The Formation of Knowledge

7/28/2019 The Formation of Knowledge.

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The Formation of Knowledge.


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Introductory.

Something has been too troublesome to my mind of late and what this

troublemaker is will be a shock to the reader for it is the most benevolent thing

imaginable. The answer is books. Too many of them and the ease to avail any sort

that I want. The problem that this has created isnt petty and the consequence of

it isnt petty either. As a result of this accessibility scores of books have piled up

on my table, and thus inevitably scores of ideas, and concepts, many points ofviews on life and the world, ranging from history, literature and philosophy, which

has by now created a veritable soup in the mind which has to be resolved and

vivisected and arranged if any intellectual integrity is desired at all. If the problem

has been caused due to my reading so also due to my writing, for with every new

idea that goes into the mind comes an unstoppable urge to bring it out again onto

the paper. So the obvious result is that with something new to read Ill also get

something new to write. So with the pile of half read books on the table would be

coupled another pile of half written notebooks. For a young mind is very difficult

to calm for it would list wherever it would, and thus to keep it stable onto a

particular something for a very long period of time is next to impossible. For as

soon as it begins with something fresh to dwell upon, it immediately grows weary

of it and demands something fresher. This is very common, at least with me. But


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whatever the mind receives it cannot do without augmenting to it something of

its own and also attaching to it bits from here and there and thus create a

considerable system of thought to amuse itself with, this system it must make

concrete and for its stage it utilises the paper. The problem arises when there is

complete chaos in procedure, that is to say, whatever the mind tries to note down

doesnt either seem to it satisfactory or it doesnt seem to it to be the only thing

deserving of being noted down. To say it simply the mind as it were wishes

nothing less than to form a huge intellectual structure comprising of everything

that it has thought, imbibed, learnt, concluded and believed and anything smaller

than this structure is not at all to it satisfactory. There is therefore the necessity to

completely analyse oneself wholly insofar as the present state of the mind is

concerned and also to keep that inspection open to external scrutiny: if we stop

literary beautification, then it would suffice to say that this analysis has to be

written. There is no option. If such a mind isnt solidified then it would become

restless and all attempts at intellectuality would look futile and fruitless because

the mind hasnt so far determined as to what it is that it is for so long minding.

There seems a kind of vagueness and a kind of forgetfulness with it, which is not

at all conducive to the gaining and proper mental arrangement of knowledge. To

use an analogy, a curator would be utterly at defeat in bringing in newer

collections of books in the library without prior knowledge of the classificationthat already hitherto exists in the library, without already knowing which shelf is

to be used for what sorts of books, or what sorts of books are contained in it.

To think or to use the more ambiguous term to mind is the very essence of

the intellect. The intellects essence involves intellection. So that, it cannot not

think. In Sanskrit they use the term Dharma, and this word is most

comprehensive as regards with what we are speaking but it is impossible to

translate it into an English equivalent. Dharma may be translated as the

necessary or inevitable duty of a particular being. Like, the seeds Dharma is to

germinate, that it cannot not germinate provided its in its proper habitation and

condition. Dharma means to put it shortly, essence. The essential duty or task or

consequence of a warrior is war and to abandon it is to lose the very nature of

what it means to be a warrior. Therefore Krishna thinks Arjuna a fool to think of


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abandoning the natural duty of his lot in favour of renunciation. We see then so

far that essence is always followed by action, and that there can be no such thing

as inaction insofar as we understand that the very act of inaction is also an action.

So Dharma can now be broadly fixed as the essential action carried on by a being

or thing in accordance to its nature.

Reason or intellect too has a dharma, an essential act that must be carried out

in accordance to its nature, which act cannot be not carried out. The Dharma of

Reason or the Intellect, as we observed before, is Reasoning or Intellection;

without carrying out these acts a reason is no reason at all because it ceases to

work as per its own nature and thus ceases to be itself. Immanuel Kant hits the

bulls-eye in the preface to his masterpiece The Critique of Reason, where he

says:Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider

questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but

which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of human reason.

The eyes cannot decline sight as sight is presented to it by its very nature and

declining which it ceases to remain an eye; so the act of seeing is the

fundamental thing which makes an eye an eye. Same goes with human reason

and from the above quotation I gather that Kant is of the same opinion.

So our minds, all our minds taken collectively are in an adventure, they are in

the pursuit of something. That something may be certain or ambiguous,

knowable or unknowable, imminent or transcendent, easy or difficult, useful or

useless. Whatever that may be, we are all sailors or raiders in search of some kind

of booty, belonging to this world or the other. In the thrill of the journey and the

little success that falls to its lot on the way the mind becomes deluded into

believing that it is all powerful and that to it any metaphysics whatever is

possible. Kant says:

Deceived by such a proof of the power of reason, we can perceive no limits to the

extension of our knowledge. The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air,

whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more

free and rapid in airless space.


