The Meaning of Knowledge in a Knowledge Society

www.giannivattimo.it. Conferenza UNESCO,
sezione coreana, Seoul, ottobre 2004

I may be wrong, but the thesis I think one has to consider in a Unesco meeting concerning the problem of building a knowledge society, une société de la connaissance, is first of all that of understanding the meaning of the knowledge we are supposed to promote. My doubt about being wrong is not a rhetorical device to start with, but a real question I ask myself and my listeners. In a world in which there is still so a great majority of illiterate people, who, at least for a large part, suffer poverty and hunger, also, or mainly, because of their lack of knowledge and of technical competence, one might also assume that there is no doubt about what an international organization as Unesco is expected to do. What is needed is a more intensive and inclusive sharing, ideally by all the peoples of the earth, of the "knowledge"which has brought the industrial societies to their current prosperity and richness. It is this general alfabetisation of the human kind that can, and finally will, give everybody on the earth peace, prosperity, means for developing an authentic human life.

Sure. So why should we raise questions on the meaning of the terms, as if the objective we are confronted with were not clear and persuading enough? I have to confess that the question of expanding knowledge on the whole earth appears to day in a sort of peculiar light, because of the events which are taking place in Iraq and in many other "developing" countries. The difficulties the West, or: the industrial democratic world, is confronted with in those countries, can be defined problems of "cultural ecology". As all of us know, even if one leaves aside the cruelty and inhuman aspects which have been discovered in the way this specific war has been conducted (I think of the tortures, above all), the main objection which is turned against USA, Great Britain and the other countries which occupy Iraq concerns the "exportation" of democracy by military force. In purely analogical terms, this objection seems to hold also for the effort which we believe has to be done for building a "global" society of knowledge. The knowledge which we seem to want to promote is, at the very end, the technical-scientific knowledge which dominates the developed countries. In very rough terms, it seems that on this level the West has not changed the "eurocentric" attitude which inspired and was supposed to legitimize the colonialism of the past centuries. Let me formulate in simple terms the question which, in my opinion, is central in the non rhetorical doubt I expressed at the beginning: when we speak of building a world of knowledge (remember that in recent years the politics of the European Union has been directed by the project of building an "Europe de la connaissance"), how and in which measure do we take into account the implications of the rejection of eurocentrism which has taken place in human sciences and also, at least in principle, in the international politics?

Note that the rejection, or abandonment, of eurocentric ideas is not only a matter of increasing respect for the other cultures of the world. It is also, more and more clearly, a device of the self preservation of the wetsern culture itself, insofar the reduction of human culture to a unique western model would involve the diminution of the means on which the human kind disposes in its struggle against natural threats, illnesses etc., which are just the other cultures. In a science fiction tale of many years ago, the story was about a future intergalactic war in which, having been broken alla the computers, the winners were at the end those who had not forgotten to calculate "by hand", in the traditional way. In terms of medicine, it is even too obvious the importance of all what is called "traditional medicine" beside the "official" one; everybody knows the large amount of money that the great pharmaceutical industries invest in order to obtain, for instance, patents concerning the use of medical plants and other natural traditional products. Clearly, as in this case, all this is almost never a pure matter of "cultures", but a matter of money and power. This is an aspect of the problem we have to keep in mind in all our discussions about the construction of a global knowledge.

So, again: how can and should we take into account the non-eurocentric "discovery" of the equal dignity of all "cultures" in the effort to plan an action for expanding "knowledge" all over the world? Although I am perfectly aware that this is just the beginning of a possible solution, I'll try to give an answer to the question by referring to the importance of what in the West is called the "humanities". Humanities, in the western context, are the disciplines of the tradition, in their difference from the natural , experimental, mathematical sciences. If you want a rough characterization of the difference, think of the importance of language - the natural language of every society - in the two types of discipline. Natural sciences depend very little, or ideally absolutely not, on the spoken natural language of a country. Humanities are , on the contrary, deeply related to that language. This does not mean that the history of a country, its literature, art, philosophy etc. are totally untranslatable. But the translation poses a number of problems in which the differences come into light and have to be taken care of. When trying to plan and realize an action of global expansion of "knowledge" it is almost fatal that one emphasizes more or less consciously the natural, non-linguistic disciplines. This preference correspond also to the main explicit objective of that action: we want to expand knowledge first of all in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment, by creating a large class of "experts" in various fields who will contribute actively by their work to the increasing of the national gross product.

Sure, again, no doubt about such a project. My thesis is that: first, it is very difficult to assume that a world of "knowledge" conceived in these terms could be a world of happiness and human satisfaction for its citizens; secondly, that without a background of humanistic education it will be impossible, or highly difficult, to expand the "knowledge" in the technical scientific terms we have in mind. As to the first point, it is meant to signalize the risk of reducing too strongly the knowledge we want to expand to an education totally functional to the production. It is obvious that the education we want to offer to everybody is a means for acquiring a position in the world, so also, and above all, a professional profile by which everybody becomes able to earn his or her life. Only, the interest in having a job and the education required by it cannot be separated from the interest in getting a certain degree of "happiness", of life enjoyment, which on its turn is much more related to what I have called the "humanities". By this term, of course, I don't designate the "studia humaniora" of the western educational tradition: latin, greek, literature, art etc. I refer to what constitutes, in each local culture,the analogous of these studies. First of all, the language and the literature which it carries with it; the traditions and the ideas - in terms of Weltanschauung, ethics, religion etc. - which we call sometimes the "roots" of a society.

