The association of knowledge with interests that guide its development and transmission brings to the fore the question of emancipation: in what sense are we, in what sense can we be free?  In a nutshell, since our way of experiencing and acting in the world has been structured by interests, our very perceptions and actions are the means by which we are being mobilized to pursue those interests.  So, how can we be free?  How can we be our own persons?

I find it helpful to keep in mind that we can consider our place in the world only after we have acquired a stock of knowledge, after we have developed sufficiently, typically by the time we have become adults.  By that time, we have of course been extensively tutored by others into what to perceive and how to conduct ourselves, we have acquired a stock of knowledge through which we consider our place in the world.  In other words, we have been socialized as members of communities, and we have been made in quite specific ways.

In a previous posting (The Structure of the Knower), I brought up two general interests that guide this socialization, one being the stability and continuation of the community we are being socialized into, another being our own interest in belonging to a community.  Our well-being and even our survival depends on being socialized and assimilated into a community, and, usually, the stability of the community is in our own interest as well.  Depending on the community we are members of, each one of us is raised to have a different stock of knowledge, suited to the survival and well-being of the community as well as of ourselves.  And these stocks of knowledge can be radically different.  It takes a particular stock of knowledge to survive as member of a hunter-gatherer community living in a jungle, a different one for a member of a settled farming community living by growing crops, another for a member of a nomadic pastoralist community living by the husbandry of cattle, yet another for a city dweller living by manipulating symbols.  Even within a single community, members may be socialized differently, acquiring very different stocks of knowledge.  The most familiar and virtually universal case is the differences in socialization according to male and female gender, with members being socialized into distinct male and female roles.  In populous societies with a large number of occupations, each requiring a different stock of knowledge, there are corresponding differences in socialization, say, for farmers, carpenters, ironsmiths, nurses, computer engineers, jurists, and so on.  The same considerations apply of course with regard to religions and our socialization into a religious community (or none at all), and extend to the adherence to particular diets (well-known examples include vegetarianism, or not eating pork or beef).

In very many cases, the roles our community makes available to each one of us at birth, that is, the possible stocks of knowledge to be socialized with and the kind of person we can become, are very limited.  This is fairly clear in the case of gender socialization into male and female roles (with usually no allowances made for intersex or other non-binary possibilities), as well as in the case of a religious upbringing, when someone is raised as, say, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim.  It is also evident in cases where the children are raised to follow in their parents’ occupation – for example, the son of the carpenter becomes a carpenter, of the farmer a farmer, the children of cleaners become cleaners – without much of a choice.  The whole society may be organized in castes, with the families belonging to a caste practicing a circumscribed range of occupations specific to that caste.  And even in contemporary western societies, whether someone ends up as unskilled laborer, an hourly worker, or as an educated office worker, an engineer, a physician, may well be the result of one’s birth and early schooling.  One’s station in life may be due to an accident of birth.

We do not choose the community we initially grow up as members of, we do not even choose our initial station within that community.  In other words, we do not choose our initial stock of knowledge, what we are initially made as.  More than that, each and every one of us is under pressure to perform the functions and play the roles we have been raised into, to conform to the expectations, to the standards of our community.  Communities exert strong pressures to ensure conformity, pressures that involve rewards and sanctions, rewards that range from mild approval to celebrity status, and sanctions that range from mild disapproval to brutal violence.  Most of us are more or less content with following the ways of our community, with conforming to expectations; after all, this is the means through which we participate in the life of the community, have a sense of belonging, are proud of who we have been made to be.  For the ones of us who are not content however, the pressure to conduct oneself within the spectrum of options afforded by the community, the pressure to conform, may feel oppressive and suffocating.  Especially because it is a pressure that is exerted not only by external means such as material rewards and sanctions, but also through the internalization of communal norms, through the shaping of our experience of the world and of our place and purpose in it.  The pressure to conform is also coming from within ourselves, from who we have been made to be.

The answer to the question about how we can be free is now straightforward: emancipation refers to freedom from the pressure to conform to the ways of our community, freedom to pursue our own choices and ways, guided by what we consider important and worthy and value.  We can always put effort into doing things in a different way, into trying to bring about a new way of living and experiencing the world, guided by our own interests. Reality is in excess and the knowledge imparted through our upbringing, the knowledge of our culture, does not exhaust the world; the way we have been made does not exhaust us.  Our resources for emancipation are to be found in the vast excess of reality, its independence from human knowledge.  So, we have the latitude to try to develop knowledge guided by our own interests, fashion our own way of being in the world.  Of course, there is no guarantee that we will be successful in our efforts, and we might very well fail.  Pursuing our own interests and choices is not easy.