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Needless to say the mind has its own limitations. For whether it is in pursuit of the

knowledge of that world or of heaven, it only has this world at its disposal to learn

from. This particular world of experience and the senses which receive these

experiences and deposit them on to the mind are the only tools with which man

must work. Knowledge by definition is finite and perhaps may always be finite. As

long as we are unable to know about the things that arent afforded us by

experience, we are bound to accept in humble gratitude whatever is given us by

the world in condescension. The word world isnt to be taken to mean the earth

or the universe; I mean by it the earth or the universe of man. All the processes

of thought, intuition, imagination, ideals, ideas and experiences which constitute

our knowledge is to us our world. How much ever we stress on the importance

of objectivism we must understand that pure objectivism is impossible, that an

element, a considerable element of subjectivity is unavoidable. Thereforeour

interpretation of the world is to us ourknowledge of it.

There has ranged a considerable amount of debate over the idea that

knowledge depends only or mainly upon experience. Empiricists like Berkeley

hold that beyond what we can perceive through our senses there is nothing and

even if there were something it wouldnt be of any consequence to us and so isnt

worth bothering. Others hold that the true knowledge that we can hold of the

world is purely a priori which by definition mean that they are beyond experience,

and thus are purely intuitive or rationalistic, and among them the Vedantists may

be included. Hume believed in the theory of knowledge attained through ideas.

This view though isnt purely intuitive for ideas too require experience as its basis,

except for the concepts in mathematics.

The best a priori knowledge is the knowledge by induction. Induction means in

the best way explainable, the generalising of repeated particular phenomenon.

We see each day that the sun rises every morning without fail and that is themost indubitable fact of the world that every morning the sun rises. So by

observation of this particular phenomenon, that too repeated observation every

particular morning, we now come to the conclusion that Each morning the sun

rises; which is a general statement that we have made after prolonged

observation the rising sun in the morning. So now when we have made the fact


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that the sun rises in the morning into a general fact, we can guess that the sun

will rise in the day as well in the morning although one doesnt have the

experience of the sun rising in the next day. Here we are making a judgement

based on a repeating particular occurrence, thereby generalising the particular.

This is a fair example of knowledge without any recourse to prior experience.

Moral truths like thou shalt not kill etc are also a priori. You do not need to

experience actual murder in front of your eyes to gain the knowledge that murder

is wrong.

Mathematics is governed by necessary and universal laws (necessity and

universality being the best tests of a priori knowledge) and hence most of its

propositions are a priori. If you tell a person that 2+5=7 he does not need an

actual demonstration of it whereby you place 2 apples in one place and 5 inanother and by combining them all you get 7 apples. The laws of arithmetic are

universal and its concepts are intuitive and non-empirical, thus many laws of

mathematics are glaring examples of how reason can tear the limited range of

knowledge burdened by experience and transcend it into loftier spheres of

understanding with the help of intuition, judgement and at times revelation (if its

true.)

Then there are the empiricists who hold that anything beyond what the mindcan perceive is either not there or isnt important. But they can be easily put to

fallacy as we now know that there are times in the long voyage of the intellect in

through lands familiar and new, known and obscure when the phenomenon is

turned into the nuemenon, when science becomes metaphysics, when human

reason as if bored with the mundane everyday physical environment attempts to

peer above and beyond all that can be seen or perceived through the senses. The

Vedantists took this view but they depended entirely on the power of intuition,

considering the senses to be deceitful and powerless for higher more profoundforms of understanding. It led them to completely reject any reality at all in the

material world and thus they had to depend like Plato on another world- a world

of spirit. The vedantic mind sought for an anchor after its long, tiresome course

on to something stable and permanent unlike the material world which is

transitory and ever evanescent. So did it rest itself on the strong rock of the Being


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and completely detested the thin ice of Becoming. Ultimate knowledge is so pure

that the qualities/adjectives like experience or non-experience, empirical or

unempirical are dualities that bring disgrace to the purity of the pure knowledge.

