Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing

369 Pages·2019·4.956 MB·English

by  Connor, Steven

THE MADNESS OF KNOWLEDGE

STEVEN CONNOR
THE
MADNESS
OF
KNOWLEDGE
ON WISDOM,
IGNORANCE
AND
FANTASIES
OF
KNOWING
REAKTION BOOKS
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2019
Copyright © Steven Connor 2019
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78194 072 9
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
9
1 WILL TO KNOWLEDGE
46
2 KNOW THYSELF
87
3 SECRECY
134
4 QUISITION
171
5 IMPOSTURE
212
6 UNKNOWING
238
7 EPISTEMOTOPIA
274
8 EPISTEMOCRACY
302
REFERENCES
335
FURTHER READING
358
INDEX
362

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people’, Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that’, said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here.
I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be’, said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come
here.’
Alice didn’t think that proved it at all.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

INTRODUCTION
. . . never stop a Psychopath
From following his vocation!
Punch, 17 January 1885
L
ike the word ‘scientist’, put into play at the British Association
for the Advancement of Science in the early 1830s, ‘epistemology’
is a thoroughly modern word. It was proposed in the English
Review in 1847 as a translation of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre, ‘after the analogy of technology’, according to its
1
author’s explanation. It is a curious reflection that, although one
would surely have to say that the entire conception and contour of
Greek philosophy was epistemological, in the sense that it was con-
cerned with how secure and reliable knowledge was to be separated
from mere doxa, the attempt to turn knowing on to the conditions
and possibility of knowing itself seems to have had to wait until the
nineteenth century to be named, if not exactly to be known.
There were a few near misses and half-chances. In a treatise com-
pleted around 1688, though not published until 1731, Ralph Cudworth
gives us the term epistemonical, meaning something like ‘capable of
being known’. Having affirmed that ‘the Entity of all Theoretical
Truth is nothing else but Clear Intelligibility, and whatever is Clearly
Conceived, is an Entity and a Truth’, implying that falsehoods have no
positive existence at all, he assures his reader that ‘no Man ever was or
can be deceived in taking that for an Epistemonical Truth which he
clearly and distinctly apprehends, but only in Assenting to Things not
2
clearly apprehended by him’. Epistemony, signifying the condition of
9