Emancipation of course amounts to very different things depending on the individual stock of knowledge and on the options available in the milieu we find ourselves in, on who one is and who they want to be.  Emancipation will amount to different things for a woman in a male-dominated profession or community; for an unskilled laborer wishing better pay and working conditions; for someone living in a small rural tightly-knit community; for someone who finds (or loses, or changes) religion; or for a meat-eater becoming a vegetarian.  The break with the ways we assimilated through our upbringing and the pursuit of our own choices and ways will be guided by our own station in life and our own individual interests.  Emancipation may be an individual pursuit, but, as in situations where interests for a change are widely shared, it may also be a collective one, pursued through mass organization and mobilization.

If our interests diverge from those of our community, pursuing our own ways will involve a struggle against the demands of the community, along with a struggle to learn a different way of life, a struggle to discipline ourselves in novel ways, along channels different from those we were raised.  We might find however that our own interests overlap plenty with those we were raised to express – we might even be happily unaware of the confluence of our interests with those of our community.  In such a case our community might offer us all the choices we want, and we can channel our efforts accordingly; emancipation would not be a concern of ours.

As the previous post discussed, our experience of the world is organized by the interests that have guided our knowledge, the knowledge that our experience relies on.  At the same time, this knowledge of the world is embodied in us, the subject of knowledge, the knower (point #3 in Compass).  In other words, the knower has been shaped by the interests that have guided the knowledge their experience relies on.  We have been made per those interests, we reflect those interests.  This shaping of the knower, of each and every one of us, is the outcome of the disciplining that our experience relies on: we, the knowers, have been disciplined to know (Knowledge, Ability, Discipline).

We are well aware of this relationship between who we are and our specific way of experiencing the world: we are products of a long process of socialization, a socialization into the ways of our community.  This socialization begins early on, as we learn to discern particular features of our environment and direct our actions towards them, as we learn how to communicate through language, as we assimilate social roles and behaviors, and as we learn skills to earn a living.  We see the particularities of aspects of our socialization when we notice the finely-grained categorization of family relations in Mandarin Chinese (Family Relations), the differences of Hanunoo color categorizations (A Color Perception Example), or the bodily experience of marital problems among Hindu women (Ardhanarishvara).  Different socialization can result in radical differences in the ways we engage with and comprehend the world, a point beautifully expressed by Michel Foucault in the preface of The Order of Things: “… the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that … is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

We are socialized by assimilating a stock of given knowledge, knowledge that is shared by the members of our community, knowledge that supports shared ways of experiencing and orienting ourselves in the world.  The stable organization and cohesiveness of our community is maintained through widespread agreements on what to produce, what to consume, what is valuable, what is proper behavior, what may be unacceptable, and so on.  We are socialized and made in ways that promote the stability and advancement of our communities.

Our socialization into a community is guided by two fairly obvious kinds of interests:

First, there are the interests of the community, reflecting the necessity of the maintenance of its organization and cohesiveness.  These interests guide the generation of shared knowledge and its transmission through socialization, knowledge that makes us, so that we can be members of the community.  This supports the sharing of a common life, of life as members of the same community, and ensures our mobilization for the needs of the community.

Second, there is our own personal interest that guides our socialization, our own interest in belonging.  In the early life of each one of us, when, as infants and children, are completely dependent on adults, we strive to engage and interact with others.  We actively seek to be socialized, to assimilate the ways of the people we depend on, and becoming a member of their community is necessary for our survival and growth.  As we grow older, we often seek to become a member of communities we develop an interest in – perhaps for learning a trade, for joining a profession, for pursuing access to resources, or simply for finding company to do things together with.  We learn and become socialized into the ways of the community we want to join, so that we can be accepted as members.  In the diverse contemporary societies, we frequently find ourselves belonging to and participating in several different communities we share things with, for example, from language, religion, cultural traditions or rituals, to the skills of our trade, affiliation with political parties, membership in sports and other clubs, or hobbies.

In our daily life we experience the world as a structured, organized environment within which we go on living, pursuing our affairs.  The structure of the world appears obvious to us, we take it for granted, we do not even notice it unless it is somehow disrupted, unless the world fails to conform to our expectations.  Our experience of the world as a structured environment is of course the expression of our knowledge, of our ability to perceive and act in this environment.  This knowledge and ability, which we have acquired through socialization into our community (Knowledge, ability, discipline), constitutes our own structure, the structure of the knower, it amounts to who we are.  And, as discussed previously, the structure of the world and the structure of the knower reflect each other (Compass).

