Theravadin Buddhist Commentary on the Current State of Western Epistemology

Abstract

The current state of Western epistemology is the consequence of a powerful critique of the Enlightenment project and its commitment the acquisition of knowledge of the world as it really is, undisturbed by our presence in it. Einstein, Heisenberg, and Goedel have rendered scientific claims on such knowledge virtually untenable. Dewey and Wittgenstein argued that knowing is an activity that can never be separated from the community in which it takes place. Michael Oakshott's views about the of mankind, too, inform reflection upon knowing as a communal venture.1 Richard Rorty notes that can only come under epistemic rules when we have entered the community where the game governed by these rules is played.... Philosophy (and, specifically, 'philosophy of mind') cannot, by supplying a loftier critical point of view, reinforce or diminish the confidence in our own assertions which the approval of our peers gives us.2 Knowing, then, works in a community. Rorty argues that philosophy, and by extension all disciplines and departments of knowing, is the social justification of belief. Whatever is known is known in conversation and community. In anchoring epistemic rules in community, we must raise the question of motives, that is, the concerns and desires of and for the self and its relationship knowledge. In this respect Michel Foucault's observations on the history of knowing-work, especially in Western philosophy, are useful. Foucault contrasts Nietzsche and Aristotle on the question of knowledge and motive. Of Nietzsche's account of the will knowledge Foucault says: is an 'invention' behind which lies something completely different from itself: the play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, and the will appropriate. Knowledge is produced on the stage where these elements struggle against each other.3 Knowledge is a product of the fragile truce these forces have achieved, though they are always prepared break that truce. Further, knowledge is interesse, that is biased or committed, not itself but to those things capable of involving an instinct or the instincts that dominated.4 Thus selfish interest