Is knowledge overrated? Many philosophers think so. They have been convinced by the horrors of 20th century totalitarianism that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is not only dangerous but ruinous for humanity. This mistrust of knowledge – particularly scientific knowledge – now percolates throughout the humanities.
If there is anything resembling an unassailable doxa in the humanities, it is the following: absolute truth is a totalitarian ideal and the desire to know everything harbours a murderous impulse. We should give up our Platonic obsession with knowing the reality behind appearances and appreciate instead the multifaceted ambiguity of appearances, as well as the plurality of perspectives on the world. These have become familiar tenets of postmodern skepticism.
But skepticism is as old as philosophy and its resurgence in the second half of the 20th century needs to be put into historical perspective. Doubt about the fundamental worth of knowledge is always a symptom of a culture experiencing a crisis of self-confidence and our epoch is no different in this regard. The memory of technologically implemented genocide and the looming threat of ecological catastrophe stoke our postmodern disillusionment with knowledge.
This disillusionment threatens to metastasize into full-blown cognophobia. For an influential strand of 20th century European philosophy, it is not only the ideal of knowledge but also the desire to know which is essentially culpable: from Nietzsche, through Heidegger and Adorno, to Levinas, the desire to know is identified with the desire to subjugate. Knowledge prefigures violence. This hyperbolic – and implicitly theological – equivalence urges us to abandon an ideal of knowledge that is not merely unattainable but dangerous.
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