I don't want to be misunderstood: I have no intention to emphasize the return to the local roots of every culture conceived as the authentic value, the real essence of that specific "humanity" and so on. I know that localisms of this kind are also popular in some philosophical view of today. The limit of my "localism" is just the viability, so to speak, of a certain degree of de-localization, or unrooting, which has not to damage the possibility for every individual to be "happy" in his or her life. This involves not only a capacity for adaptation by the individuals, but a specific respect for the "ecology" of each culture. This respect is required both in order to make the "world of knowledge" a viable and satisfying one, and in order to obtain that the scientific and technological education we want to promote in all countries be accepted without the impression that one is suffering an "imperialistic" violence. Much of this respect is related to the preservation of the local language. The violence of the efforts of "modernization" which have been taking place in several countries has been profoundly felt as such because modernization involved the imposition of a different language upon the local mother tongue.

Generally, the more or less total abandonment of the local language and traditions in the school curriculum is justified by the need of reducing and simplifying the weight imposed upon the students. I suggest that we should be more radical in the solution of this problem: for instance, separating clearly the education in the sciences and techniques, which can be developed in that sort of international language which is the formal language of mathematics, and recently that "international English" which is no longer a national tongue but a sort of esperanto, on one side; and on the other side the learning of the mother tongue, the local literature and all what is carried by it. I realize that this idea appears, and in part is, a provocative and radical one. What inspires it, nevertheless, is a very realistic experience of what is happening every day in the world: an enormous number of local languages disappear, literally, without leaving any trace. Of course this seems to be also a physiological process: our memory has also the capacity of forgetting, otherwise there would be no novelty in history etc. Again, we cannot stop the "physiological" process of the disappearance of this or that language, although every effort has to be done in order to preserve some infomation about it; e.g., the teaching and study of dead idioms in some university department. But the physiological disappearance of a language is different from the violent exclusion of it from the educational programs because or reasons of their reduction to a purely functional idea of education. This "violence", I repeat, is not only a way of ignoring the need for a human satisfaction of the people involved, which requires also the possibility of being integrated in one's community and tradition. It always implies the risk of making the scientific technical education we want to offer to everybody a sort of violation of one's identity, so that this education is not accepted and does not obtain its results.

The unrealistic appearance of the proposal I present might be related to the difficulty of imagining a curriculum which includes both the learning of a "formal" language - sciences, mathematics or even English as a "service language" - and a strong, not simply marginal part dedicated to the local "humanities". As to this, let me recall a personal experience I made some years ago, when I was asked to give a course of philosophy to the students of the course for engineers, in the Polytechnic university of Torino (by the way, one of the most "specialized" and rigorous in Italy). The dean of the faculty explained to me that it was important for the school to prepare technical specalists educated also in the humanities, because the specialization in one discipline puts them into the risk to become "obsolete" very soon, because of the transformations of technology they have learned in their studies; while a humanistic education prepares them, albeit only in terms of adaptation capacity and "elasticity" of mind, to recycle themselves by learning new technologies when needed. I am not sure that this optimistic expectation holds; but what I would emphasize is that it is possible that the very development of technology requires a more and more limited number of super-specialists, and an increasing number of educated people who need of course to know a lot of technical and scientific notions, but who above all are required to learn a great amount of "background" notions and habits, which belong to that field of humanities I propose to relate to the local traditions, language, ethics, etc. I want to say that it is possible to include in the curriculum the non marginal teaching of this field of the humanities, also because the development of technology can be used to easy (make easy) facilitate the learnign of many contents which now are available through a simple click on the keyboard of a computer (think for instance of all the mnemonic learning which was required for an attorney : previous cases, articles of codes, etc…).

This idea of a number of half-specialized people seems to imply a view of the future involving another, dangerous form of exclusion, which is already real in many countries and also on the global level: a small number of highly specialized experts who represent a sort of new dominating class imposing its power on the mass of workers. Of course, the risk exists. But only because in many societies there is still an imperfect democracy. The proposal of "humanizing" education - both in the specific sense of promoting the humanities, and in the sense of making the expansion of knowledge a way for making our world more human - might also result in another divide, that between the hard-workers - the fewer and fewer highly specialized experts - and the mass of citizens who are more free to enjoy life, community, social exchange. I understand very well that this provocative idea seems too much close to what is happening today in the mass culture, where we live in a full immersion of entertainment, and where even information is entertainment (TV programs, etc.). I don't see this "entertainment society" as a great risk for the future of mankind; provided that it is not dominated by the group of the specialists, and on the contrary is politically directed by democratic decisions; by the way, the citizens-workers will have also more time to debate the collective questions, more or less as the leisure class of the ancient Athens had much time to spend in the agorà while slaves, women, poor people worked for them. I don't mean that the highly specialized people should be considered the new slaves - although, by the way, they would be a far smaller number than the slaves of those ancient times. The non purely paradoxical meaning of this proposal is that we cannot imagine a world of knowledge as a world of specialists; only a more completely realized democracy, the government by the citizens all equal no matter what is their scientific competence, can be seen as a possible, viable future. Much more knowledge, of course; but also much more leisure for everybody, i.e. a really shared citizenship.

Gianni Vattimo