I am in the middle of revising for my winter exams. If you are doing a masters, you would know that the question you hear the most is ‘what do you think?’. The lecture room is no longer a sit and absorb the professor’s words, it’s now the professor asking you, ‘what do you think?’. The more you sit in the more you come to realise the subject’s nuances and complexities that ultimately make you feel like you know nothing. Education is no longer a regurgitation of literary quotes and arithmetic formulas we will never use, but a critical analysis of chains of authors who feel obliged to call their discoveries credible, dare I say powerful. And finally cast in the golden carriage that we call, ‘knowledge’.
In the modern age, knowledge is ‘international’. Our knowledge of the world is no longer local but abundant with global stories that feel like pure imagination. It’s no longer about the accident that took place at your local grocery store, but about how the Venezuelan president was captured by Trump. We have come to a point now where to not know about the world’s happenings, is accused of ignorance. Accumulating knowledge is no longer a bookworm activity, but a social one that you have no right to avoid if you own a device of some sort. The definition of knowledge is expanding in ways incomprehensible. Knowledge itself is a myriad of categories. It’s a network that divides people, cancels them when opinion and reasoning come to play.
Is it wrong to have an opinion about why you believe something to be true?
It was only through my degree that I really came to understand what the philosophical term, epistemology, means in practice. And if we are to be able to decipher between the abundance of knowledge, I believe everyone should add this word to their vocabularies. If we are to justify knowledge, we must be aware of its roots. We must celebrate its diversity as long as we preserve where it came from and who it resonates with. In a sense you’re not just becoming intelligent by knowing this, but emotionally intelligent. That is different. Knowledge is not just wrapped in theories and frameworks, it’s enhanced with experiences, feelings and desires. So before you decide to cancel someone’s opinion on a topic, research the causes that made them arrive at such a claim. To be knowledgeable is just an ego trait, but to challenge it and find purpose with it - that becomes intelligence.
This tension between abundance and understanding really came to light from case studies that highlight epistemic injustice. A quote that resonated with me in my readings was, ‘We are embedded in cycles of hearing, not listening.’ (Burgess, 2023). The two words ‘hearing’, and ‘listening’ seem synonymous on the surface, but on a deeper level they connote two entirely different meanings. To just hear is a way of registering sound but to listen is to draw awareness to what that sound is telling you. In other words, what Burgess tells us in this context is that we are passively taking action. We pay less attention to what the knowledge actually needs us to do. As a result, we end up repeating the same actions without adapting to the knowledge in front of us.
What can we learn from this?
Whether it is reading or listening to ‘knowledge’ in training, you must learn to control this power by putting it into practice, by testing it against other powers and joining allies with them. It becomes a superpower for good. Only then do you see just words come to life. However, knowledge can be equally condescending as it is empowering. At the expense of using knowledge for influence, we are also hindering knowledge that is lived and breathed in practice over theory.
In all, there is good and evil in all voices. Don’t be intimidated by these voices, learn from them, defend them and fight ‘for’ and ‘against’ them. Question them as if you were in a jury, because as Foucault claims knowledge and power cannot be separated. The exercising of knowledge, the creation of knowledge, is the exercising of power. We should allow knowledge to flow, not drown us. Knowledge should enable you to float along paths you never imagined embarking on. Knowledge is a form of connection; the matchmaker of people on two opposite poles of the globe.
There is still much to uncover on this topic and so this is only the beginning. Consumption, capacity and the threat of AI? Who decides what knowledge is surfaced? These are avenues to explore for another day.