The previous postings (Knowledge and Interests) however have also pointed out that knowledge is interested, is always associated with specific interests.  Knowledge has to be of use in order to be developed, be maintained, and be transmitted across generations.  Interests drive the tremendous effort required for developing the knowledge, the knowledge that underpins our experience of a structured world; interests also drive the tremendous effort expended for transmitting knowledge across generations.

Because the development, maintenance, and transmission of knowledge require effort, the structured, organized ways in which we experience our world reflect this effort and the interests that drove and drive it.  So, our experience of the world reflects interests that guided — and continue to guide — the knowledge that this experience is based on.  The maintenance and transmission of knowledge also maintains and transmits the associated interests.

Taking a look at how these considerations play out in our everyday life nowadays, most of us, for example, do not grow our own food.  In order to obtain food, we depend on the knowledge of the ones who produce it, as well as on that of the ones who transport and distribute it, not to mention the ones who regulate and check its quality.  The knowledge that food production is based on has developed over thousands of years and continues to be developed, offering a wide range of choices in terms of diet and lifestyle.  Nowadays, depending on availability and access, one can be vegetarian or vegan, limit oneself to ‘organic’ or non-genetically-modified food, food processed in a manner consistent with certain religious customs, food of a range of qualities and tastes, prepared at home or at a restaurant, and so on.  Our interest in nourishment, along with our interest in particular lifestyles (including, for example, ‘healthy living’ or adherence to certain religious practices) guides the development of our own personal knowledge for seeking and obtaining food.  These interests and knowledge of ours coordinate with the interests and knowledge of those who maintain the networks that make available to us the food we seek.

We can approach in the same vein our health, for example, whether we strive to develop a ‘healthy lifestyle’ in terms of diet, exercise and daily activities, whether we depend on mainstream medical experts for advice and treatment, or whether we seek the advice of non-mainstream alternative medicine experts.  We can also look at our communication with each other and our use of different communication media and gadgets, or our movement from place to place and our use of different means of transportation… And so on, and so forth…

The structure of the world we live in, the structure we experience, is organized by interests: interests that structure our environment in specific ways, guiding our perceptions and behavior; interests associated with the knowledge imparted to us during our socialization in particular communities.  And along with these, there are also our own interests that drive the development of knowledge through our own individual efforts and experience.

The association of knowledge with interests, that knowledge is always developed through guidance by interests, might begin to make one nervous.  We all depend on the specialized knowledge of others for our daily lives.  We depend on the ones who produce our food, on the ones who work the networks that transport and make it available to us, and also on inspectors who check on it at every stage, to make sure it is safe and is what it purports to be.  Same for our water supply, the places we live and dwell in, the removal of waste, sanitation, energy.  Not to mention the experts who work to provide us with health care and medicines, lawyers who assist us with navigating the framework of rules our societies are organized with, and so on and on and on…  We are all familiar with difficult situations when we have found ourselves in need of expert assistance.  Situations that can range from a leaky pipe in our house, or from a problem with our car, to illness.  Does the whole wall have to come down?  Does the car really need a new engine?  How serious is my illness and how appropriate or effective is the proposed treatment?  We cannot even judge whether the approach to our problem suggested by experts is relevant, feasible, how risky, or even how likely to succeed.  And we also realize that experts rely on making their expertise relevant to our problems in order to make a living.  Hence the well-worn advice to always seek a second expert opinion.

Our survival basically depends on the specialized knowledge, on the expertise of others.  At the same time, the survival of the ones with the specialized knowledge, of the experts themselves, depends on their expertise being useful, or at least being perceived of being useful, by the rest of us.  We are quite well aware of this need; we understand the interest of the experts in having their expert knowledge being actually used.  The awareness that experts have a vital interest in their knowledge being used makes us even more nervous.  We are all quite concerned about depending on someone else’s expert knowledge, as we usually have no way of evaluating that knowledge on our own.  Our concerns appear to be well-founded, as many times expert knowledge fails us.  Sometimes the failure is due to incompetence, for example when a medical doctor prescribes the wrong treatment per the standards of medical practice, or a driver fails to reduce speed and the train derails.  Sometimes the failure is due to fraud, for example when an engineer knowingly uses materials that are not up to specifications to build a house, or a car computer’s software has been adjusted to falsely indicate compliance with regulations.  Sometimes the failure is due to the limitations of expert knowledge.  After all, even authoritative expert knowledge changes with time, as, for example, is the case for medical advice for the treatment of certain conditions or the efficacy of particular drugs.

