Questioning the Power of Intellectual Regimes: the Metaphysics of the University

Descartes and Newton, among others, gave rise to a new 'paradigm" of knowledge, and thus of power. The central characteristic of the new paradigm was its claim to value neutrality or 'disinterestedness' and 'objectivity'. The institutions that grew up as a response to the new theories of knowledge were the universities, the corporations and the political apparatus that funds and facilitates their activities. The rise of the university roughly parallels the rise of European domination and the imperial project.

Yet a critique of the historical growth of the university, made within the university system, and using the techniques and evidentiary procedures developed by the universities is inherently paradoxical, and therefore necessarily political. It is similar to trying to study science scientifically. The relationship of knowledge to power is subtle and does not seem to be susceptible to scientific analysis, since science itself can be a form of knowledge/power. Yet at the same time science, empirical inquiry or at least the effort to report accurately, can be part of an analysis of knowledge and power in history.

To further complicate the seeming paradox of knowledge/power: it is not susceptible to what the Hindu's call Nescience, which is an a 'science', or 'not-science' of transcendental knowledge that tries to go beyond the knowable in a manner similar to the Tao te Ching, the Via Negativa of Dionysius the Areopagite, Ibn Arabi or Niffari[1], whereby the knowledge and power of god is defined by what god is not or by paradoxes. What might be called antinomial or negative knowledge systems define social power relations more by what they exclude than by what they include. Esoteric metaphysics is to traditional societies what today's quantum mechanics, with all its paradoxes, is to our society. They embody the limits of the knowable and thereby reflect the ultimate justifications of social power. But they do this is highly abstract and dialectical form. Their otherworldliness, mystical excess, and hidden, exalted and esoteric status confers on them an underserved mystery and luminosity. The esoteric men of knowledge of old, such as Dionysius and Ibn Arabi, despite the occaisional accusations of heresy that were hurled at them, were like today's quantum priests of science. They explored the outer reaches of the system of knowledge that justifyied the social hierarchy. They were the 'pure researchers' of traditional societies. This is quite clear in the case of Dionysius the Areopagite. Some of his writing, such as the Divine Names, are mystically sublime flights reaching into the metaphysical nether world. His mystical flights end up being the ground work for 3 other books, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy and the The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy , which, in descending order , describe the order of the Universe as a ladder that uses these sublime flights as the justifcation of a totalistic Church hierarchy. Some have credited Doinysius with the invention of the word Hierarchy. Dionysius is a Platonist Roman Catholic, whereas our quantumn and relativistic physicists are not. But each had a function in their respective societies, and that was to speculate on the ultimate justifications of the natural and epistomological order, which in turn helped justify and symbolicly represent the heirarchical social order.

Antinomial or negative theories of knowledge are no less a system of knowledge/power, despite their claim, as in the case of Socrates, to a kind of 'divine ignorance'. Socrates, in fact, is a kind of advertisement for Plato's theory of hierarchical knowledge, which would lead to 'utopia' of eugenic control and caste elitism based on the military model. Likewise, Zen 'nothingness' or 'emptiness', seems to have functioned historically as an unconscious screen for the Samurai class in Japan. It distanced the Samurai from the brutality of themselves and the world around them. One sees a similar phenomena at work in Hindu metaphysics. The sublime excesses of the Vedanta justify the cruelty of the Karmic idea, the same idea that would appeal so much to Himmler and justify his promotion of concentration camps. The notion of Karma justifies both the social hierarchy and the suffering that follows from it. If it is one's Karma to be of a lower social order and die of neglect and suffering, than this is the 'dharma' or the 'truth' for that person. This cruel doctrine justified, and in some places, still justifies inequites.

An inquiry into systems of knowledge/power, if it would avoid the pitfall of generating yet another form of knowledge/power, could not be part of a religious search, nor a scientific search, but uses them both as sources. The critique of knowledge/power, which cannot avoid a critique of the university, is a critique of hierarchy made in support of human rights, and not in support of another from of knowledge/power. Human rights is a simple ethical stand, not a mystical or scientific justification. No one wishes to be hurt: no one wishes to be subject to a system of mind-control; no one desires poverty: lack of health care: lack of work: or to be subjected to arbitrary legal or governmental abuses. Human rights is not grounded in a system of knowledge, but in life itself, in existence, in the realites of the human and natural world and the inevitability of suffering on the one hand and the need of its allieviation on the other. Human rights precedes or lies at antipodes with exalted systems of knowledge. It brings systems of knowledge into question. Human rights is the conscience that systems of knowledge neglect, overlook or ignore.

