Epilogue

J.E. CHAMBERLIN Epilogue Knowledge is necessary for two things: survival and power. And all of us are in the business of both. Anybody who has been in touch with the natural or the supernatural worlds within which we negotiate them will recognize that the notion of truth, from which knowledge is typically distinguished, is mostly a distraction. On the other hand, knowledge, unlike truth, is not usually available through traditions of bearing witness , which tend to be represented in certain secular and sacred·institutions (such as churches and courts) and in the hermeneutic practices of the academy. All societies recognize that knowledge requires specialists charged with the responsibility for interpreting the wisdom of the community , consolidating the conditions for its survival and maintaining the sources of its power. In recent years, by which I mean the past several hundred, we have got into the pernicious habit of distinguishing between specialists who work in the yard and those who work in the tower. It is all part of an old story, about the relationship between what are sometimes called particulars and universals - ideas and things rooted in time and place, on the one hand, and those that transcend time and place. The argument about particulars and universals goes back a long way; in the relatively short memory of European civilization, back to Boethius, in prison near Milan in the year 525 AD in the dark end days of the Roman Empire, writing a book called The Consolations of Philosophy ... which became a medieval best-seller. But this is not some dusty old issue. It is around us constantly, this question of particulars and universals: in the arguments about standards (according to which knowledge is certified) determined here or elsewhere, about advice (and knowledge) coming from those directly involved or those distant and detached, and about practice and theory. It is there in the contradictions between individual and collective rights, and between local laws and those of supposedly higher standing, derived from the notional universality of either natural reason or revealed religion and transcending local particularities - contradictions based on distinctions that are familiar across a variety of European, African, Asian, and Aboriginal cultures. Civil disobedience rests its case upon this kind of distinction; and it received eloquent expression in Martin Luther King's famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he answered the charges that UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4. SUMMER 1992 EPILOGUE 509 his actions were untimely, that he was an outsider, and that he was disobeying a particular law of the land with an appeal to the universals of justice and freedom. And it is there, this tension between particulars and universals, in the continuing argument about whether knowledge is centred in the yard or the tower, whether it should be rooted in everyday experiences or set above and beyond them, whether it is generated at home - in this place - or away, in some other, separate place. At the still point, or in the turning world. The humanities, usually obsessed with questions of power and often oblivious to questions of survival, have lately been preoccupied with the problem of choosing between one and the other - increasingly so for the past few decades, but intermittently since the melodramatic intellectual dialogues of the nineteenth century, with its spectres of culture and anarchy. It is a debilitating preoccupation, about a foolish choice, between false alternatives; but it has a persistent hold on our imaginations. It is a choice between being isolated in particulars and being overwhelmed by universals, between separation and assimilation, between being marooned on an island and drowned in the sea. It is a choice routinely given by those who are in power to those who are not, or to those who are different. Nobody should have to make that choice. The humanities should ensure that nobody has to. But the humanities have not been doing their job. To be fair, some people, usually while arguing the merits of one side or the other, have pointed out the shortcoming of each alternative. Some say, for example~ that an exclusive commitment to particulars - that is, to yard - limits us to a diminished reality, and to a debilitating relativism that...