Wisdom, Knowledge, Information

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T.S.Eliot, The Rock, Chorus I, 1960


The principal characteristics of the impact of scientific culture on modern politics include the growing deployment of professional instrumental and technical vocabularies in fields of political discourse formerly regulated by religious, moral and legal. The principal themes of modernity is captured, by the poet here, as ways or means of knowing. What we need is trust in the transparency of political realities to the public and therefore in the possibility of public political accountability, breaking down the alienation of the means of knowing from personality. Modern technology has enormously enlarged the options for shifting from passive to active engagement, introducing the element of play into the engagement with politics by means of the Mass Media. They do not seem to be disciplined by the scientific commitment to repress affective, emotional, aesthetic or psychological elements as disruptions or distortions of the cool, rational, unmotivated representations of the world. This makes contemporary humanity aware of the role of media and of creativity in the production of notions of reality and in mind setting which travel in our culture and politics. There is increasing focus on recent implications of the decline of the Enlightenment’s synthesis of knowledge and politics and the rise of new configurations of knowing and doing politics.

Wisdom as a form of knowing or communicating knowledge is not usually easily acquired or teachable, nor accessible through the mastery of technical skills. It is often associated with faith in the privileged access of the wise to supernatural sources of knowledge or to unique revelatory experiences. Words of wisdom are characteristically polysemous mixtures of cognitive, moral, emotional, social, philosophical and practical references. The gems of wisdom founding Ecclesistes or Montaigne’s Essays are well known examples. These expressions of wisdom invite endless reflections and interpretations, especially those which are supposed to have layers of esoteric, hidden meanings. By comparison knowledge in the scientific sense is perceived as much more systematically organized and formalized - especially due to its logical and mathematical components. Knowledge as it emerged in the West relates to values such as clarity, logical rigor, a sharp distinction between truth and error, conflicts of opinions and the urge for their rational resolution. Wisdom by comparison is inclusive of truth and its opposites, irenic rather than polemic, allusive rather than explicit or public, and often expressed in silence. In this sense, the omnipresence of informal layers of ’tacit knowledge’ in science (Polanyi 1974) is undeniable. But the production, certification and communication of scientific knowledge engages a host of methodologies and tools, whose intended or unintended import has the effect of de-contextualizing and depersonalizing claims of knowledge, thus rendering them particularly useful in the production of the modern democratic order. Inasmuch as science, much more explicitly, is a socially cooperative enterprise scientists produce and possess their knowledge together (Merton 1957).

By contrast to wisdom, scientific knowledge and skills are presumed teachable. they involve the mastery of technical mental or material operations and are therefore more independent of unique personal experiences, inspiration or unusual personality traits. Hence, although scientific knowledge, especially in its formal mathematical embodiments, may in fact be restricted to specialists, the fact that it can be learned renders it more accessible in principle and therefore, at least apparently, more democratic. Inasmuch as the public perceives science as knowledge produced by means of a social process and possessed by a group, the authority of the individual scientist seems to be less personalized than that of the sage.

Information is characteristically more restricted to the technical practical surface of knowledge. It is knowledge stripped of its theoretical, formal, logical and mathematical layers and made to fit quick, often do it yourself, tasks and operations. Information is often but thin knowledge, a shortcut approach to the need to have operational guidelines for decisions and actions without getting into the scientific accounts.

When it is represented by information rather than by knowledge, ‘reality’ can be flattened and simplified as a reference for discourse. But the losses we incur in shifting from wisdom through knowledge to information might be a thinning out of layers of meanings, references and associations, a process of impoverishing human understanding and experience. It looses poetical, philosophical, religious and ethical dimensions of knowledge and experience which were part of earlier configurations of culture, the polysemicity of language, the complexity, the depth and, perhaps more than anything else, the wholeness and the all encompassing coherence of our life and our world view. We need judicious, wise, inspired men/women of wisdom to process our information into knowledge.

References:

Ezrahi, Y., 1990, The Descent of Icarus, Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ Press

Jasanoff, S., 2004, States of Knowledge, the co production of science and social order, Routledge London

Merton, R. K. (1973), The Normative Structure of Science, p. 267-278

Polanyi, M., 1962, The Republic of Science, Minerva, 1:54-73