Expert knowledge is the result of a vast amount of hard work engaging with the material world.  It takes the sustained effort of many individuals to develop a field of specialized knowledge; effort that takes place over many years, decades, centuries even, with knowledge accumulating and transmitted across generations.  Individual experts do not rely on their own personal experience to tackle every challenge, or develop all their expert knowledge from scratch; they rely instead on the work and experience of previous generations and the training by older experts.  In short, expertise requires the existence of a community of experts, a community that persists over time.  Communities of experts maintain themselves by recruiting new members, training and socializing them into the specialized knowledge, the practices, the ways of the community.  The hard work required for the development and maintenance of expertise does not allow the experts to make a living independently and so the support of expert communities by the broader society is necessary.

These considerations highlight the interests that guide the development and maintenance of all expert knowledge.  Expert knowledge has to be promoted, valorized, and accepted as useful by society at large.  In addition, a community of experts has to be supported and maintained long-term, it has to persist across generations.  So, expert knowledge has to be integrated into the life of the broader society, and a sufficient number of experts has to be trained on a continuous basis.  Several expert communities have been eminently successful at achieving this.  The relevance of expertise in different areas of Physics, Chemistry or Biology for contemporary life is fairly obvious when we note the widespread use of, say, electronic devices, all sorts of synthetic chemicals, or genetically modified organisms.  Another obviously relevant area is Medicine, with regular health check-ups as well as diagnostic tests being strongly promoted by medical experts.  Accounting, Engineering, Agronomy, Geology, Sociology, Philology, Education, … the list of areas of expertise relevant to contemporary life is fairly long.  Again, for a field of expertise to stick around, it has to maintain its relevance for the broader society and new experts have to be produced continuously.  Otherwise, the particular experts will not be able to make a living, new experts will not be trained, and the particular expert knowledge will be lost.  Manual typesetting for printing, photographic film development, stenography, are a few examples of skills (and expertise) that are much less relevant nowadays or have even disappeared.  Many artisanal skills for example have disappeared with the mass production of goods, and many more may be lost with the advent of machine learning and automation.

It is not surprising that expert communities place a lot of emphasis on and put a lot of effort towards maintaining their relevance for the broader society.  In contemporary societies, a major way by which expert communities have advanced their interests is professionalization.  Professionalization promotes the establishment of training and performance standards for the particular expertise and safeguards the survival of the expert community within the broader society.  “Turf wars” among specialists for who gets to fulfill the needs of the broader society – and reap the corresponding rewards – are a common occurrence.  Conflicts among medical and nursing specialists, or among ophthalmologists and optometrists, or conflicts regarding who can inspect buildings, goods, accounting records… and so on.

The above considerations readily apply to scientific knowledge and expertise.  For fields of scientific expertise to survive, they have to maintain their broader relevance, and they have to keep training students to replenish their pool of experts.  Failure to do so results in the shrinking of the pool of experts and the eventual disappearance of the field of expertise.

Virtually all of the examples I have given before about learning and knowledge show them as goal-oriented, linked to the achievement of specific goals, developed with particular purposes in mind.  I learned how to use chopsticks so I could eat with them; Bian’s knowledge, including its unverbalizable dimensions, is for the express purpose of making wheels; I learn a language in order to communicate; Conklin learned how to discriminate colors as the Hanunoo did so that he could live with them; a student learns how to measure the color of an object scientifically so that she can become a scientist – and before that, several people wanted to measure the color of an object independently of place and time, in a standardized way that is, so that they could coordinate their practices across space and time; and so on.

Knowledge is always linked with the pursuit of specific interests, it is interested.

This aspect of knowledge, that it is associated with the pursuit of interests, is not surprising. I already hinted at this aspect of knowledge when discussing the importance of socialization for the coordination of community life and activities.  And with Science being a social activity, with scientific knowledge being developed by scientific communities, the point holds for scientific knowledge as well.  As I have highlighted before, we learn what we know through our socialization into a community, our knowledge is part and parcel of the way of life in the community, it expresses local aspirations and purposes, solutions to local problems and concerns.  The development of knowledge within a community is guided by the need to coordinate community life and activities, the need to maintain the community.  So, knowledge expresses the interests of the community within which it is developed; knowledge is interested.