There there's no tinsel of duality, of matter, of anything "other" than 'that', for

that which we have perceived as the end of our knowledge is ONE without

anything. It's absolutely one, the unit, there there is no knower as well, there is no

known, there is no knowable, all is merged in a single uninterrupted unity and it's

called "Brahman" or the "Eka"- the one. Yagnavalkya tells Mitreyi in the

Braharanyaka Upanishad:

"For where there is duality as it were, there one smells another, there one sees

another, there one hears another, there one speaks to another, there one thinks of

another, there one understands another. Where, verily, everything has become

the Self, then by what and whom should one smell, then by what and whom

should one see, then by what and whom should one hear, then by what and to

whom should one speak, then by what and on whom should one think, then by

what should one know that by which all this is known? By what, my dear, should

one know the knower?"

Knowledge (jnana) and the knower (jnata) have become one in an

indistinguishable union and thus the mind has finally found its anchor, the stable

basis on which to rest, there is no more to search, no more to go, knowledge hasbecome complete now and hence they call it Veda-ant :- the end or completion of

knowledge.

Still I'm convinced of my earlier opinion that whether knowledge be empirical

or transcendental, to begin with we only have five senses and this world with

which to go on. And on and on we must go, the mind may get scathed or relieved

on the way, it may get lost or find its destiny. Whatever that may be, the mind

uncaring about the consequences goes on ahead for it is only in this pursuit that it

finds relish, finds it's home on the way to wherever it's going. It's the call of its

very essence to pursue it's nourishment and hence that pursuit is inevitable

thought the form taken may vary.

With the success that it receives in its search in the uncharted realms the mind

becomes drunk with the false hope that all forms of knowledge is possible to it, in


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it's drunkeness it becomes disorganised and remains in the marshy lands of

disorder- knowledge remaining incomplete and its aim unachieved. However

possible may intuition be or a priori knowledge be, it all has its basis in the

limitations of the senses and of experience. Intuition always requiring the

necessity of objects and a priori knowledge normally being synthetic and hence

ultimately based on experience. Inspiration as they call it, never shines suddenly

on the mind, the mind must go on in steps, slowly rising from the lower to the

higher forms of knowledge. By higher forms of knowledge I don't mean

transcendental knowledge.

My fundamental metaphysical position is that all knowledge starts from

experience and is gathered by the five senses and that all knowledge is limited

and imperfect. I don't hold the Vedantic idea, brilliant though it be, of 'paramvidya' or 'ultimate knowledge', for that position to me looks very utopian for it

aims for the perfectibility of man which I believe is utterly impossible. The mind

reaching a plane wherein it is completely undisturbed and unaware even of it's

own self, that mode of complete impersonality is seldom acheive. For as

Nietzsche has suggested in his book "Beyond Good and Evil":

"In the philosopher...there is nothing whatever impersonal"

This is a great contribution for mankind's understanding. The idea that man is all

the while commanded and disturbed by his passions. Being an admirer of

Heraclitus, Nietzsche laid great importance to passions and believed it to be the

sole determiner of knowledge selected and accumulated. An unalloyed pursuit of

knowledge is on the whole rubbish. In this pursuit he must list as his passion,

passions like selfishness, dishonesty, honesty, pride, hope, vanity, and the rest. All

accumulation of knowledge is for the satisfaction of these. Nietzsche has said

elsewhere that all writing is concealing. That is to say, writing and acquiring of

knowledge is a shelter, a respite, a hiding place for those that are in despair,

those that want power, those that are vain. Sartre says in his notebooks that

knowledge of the world is appropriation of the world. Knowledge here is for the

sake of power, for the sake of raising above the petty. Knowledge without utility

is possible (for no true seeker, seeks utility) but knowledge unblemished by

emotions is purely imaginary: the most fundamental of my beliefs is that it is


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meaningless. All pursuit is conditioned and is only for the sake of masking and

bandaging the complex mind of all complex individuals.

We musn't become pessimistic about knowledge when we say all this, when

we limit it into so small an orbit. Though absolutely perfect knowledge isimpossible, a highly developed and organised mind is what we must aim at. For in

knowledge there is no correct and incorrect, no true or false, there is only

organised and disorganised, developed and undeveloped. So our sole objective in

our pursuit of knowledge is the proper and systematic collection and organisation

in their proper classified places the concepts, ideals, ideas and facts that are

received from the world. As Schopenhauer says having a small library with a small

set of books all organised properly is better than having a large library with a large

set of books all disorganised. It is not the vast accumulation of facts, but theproper organisation of them and proper correlation of one to the other, in a

systematically interconnected whole that makes one man more knowledgeable

than the other. The experiment that I'm trying aims at this. It is to lay down on to

paper all that the mind has grasped and to place each and every of them in their

category, thus categorising the mind leading to better (if not perfect) intellectual

integrity. Leading to the formation of Knowledge.

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The Formation of Knowledge