Long post ahead:
I think we need to be really careful about what we mean when we say “know,” or refer to “knowing” or “knowledge.” Vimana is attempting to get past concepts (something I resist), but by using the word “knowledge” – as in, a subject can have nonconceptual knowledge of itself – without qualifying it, we’re miring ourselves in circular conversation.
This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consciousness:
Whether facts about experience are indeed epistemically limited in this way is open to debate (Lycan 1996), but the claim that understanding consciousness requires special forms of knowing and access from the inside point of view is intuitively plausible and has a long history (Locke 1688). Thus any adequate answer to the What question must address the epistemic status of consciousness, both our abilities to understand it and their limits (Papineau 2002, Chalmers 2003).
Questions of epistemology concern, by definition, the problem of knowledge, and this is handled in a conceptual sense. Consciousness entails conceptual investigation because it is a conceptualizing system – it responds to stimuli and sensory input in a conceptual way. By situating the subject of consciousness within a temporal flow, and installing the subject with memory, the subject of consciousness becomes aware of enjoyment and sensory pleasures in a reflexive way; that is, she can recollect that she enjoyed having sex, or eating chocolate, or (a more complex example) winning a competition, and thus will attempt to do so again. Without the subject, the central “I”, consciousness has no means of reflecting upon itself – the “I” is the window onto consciousness, but it is a window that offers only a delimited perspective, and any alteration of the perspective necessarily entails the preclusion of some other aspect (or aspects) of the system.
Without the ego, consciousness becomes a decentered system (meaning it ceases to possess a central perspective from which to contemplate); and this, in turn, means it ceases to be
conscious. This doesn’t mean it would not be complex, or even intelligent; but it would lose the capacity for knowledge, since knowledge is constituted by limits, categories, concepts, etc. This is knowledge in terms of memory and order, to know something factually – in French, the word is
savoir. We can turn to Foucault to get a better sense of the conceptual nature of savoir:
Knowledge [savoir], even under the banner of history, does not depend on “rediscovery,” and it emphatically excludes the “rediscovery of ourselves.” History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. “Effective” history leaves nothing around the self, deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
This kind of knowledge is, in its ideological application, a mode of violence for Foucault. Knowledge results in conceptual understanding, but its primary purpose (through institutions of power) is one of separation, classification, and exclusion. This process of classificatory knowledge derives from a more primitive (we might say) concept of knowledge, which Foucault calls
connaissance; this is knowledge in an individual, subjective sense, the knowledge of familiarity. Savoir is predicated upon connaissance; that is, the latter enables the former. However, it is also true that only savoir allows the cognizant subject to come into focus. Foucault thus argues that both forms of knowledge, whether individual or institutional, rest upon “injustice,” and that “the instinct for knowledge is malicious.”
This does not sound like Vimana’s “deep knowledge” (let’s call it that for now). Deep knowledge, according to him, reveals a unity between subject and object – in fact, it dissolves the subject entirely. I have no problem with this; I only have a problem with the claim that the system which underlies the subject can
know anything in the sense that we speak of. Knowing necessitates reflection, and reflection necessitates an ego. One can find a compelling argument for this in Wittgenstein’s private language argument. According to Wittgenstein, there can be no private language (i.e. a language that could not be translated into any other, but that allows the subject a direct knowledge of itself). Furthermore, the very notion of interior experiences is mediated by their arousal through language, so that nothing, no interior state can be free of linguistic contamination (I use contamination here in a neutral sense). This isn’t to say that we don’t have interior experiences, merely that in order to
know that interior experience it must pass through some kind of symbolizing apparatus. Without subjective reflection – without the ego – we would still have these experiences, but we would not
know them. Knowing is a project, or pursuit, particular to human subjectivity.
As I said, this doesn’t mean that complex systems vanish without a central ego. Niklas Luhmann has driven this point home with his work on communication – communication, that is, being a system with no central, intending subject, but only various nodes or conduits through which meaning gets generated. There is no intention or source of meaning, at least not in a subjective sense; rather, meaning happens retroactively as an effect of the system. It may be desirable at some point in the future for humans to adapt to – or toward – some kind of decentered cognitive state. However, even decentered complex systems lack totality – they are governed by infinite play, displacement, metaphor and metonymy, internal difference and disjunction… There is no legitimate scholarly regime (beyond outdated theism) that gives us any reason to believe otherwise.
Thus, a semantic intervention: I do not think that you (Vimana) can keep using the word “knowledge” as you are using it. I cannot prove a negative, so I won’t keep saying that what you experience is an illusion; but it is a convenient move to be able to say “Nothing I can say can prove that what I’m saying exists actually exists.” To offer an analogous situation, you may have come into this thread and said the following: “Hey guys, it’s true if you simply force yourself through the pain of depriving your lungs of oxygen, you’ll find that your body can actually breathe underwater.” To which we might respond, “That isn’t true at all.” You could ask us to prove that it isn’t true, but we would not be able to. Furthermore, you would say that there’s no way you can explain in words how the body does it – we would just have to experience it ourselves.
Regardless of whether our bodies would start breathing underwater, you can see how you have precluded advancing the argument or discussion in any way. It is said that the Tao cannot be directly explained; one can only indirectly access its ontology through figurative language. So, what we have here are basically philosophers trying to argue with a poet.
cool