It should be noted that hierarchical knowledge systems, which essentially are belief systems depend upon 'discipline", as Foucault often pointed out, and that 'discipline', involves power relations and the implied right to punish and exclude or to provide benefits to those that conform. The maintenance of strict disciplines, each pursuing a linear road to 'progress' organizes knowledge into a hierarchy which ultimately serves institutional powers and agendas rather than rights. The result of the creation of professional disciplines has been the rather arbitrary sectioning off of areas of knowledge from each other in accord with a 'technology' as Foucault would put it, of salaries, pensions, hierarchies, administrations, classes, chairs and positions. This is quite evident in the military, medical, mental health, prison, academic and corporate sectors, as elsewhere. It is rather amazing, given the obviously 'interested', nature of these institutions and powers, that an ethic of value neutrality and 'disinterestedness" is entertained by them. The 'disinterested' pursuit of knowledge occurs mostly in institutional environments whose structure implicates and fosters hierarchies and interests. The university system primarily serves the state, science, corporations and economic interests.

One result of this in the academic field is that disciplines such as "religious studies" , 'physics", "anthropology" or "history" are arbitrarily cut off from one another. The result of this is that fields like "economics' , "physics" or "computer science" or "genetics", which are essential to the maintenance of the elite status of the corporate state or what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex", are almost entirely removed from analysis by other 'disciplines'. Physics and Economics, in fact, have aspects that qualify them , in some respects, as technological belief systems, virtually civil religions and not "objective sciences". But if this thesis were accorded a more than marginal legitimacy within the academic system, the inquiry would very likely threaten the disciplinary elite of well paid professionals who exist as marketable commodities in a system of exchange. The medieval and non-democratic character of the university is preserved precisely because it exempts knowledge and those who claim to know from facing the consequences of the relationship of knowledge and power, which in the US generally means the power of corporations and their symbiotic relation to the state.

Whatever the merits of academic freedom, and they are many, the university system is an outgrowth of medieval Christian institutions based on the notion of the Great Chain of Being. The great chain of being was a Greco-Christian creation which classified knowledge in hierarchies leading up to god. The structure of the university, and not necessarily those who work within it, to this day, is still largely based on the Scholastic model of the early universities, adapted now to the corporate model. The University is pre-Copernican, even Ptolemaic in the sense that it is Man centered- that is, centered on man as the locus of all legitimate, 'universal' knowledge and thus a template-maker, or "research" designer of correct and useful practices. While the idea of the great chain of being no longer justifies the academic professions, the structure of the university still maintains something of the old Ptolemaic hierarchical arrogance. There must be a reason, besides institutional inertia, that the ideology of the great chain of being still inheres in the academic hierarchy. It would seem that the Medieval structure turned out to be adaptable to the global aspirations of Western science and political economy. The structure of the university, like that of corporations, tends to negate whatever efforts might be made to support a democratic notion of human rights.

[1] These are Christian and Islamic, Sufi mystics respectively. Dionysuis in books like The Divine Names and the Celestial Hierarchy seeks to go beyond knowledge in order to put the knowledge that is power beyond question by shrouding it in antinomial mysteries. Niffari seeks to do the same thing in the Islamic universe of discourse and understanding. In both cases the result is to justify the hierarchy of knowledge, not to question it. They both use the metaphor of negative knowledge or 'not knowing' as a metaphor for total knowledge, They both might be called mystical Platonists. They are roughly comparable, in their social universes, to the speculative physicists and "pure researchers" of the 20th century. That is, like the Niels Bohrs or Einsteins of the 20th century Dionysius and Niffari were laboring to create templates or paradigms of knowledge which helped justify, in abstract and seemingly detached form, the hierarchies of their time. The templates or theories of knowledge they created helped legitimize the powers, classes and rulers that had control over their societies. A better known example of this in the literary sphere of Christian mythology is Dante, whose political writings go far to explain his mystical flights. But this can also be understood conversely: mystical transcendentalism appears to have a fundamental and justifying relation to regimes of power. This appears to derive primarily from the world denying and negating nature of spiritual 'knowledge', which tends to locate all meaning in the Intellect or Self. Life in its concreteness is thereby seen as hierarchically inferior, Nature becomes a place of sin or merely a dim vale of suffering that reflects immutable crystalline archetypes only shadows of which can be dimly intuited.