But there is another more important reason that knowledge always expresses specific interests, even if we think beyond socialization and the association of knowledge with particular communities.  Knowledge is developed within a reality that is everywhere, always in excess.  Of course it takes effort to know, that is, to develop and establish a stable interaction with the material world; but with the material world being in excess, there are many ways in establishing such stable interactions.  So, the activity toward the development of knowledge has to be guided somehow, has to look for specifics, has to select particular patterns, and this looking and selection is informed by local goals, purposes, interests.  Different selections across cultures result in differences in the development of knowledge.  An example in point are cultural differences in color discrimination, with Hanunoo color categories being a particularly striking one.  Another example would be sound discrimination across languages, and I still remember my difficulty distinguishing between “cut” and “cat” in English, as Greek, with which I grew up, has a single “a” sound.  Greek also has a single tone, making my learning of Mandarin Chinese with its four tones an instructive challenge.  Gestalt pictures offer another way to make the point.

Sometimes the first steps toward developing new knowledge begin with play, with tinkering around with things we are familiar with, arranging them in different ways, seeing what stable patterns might emerge.  But from the stable patterns that emerge even during play, we do eventually settle on particular ones that suddenly appear interesting – say, for pursuing a goal or connecting with our existing knowledge.  So, knowledge is always developed informed by interests.  At the same time, knowledge reflects a stable pattern of interaction with the material world – regardless of its development in association with interests, it works!  Precisely because knowledge reflects a stable interaction with the material world, it can be repurposed, linked with novel interests, be used to pursue different goals from the original ones.  Examples abound: the knowledge that underpins today’s internet for example originated in association with military interests – to network computers for military purposes; it has obviously been repurposed in very many ways.

Although in general we recognize that knowledge may sometimes be developed in accordance with particular interests, we may also feel that it is possible that knowledge can be disinterested.  That somehow knowledge can be developed so that it just reflects a stable interaction with the material world, nothing more.  The notion that Science actually provides the way to develop such interest-free knowledge appears to be fairly widespread, so I will be addressing this issue in detail in the following post.

We are now in a position to consider the possibility as well as desirability of change, that is, are there better ways of understanding and being in the world?

To begin with, the pursuit of change requires significant effort in order to engage with our world in novel ways.  Change requires that we successfully discipline ourselves along new dimensions, so that we perceive the world and conduct ourselves in novel ways.  It amounts to establishing a new way of being in the world and experiencing the world in new ways.  In other words, a change in our understanding of the world goes hand-in-hand with a change in ourselves, in who we are: a changed understanding of the world is accomplished by a changed human being.

However, the possibility of change is not considered in a vacuum.  The question of change cannot be asked in the absence of knowledge, and knowledge is indexical, specific to our socialization, our environment, and our own individual life experiences.  Growing up we were socialized into a particular community, lived and live within a particular environment and social milieu, and experience the world through particular frameworks. We already know, we have been disciplined, were made to know and act in such-and-such a way.  So, here is the rub: our notions of what may comprise a better understanding of our world, what way of life to aspire to, are informed by who we already are, indeed, they are an expression of who we already are.  Not too surprisingly, we might actually wish for incompatible things, we might even be conflicted about our aspirations.

Then, how are we to proceed, how are we to evaluate our current ways, including what we have been socialized into, and decide towards what to put our efforts in?  As I wrote before, our socialization rarely provides us with tools for such an endeavor.  A most important goal of our socialization – our disciplining through socialization – is to mobilize us for the needs of our community: our perceptions of the world and our actions are actively guided and coordinated to produce social organization and ensure its stability. 

The Compass provides specific guidance: we actually know who we are.  We are in a very concrete sense projected onto the world, as we experience reality through features we have been shaped to recognize, to latch on, to orient ourselves and act accordingly.  We can literally see who we are from how we perceive and act.  Being aware of our knowledge, of who we are, allows us to probe how we acquired it and evaluate it.  Was it through our schooling?  From our parents?  From our peers or maybe from some ‘authority’ appearing in the mass media?  And where does it come from?  How much and what kind of human effort went into developing it?  Is what we know an expression of wishful thinking?  Was it something we were inculcated with to facilitate our integration into and mobilization for our community?  Or does it reflect the outcome of human effort, perhaps our own?  Of course, we cannot personally evaluate each and every bit and facet of the human knowledge that maintains our everyday lives, or even our own knowledge that underlies our daily experience.  But we can have a pretty decent sense if not where our knowledge is coming from, at least of how well we understand its origins.  And if we deem something as being of particular significance, we can always probe and look into it further.

Our experience of the world provides the feedback we need for evaluating our efforts towards change.  As we put effort into doing things in a different way, say, learn new skills or make new friends, our knowledge changes, we change, and we can see how we change from the new ways in which we experience the world.  The extent of change will of course be commensurate with the effort, the extent and type of effort, we put into it.  We are what we do.