Previous articleNext article FreeEditors’ IntroductionShadi Bartsch, Clifford Ando, Robert J. Richards, and Haun SaussyShadi Bartsch Search for more articles by this author , Clifford Ando Search for more articles by this author , Robert J. Richards Search for more articles by this author , and Haun Saussy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWelcome to the second issue of KNOW. As with the first issue, we’ve encouraged our contributors to speak in their own voice about their experience in their field of expertise and its assumptions, constraints, and possibilities. An interesting trio of overlapping approaches to this prompt has emerged in the following nine essays. Some offer what could be seen as normative ideals, whether current or corrective, for how a field should be practiced and what its aims should be. Others grapple with what Sheldon Pollock here calls “the conundrum of comparison.” Comparison and/or analogy have represented practices of knowledge formation at least as early as Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, but the assumptions embedded in the practices have not often been articulated with the complexity they deserve. Another group of essays more or less explodes what we think we know, whether it’s statistical inferences underlying scientific “discoveries” or the simple unknowability of the systems of thought that resulted in the Andean use of quipus in lieu of written records. The common thread here is the necessity of context and complexity in our approach to any form of knowing; it seems fair to say that any form of knowing cannot exist on its own, that it cannot be, as it were, a Platonic idea utterly unaffected by the mundane practices going on down here on earth. That is hardly news (though at times humanists have unjustly charged scientists with believing it), especially in an era in which the ideas of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault have themselves become normative to an extent we don’t always realize. Many humanists who disavow deconstruction nevertheless have no problem with finding loose threads, as Jacques Derrida did, in literary and philosophical works and may even value those threads as residues of an unspoken intention, gestalt, cultural fault line, and so forth.Cleaving roughly to the order of the table of contents, we begin our introduction with what sounds like a traditional pair of adversaries, philosophical and literary knowledge, which have fought it out ever since Plato denigrated literature and rhetoric as lower forms of knowledge. Philosophic and literary claims to knowledge find here their respective advocates in Martha C. Nussbaum and Victoria Kahn—though the nature of the claims at stake has very much changed. In a dramatically non-Platonic move, Kahn suggests that the critique of Western literature has always been about the question of literature’s relationship to knowledge, rather than a dismissal of it. The gulf that Plato created between truth-seeking and imitation precisely set these two poles as the terms of the debate, though the “aboutness” that characterizes works of art is also a dimension of Plato’s format, the fictional dialogues that launch the supposed split between literature and philosophy. Aristotle’s rejoinder repositioned the poles by reframing the problem not in terms of truth value but in terms of the wide realms of the probable and the narrow channels of historical fact. Because the knowledge conferred by literature is now associated with the former, literature can disassociate itself from history and mimesis to rejoin philosophy in its claims. And after the Greeks, Christianity would pursue the question about what literature knows, often by invoking divine authorization to sidestep the relationship between fiction and morality.If Kahn sees a degree of “literariness” as the cure for philosophy’s propensity to regard itself as clearing the only path to truth, Nussbaum would rather gather the other disciplines under philosophy’s umbrella. Her question is: What can philosophy do for humankind? Nussbaum’s review of the capabilities approach leads to a discussion of how philosophy can enrich the three main capabilities of the individual: basic, internal, and combined (the internal capabilities plus external conditions that make choice available). Philosophy needs to address this responsibility by first of all adopting a style of writing accessible to the great number rather than to a coterie alone: that is precisely the choice imposed on such thinkers as Rousseau and Mill, for whom the path to an academic career was blocked. Nussbaum believes that philosophers also need to make common cause with practitioners of other disciplines—law, literature, economics, religion, development, and medicine, for example. Such interdisciplinarity makes possible the shock of new knowledge, or of old knowledge seen from a new point of view, and accomplishes the more even distribution of philosophy’s traditional virtues: critique of principles, far-ranging attention to consequences, a promise to evaluate all arguments on an equitable basis. By stepping outside its traditional linguistic and cultural bounds, moreover, philosophy will better serve human life. Here is a prescription that has roots not so much in Aristotle as in the Hellenistic philosophers, who nevertheless (while concerned with the quality of human life) could never have seen past their own particular blinders to a universalization of a set of values for all human beings.Haun Saussy and Sheldon Pollock represent not so much an ancient struggle around the locus of truth value as the increasingly modern struggle of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic translatability of knowledge forms. Speaking as an inveterate language learner and committer of linguistic blunders (his own words), Saussy in his amusing yet serious essay advocates for language instruction as a type of intellectual work. What we learn when acquiring a language is not just the vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, and other