non-being ascends towards and recovers its origin in Being

itself, refers to all those representations in occult tradition in which

the female archetype is secreted in matter and the male in spirit. The

logos therefore structures the knowledge which joins these extremes

and informs the created reality of the world in which they are



96 David Kuhrt

perceived. Their differences therefore are accidental in Time and do

not concern the essence of the transcendental human.

As far as the expression of logos in the structure of language

is concerned, Time is expressed in tenses; Space, and the relative

location of ingredient existing objects, is expressed in conjunctions;Form by nouns and Movement and corresponding temporal location

with verbal conjugations. The situation of the subject who speaks in

relation to the objective matter and content thus given is represented

by modifying that complex structural product with pronouns and

possessive forms which reveal the nature of his subjective

relationship with the comprised reality as he experiences it; this is

what he means. The reality as he apprehends it has been expressed

and understood by others who experience it, in varying degrees,

differently; but others nevertheless know with him, and assume

consensually, the existence of one reality to which each necessarily

refers in spite of those differences; for, if not, if the one reality is not

in that non-veridical and provisional sense known , nothing could be

understood. This nothing includes those propositions which are

agreed to constitute positive knowledge on a scientific basis. That is

to say, as far as positivism is concerned, that scientific propositions

are meaningless as knowledge unless the consensually agreed world

of ordinary discourse is acknowledged as existing a priori, in

ordinary discourse and in common sense. A context which makes all

assertions meaningful in a social consensus which has yet to be

determined.

References

1 Vladimir Soloviev, The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Lindisfarne Press, 1996)

2 Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Aspects de la Civilzation Africaine (Présence Africaine,

1972)

3 Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (University Press of America, 1966)




4 Pierre Bordieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Polity Press, 1994). This book is

of particular importance in the context of our discussion concerning the conflict

between instrumental and spiritual notions both of reality and of the human in thatBordieu points out the social limitations of Chomsky’s structurist view of universal

forms in language. In his introduction, the editor, John B Thompson, summarises

Bordieu’s difference with Chomsky: “The notion of competence, understood as the

capacity of an ideal speaker to generate an unlimited sequence of grammatically

well-formed sentences, is simply too abstract. The kind of competence that actual

speakers possess is not a capacity to generate an unlimited sequence ofgrammatically well-formed sentences, but rather a capacity to produce expressions

which are appropriate for particular situations, that is, a capacity to produce

expressions à propos.” The pertinence of this observation is borne out in the

example we proposed above of conversation between two farmers and a vet, in

which assertions à propos imply the understood (universal) context of the reality to

which they apply without direct reference to it.

5 “Minister backs ‘secret system’ for legal posts” (The Independent, 8 October

1999).

6 Editor: C H Waddington, Towards a Theoretical Biology (Edinburgh UP, 1970).

Rupert Sheldrake, inter alia: A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Formative

Causation (Blond and Briggs, London 1985); The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Collins, London 1988).

7 Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’Instant (Editions Stock, 1992)

8 Letter on ‘hidden constraints in evolution’, David Kuhrt (London Review of

Books, 6 June 1996): “ … all formal definition of type or species … describe a

constraint outside time and space to which material evolutionary progress is

supposed to conform; therefore the rhythm and pattern of their realisation in space-

time is determined by material constraints already operating in the natural world as

a result of prior evolution at any given time … In this case, we cannot even discuss

the existence of hidden constraints if we accept Occam’s (and others’) stricturesabout the nature of reality, for this determines our ideas about existence.”

9 Robert Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Rowan and

Littlefield, 1993)

10 Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practise in Medieval Damascus,

1190-1350 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Concerning knowledge production

in other forms of society, primitive, theocratic, liberal-democratic etc in past and

present history and their cognitive systems, see: George Gurvitch, Les Cadres

Sociaux de la Connaissance (Presses Universitaire de France, 1966). This book



98 David Kuhrt

opens with the sentence: “Of all the productions of civilisation, it is knowledge

which, at first glance, appears to be the most detached from the social reality.”

11Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred, Aspects of the Christianisation of the

Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

12 Michael Chamberlain, op. cit.

13 Vladimir Soloviev, op. cit.

14 In Charles Birchenough, History of Elementary Education (University Tutorial

Press, 1925)

15 Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin Books, 1973)

16 J K Galbraith, The Rise of the Industrial State (The Reith Lectures, in The

Listener ….. 1965)

17 Georges Gurvitch, op. cit. (see reference 11)

18 See Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom

(Columbia University Press, 1960), in which he discusses how education (in thesense given by the context of our discussion of neo-Darwinian determinism), and

the moral imagination it nurtures, replaces, in human societies, the function of

genetic mechanisms during evolution.

19 Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Life, Civil Rights and the Economy (offprint from The

Hibbert Journal of July 1921, published in pamphlet form by The Threefold

Commonwealth, London 1922 ) Rudolf Steiner ascribed the origins of the FirstWorld War to the transfer, in Middle Europe prior to the collapse of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, of political power from the aristocracies to the emergent

bourgeois merchant class at the expense of any real devolution of power to the

nominally enfranchised masses. In other words, though enfranchisement took

place, no legislation was enacted to neutralise the political advantages of those with

privileged economic status. Emergent economic interests created by the rapid

ascendance of the bourgeoisie were therefore increasingly inimical to the interestsof the aristocracy so that tensions across national frontiers in Europe between the

unrealised political aspirations of the enfranchised masses and the oligarchies to

which they were subject were exacerbated by the entrepreneurial ambitions of the

new middle classes; tensions which then found expression in the assassination ofthe Emperor Franz Josef at Sarajevo which destabilised the balance of power in

Europe.

20 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Routledge, 1898).




21 (Cited in Chomsky, op. cit.) Réné Déscartes, Discourse on Method (The

Philosophical Works of Déscartes, translated by E S Haldane and G R T Ross, vol.

1).

Documents

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