What do We Know about Knowledge? An Essay on the Knowledge Society

I.

After God created the heaven and the earth, land and sea, plants and animals, and, finally, man and woman, everything appeared to be good. For the children of God to enjoy immortality and the peace of paradise, their ignorance would have to be maintained. Thus God commanded Man and wife to refrain from eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. But, as we know, the blissful existence of the young lovers was cut short. In the middle of the Garden of Eden, right under the forbidden tree, a snake tempted the woman into disobeying divine law. The first man and woman could not know that their impermissible appetites would bring death and tribulation to all mankind, beginning the fate of the eternal repetition of the human tragedy. If they had taken a more careful look at the snake, they would have seen the sign of their future. But they did not know anything. They did not even have knowledge of the opportunity to know anything. Above all else, they did not know that knowledge, like a snake, is constructed circularly.

News of the original sin apparently caused God enough anxiety for him to make absolutely certain that in the future, creator and creatures would remain distinctly separate, never again to coincide. He drove the human beings out of paradise, far from that divine location of self-sufficient happiness, that place that makes invisible the conditions of its own possibility. In the Garden the creatures were not even able to see their own nakedness. Nakedness: meaning just as they were, living in a carefree manner and without any real interest in the world. But now, outside of paradise, life became a finite resource; a project that would have to be achieved and a project that might fail.

It appears that a fundamental aim of God was to give man order, but a form of order he should never really understand. Man's erection of the Tower of Babel arrogantly demonstrated the triumph of an early knowledge society, one in which knowledge was successfully managed to achieve the world and divine truth, because all human beings spoke the same language. This human triumph was also punished by God. The punishment was the advent of confusion and difference and the curse that knowledge will never be able to reach heaven. This sentence was the beginning of the limits of knowledge: all knowledge is limited by and based on itself, not on the world.

The Book of Genesis tells a story that unfolds two fundamental problems. On the one hand it shows that the primordial order of the world seems forever remote from man's knowledge. One compensation is the possibility of divine association; a relationship the creatures can believe in, but one they cannot know. On the other hand, it symbolizes that human knowledge is limited to its own circularity, bounded by language and confronted with the diversity of languages. It seems that the God of the Jahwistic tradition might be described as a considerable postmodern guy, one who has set everlasting differences into a world that disappears behind the language and the diversity of languages. God must have been rather alarmed that man's successful overcoming of difference through language would make Gods of his creatures, paradoxical characters, both created and creators. If created characters could achieve the absolute, there appears certain evidence that they are not created characters but creators by themselves.

From now on knowledge was the essential resource for those mortal and particular human beings struggling to cope with a world that could be imagined as being independent from any observer. In Western tradition, knowledge emerged as a cipher to abolish the difference between observer and observation. To know something simulates having direct access to the world. The problem of reasonable knowledge than leads to the question of whether or not one's own observation, one's own sight, ultimately, one's own knowledge can be brought into harmony with the being of the world. In the philosophical tradition, dealing with this difference between the object and subject of knowledge has...