pieces of verbal machinery of interest to linguists, but schemes of tacit knowledge, reservoirs of concepts and attitudes, incipient arguments and gestures. Languages embody knowledge, and speakers embody languages. In a country like the United States, colonized over the short period of three hundred years by speakers of a mere handful of languages, language loss is something of a common history, not only for the speakers of hundreds of unrecorded Native American idioms, but for the former Germans, Swedes, Czechs, Slovaks, and Japanese who were pressured to abandon their home languages in the “Americanization” campaigns of World Wars I and II as well. Saussy’s defense of language learning, always a threatened component of American school and college curricula, implies a defense of translation as well. Translation is to be taken, not as a substitute for the work in its original language, but as a record of the struggle to bring it across in a new language. (As Mark Twain put it: “Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil.”)Pollock shifts the scene from language in particular to the assumptions of cross-cultural comparison more generally. His charming confession of befuddlement about how one should go about such a thing in the first place must echo with many of us who strive to incorporate such elements into our work. It’s fine, he says, to describe our goal as “[making] discoveries through different ways of seeing things,” but who are the discoverers, and how do they account for the inevitable and usually invisible frameworks they use to categorize what they learn? The notion of learning through comparison, of course, has a fine Western pedigree from antiquity to Kant and beyond. Everywhere knowledge emerges as the product of comparison of some thing to another thing, “both as to sameness and difference.” To quote Pollock’s quotation of Nietzsche, “What do people actually take knowledge to be? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something unfamiliar is to be traced back to something familiar.” And how familiar those words, that idea, is! After all, the Greek houtos ekeinos means precisely “this is that,” a process that for Aristotle underpins both simile and syllogism. Instead of comparison, then, Pollock asks, why not push for “comparativism”? This does not refer to the capture of processes of mutuality, where interactions of case a and case b cause exchanges and influences on both sides. Rather, the term is meant to cast doubt on the normativity of the standards being used in the comparison in the first place. If we take recourse to the (familiar) tale of the elephant and his retinue of blind gropers, instead of one man claiming an elephant is a tail, another a bulky mass, another a long tube with a hole at one end, and so forth, we might now ask: What does it mean to privilege touch as the standard in this case? Why the choice of an elephant to represent the unseen whole? Why parts rather than continuities? Why did no one smell the elephant? And why do we find the story meaningful rather than ridiculous? Do we believe reality is a whole of which we perceive parts? As Pollock concludes, “Better comparison requires exhuming the hidden standard against which we measure all things, bringing its illicit paradigmaticity to consciousness.” (And who could resist adding: Freud would surely approve of the metaphors here. But that’s our problem.)Our next dance partners are Ada Palmer and Robert J. Richards, both historians, both dealing here with traditional issues in historiography—teleology, progress, and the role of the individual in effecting large-scale events. Palmer, whose professional beat is the period of the Renaissance, waves as a caution Butterfield’s little book on Whig history, which warns against the assumption that past events prefigure a determinate goal. Whiggish historians, like Hume and Macaulay, were wont to embed a teleological inevitability into particular trajectories, those that led to “superior endpoints,” especially the kind of achievements enjoyed in Western societies. Palmer thus signals the dangers of making the easy judgment that history records a progressive development from a darkened age to a more enlightened one. She does, nonetheless, recognize certain historical changes, particularly in science, as meeting a reasonable criterion for progressive advance. Richards, by contrast, edges self-consciously close to Whiggism. As a historian of science, he emphasizes that historical narratives are constructed to explain past events and that those end-events become the historian’s guiding light. Such illumination allows the historian to pick out from the antecedent welter of causes those that led to the end-events, and so explain them. Thus, the historian, in Richards’s view, cannot escape a level of teleological projection. He also argues that there is nothing wrong in judging Galileo or Darwin to have had insights superior to that of their competitors and so to have prepared the way for more modern science. He supposes that great advancements in science and intellectual affairs have almost always been associated with contributions of genius, even if those contributions have been founded on less-celebrated achievements. In this sense, both Palmer and Richards restore a certain integrity to the study of biography as the study of history, both focusing on history and causality, and perhaps offering us an optimistic way to face the next few decades.The context of knowledge formation was invoked in our first paragraph, and in this connection Timothy Reiss’s essay offers a bravura performance of context awareness that follows a trail from Descartes to his unexpected partner in thought formation, the cassowary. Reiss introduces his essay with the theoretician’s dilemma: how do we adjust the general categories constructed through “figurative thinking and symbolic imagination” to the particularities of local context and the sources of a subject’s thought? Here, the individual subject of Reiss’s concern is Descartes. He lifts Descartes’s mask of