Knowledge that Shapes Us, Tools that Possess Us
Detached Intellectuals?
Note: A really quick Sunday evening contemplation on our use of tools of ‘knowledge’ and their possible repercussions upon us.
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Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim
The modern world harbours a comforting ‘belief’ that knowledge is a collection of tools laid out before us. We imagine ourselves as technicians and analysts standing in the workshop of the world, picking up an idea, a theory, a technique, or mental tricks we can use at will, manipulating them for our purposes, and laying them back down unchanged by the tools we use.
This is the persistent myth of the detached intellectual. But tools do not leave the hand that uses them unchanged. It is not that we possess an idea and manipulate it, the idea also possesses us. It subtly arranges our perceptions, influences our judgments, and selects what we notice and what we may intentionally or unintentionally blind ourselves to. Every intellectual tool, philosophical system, scientific method, ideology, technology, even language, acts back upon the user. It is never the case that we simply think through concepts, because concepts also teach us how to think and shape the very manner in which we view the world we inhabit. Our supposed ‘objectivity’ is subject to the logic and the resonant impact of the things we imagine we command.
And in our technological societies, knowledge treated as commodity (as raw information or data trees to be traversed or fixed methodologies) or as tools for technical mastery, stand in danger of reducing us to the status of peripherals connected to a machine. In these digital times, faced with reams of data that a computer can superficially analyze, the rapidity of computer analysis paralyzes our own ability to synthesize meaning. It can turn us into nodes in a network, fractionated creatures unable to deal with the information deluge to which we are persistently subjected such that our minds circulate within the limits of containers made up of structures and mental tools we are taught are important.
In a sense we are ‘modern moderns’ who feel we have expansive knowledge about the world, but who know next to nothing about our own souls. We think we are free, but we are in many ways primarily instruments of our environment.
The environment is not neutral. Knowledge is not neutral. It is not an inventory of facts or a traversal tree of data points and digital-style logic. If anything, it is an act of becoming. The question is, what are we becoming? We do not merely see reality and then become something, but what we are (what tools we use and our method of acquisition) determines what reality becomes visible to us and what we are capable of perceiving.
There is a daunting responsibility to consciousness if what we know determines what we become, and if what we become determines what we are capable of seeing, of envisioning. Surely truth is not just something to be stored away in a digital file, or a series of factoids lodged in memory, but a meta-signifier capable of shaping the depths from which we speak and act in the world, and the way we deal with one another through our shared humanity in the hope of moving towards that which liberates our being.
So, can we recover wisdom in an age that has made its center of gravity the pursuit of endless data and instrumental analysis? What we know and how we choose to know it will determine whether we become dependent servants of modern machines or whether we approach deeper aspects of the human endeavour.
To truly know is to transform our existence. It demands our plenary participation, not distant observation and imagined objectivity. Perhaps it is not how much we know (not the quantity of facts and data points) but what our knowing is making of us. Every act of attention is an act of formation. We become, little by little, step by step, a reflection of the things to which we give ourselves. In that sense, knowledge is never mere ability but is destiny that emerges from what we are and what we are becoming.
-Irshaad
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