an isolated and autonomous figure to reveal a face deeply lined by worries about continental war and religious strife. The clue to a reconstruction of Descartes’s worries comes in a remark the young philosopher made about serving in the army of Maurice of Nassau among idle and licentious fellows. Reiss cashes out this remark in currency from another soldier, who observed that the life of the cadet consisted in tobacco, wine, and Casuart, the latter being a strange French term meaning “gluttony.” Reiss traces the use of the word through the Dutch, Portuguese, and finally Spanish, where at root it means “the cassowary.” Now why the bird should become transformed into gluttony is a tale that leads through many turns till it lands in the Canary Islands and becomes, through a multistage figurative adjustment, a symbol for “the gluttony for empire” and “imperialist aggression.” The lesson for the literary theorist, as exemplified by this tale, is that one must take seriously the material context in which thinking occurs.Our last set of essays may seem very different from each other—one on the problems of statistical evidence, the other on Inka quipus—but they share a fundamental concern with the problem of not knowing (and perhaps thinking one does). Adam Morton points to the extraordinary amount of statistical evidence embedded in scientific claims of various kinds, and suggests that the failings of this methodology in the hands of scientists untrained in statistical complexity may contribute to the widespread public skepticism about topics such as global warming. The charges: motivation in selecting the criteria for investigation, the problem of nonreplicability of experiments, the “smoothing over” of complexity by the generalization around the laws of nature, the journalistic bias toward the spectacular rather than the mundane. These are all features of the problem, but Morton singles out two in particular: lack of experience in statistics and academic deference toward those with authority. One solution, he suggests, would be for philosophers rather than scientists to wrestle with problems of real-world belief formation. Here an important commonality with Nussbaum’s essay is precisely the need for philosophers to intervene in “real life,” and the multiple ways in which that may be defined.Gary Urton’s exhilarating essay on the quipu rounds out this issue of KNOW (or as he might call it, KNOW KNOTHING). In discussing his research on the quipu, knotted strings of Inka culture, he notes that these artifacts have generally been interpreted as representing a system of record-keeping (much like the origin of writing in the West, the Phoenician marks used in maritime trading). And yet, in their own records, the Spanish invaders repeatedly claimed that at least some quipus contained royal biographies, tales of conquest, and other constructions that map onto what we call narrative rather than record-keeping. (Does this call to mind the genres of history versus annals? Another dangerous Western analogy, perhaps.) At present we are only able to read the quantitative quipus, conveniently in base-10—though as Urton’s work has uncovered, it seems clear that some quipus do in fact represent what we might call nonquantitative information. Of what sort? We don’t know. And how? Color? Yarn? Knot complexity and placement? Texture? We don’t know that either. We don’t even know if knowing the difference between what we call truth from what we call fiction mattered to this culture. We do know that the quipu grammar of knots and strings represents a conceptually novel expansion of what we think of as forms of knowledge storage (writing, images, sounds) even as the use of yarn invites comparison to the early use of weaving metaphors to represent social harmony in the West, while the straight lines of the strings emanating from the circular “necklace” befuddle Western clichés of history (or epic) as teleological, and other forms of representation as cyclical. Meanwhile, what does it mean to use the same “sign” for numbers and for concepts? How does our alphabetic bias hold us back from seeing (given that tactility holds but a meager position in our metaphors of knowing)? How is causality represented, if at all, in a system that seems to have started out numerically? As Urton points out, “perhaps their own tradition of rationality was constructed around a merging of visual and tactile stimuli that produced a form of what we term ‘knowing’ that was wholly different from anything Westerners have experienced and, therefore, that we have the mental wiring to recognize, much less to interpret meaningfully. After all, among the five ancient, ‘pristine’ civilizations—commonly taken to include Mesopotamia, Egypt, Shang China, the Mayas, and Inkas—only the Inkas did not invent or use the wheel, markets, or (graph-based) writing, otherwise the sine qua nons of civilization.”This thought, and the avenues it opens up when we think about yarn, must direct our attention to our common use of yarn as a tool for closing off, rather than opening, some objects in our culture, especially in gift exchange. Consider the impeccable yarn knot tied around Polly Geller’s box—to close it? But surely only ironically—and her disarming second-person address to a translation that takes on an identity invokes an elephant in the room, and invites us to think of Mesoamerica, refugees, and vision. What’s in the box? Is our state of knowledge waiting for a Godot? He won’t come, of course. We know that from before. But why is that knowledge a gift? Meanwhile, we can wonder how the (k)not of Geller’s yarn erased “salut” into “slut.” Someone must have persuaded a woman to wait for Godot, and eagerly, and of course in California, where we’d all prefer to do our waiting for Godot, God, and any context-free metaphysics. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge Volume 1, Number 2Fall 2017Reflections on Disciplinary Knowledge Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693450 © 2017 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.