Philosophy is an extreme intellectual sport. We would like to believe that doing philosophy is only and always good, but doing philosophy can be extremely dangerous. Most obvious is the risk of death. Philosophy is littered with those who have been, quite literally, killed for the practice. Socrates, of course, was put to death by the state, but also Boethius, Descartes, and (allegedly) Walter Benjamin all were unalived for their philosophical practices. See my piece on The Death Of Philosophers to read more.
But there are fates worse than death.
Relativism. Heraclitus wrote that the way up and the way down are one and the same. The way down to town and the return is the same road, but whether one is going downtown or uptown is a matter of one’s own situation. This is just one example of the way in which what is lower-case true is relative to the subject.
After Heraclitus posits this relative truth, the hunt was on for capital-T Truth (the non-relative kind), giving rise to great fictions. All of these fictions run aground in skepticism.
Skepticism. The Papi-skeptic Protagoras argues that not only is there no certainty or truth, but even if there was we would not be able to comprehend it; and even if we were able to comprehend it, we would not be able to communicate it. Radical skepticism is where you end up if you go looking for Truth .
This lands us in one of two holes: nihilism or the incommunicability of meaning.
Nihilism is the belief that there is no meaning to be had in this world. Everything that happens just is, for no reason whatsoever. We humans need reasons, so we make up stories and perceive certain comforting patterns in an otherwise hostile and errant universe. We are the fools of this universe, a fact to which other animals could have alerted us were we not, well, such great fools.
Most days, I am not a nihilist. But I am oddly attached to the idea that what is knowable is not communicable. What we know is unique to our own singular experiences. Knowing something, whatever it is, is a lonely endeavor.
I can try to put myself in your shoes (through empathy) and feel what you feel or experience what I believe you experience, but this is based on whatever commonalities we already share. It is only in so far as we are similar that we can construct something like shared knowledge or common practices. Being able to do so is a product of power and politics.
What we call knowledge and truth is a political instrument build for the preservation and transmission of power across time and space.
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We are like atoms in a void, each having their own reality and trying hard as we might to reach another who might understand us. We cannot comprehend another’s reality, but we can get in alignment with others, ironically often based on misunderstandings. What we call knowledge is really just convenient misunderstandings by which we come to be in social and political alignments in our trajectories through life.
Any hard truths that we manage to find become prisons in which we live, however we choose to decorate and redecorate them. So I do believe that there is meaning and something like knowledge, but it is not what we think. That is the tragedy and comedy of the human condition, that we should pretend to know so much based on so very little.
Convince me otherwise.
This is worth a long ponder.
> I am oddly attached to the idea that what is knowable is not communicable. Like the subject, what we know is unique to our own singular experiences. Knowing something, whatever it is, is a lonely endeavor.
> It is only in so far as we are similar that we can construct something like shared knowledge or common practices. Being able to do so is a product of power and politics. What we call knowledge and truth is a political instrument build for the preservation and transmission of power across time and space.
Bodies of scientific knowledge (not Truth, because they're continually evolving) might be a counter-example to the unsharable truths of subjective personal experience only -- but they are products of power and politics, so they do not escape your classification.
It would be interesting to put Foucault and Arendt in conversation about power and politics vis a vis attempts to share knowledge and subjective truths. Arendt was highly positive about it, if it could be possible again (long after the Greeks in the polis).
I agree that we can't communicate or share without constructed knowledge and practices (what I've called "techne"), and I agree these are products of power and politics and political instruments built for a purpose. I think it's an open question whether some techne (not all), even as they preserve and transmit power over time and space, might not do some net good, even for those not in power.
Another interesting interlocutor might be James C. Scott, especially his Seeing Like a State. Also perhaps also Wengrow and Graeber (Dawn of Everything), who see broad flexibility in the human repertoire for experimenting with social and political systems, much broader than is usually countenanced.
The most obvious pre-existing oppression truth liberates us from is ignorance of truth itself. It's the age-long myth of the cave of Platonic origin. According to this realist tradition, truth and knowledge are absolute goods for human beings, given the kind of rational ceatures we essentially are.
About your example, just knowing the truth regarding women's subordinate roles as compared to men in itself might not be liberating. However, the value of truth in this case is to be accompanied by a theory of action that sees liberation from subordination as a value. A presupposition of being successful in pursuing such value is obviously acquiring the relevant (true) facts concerning women's condition.
In regard to knowledge from personal experience, this is just a kind of knowledge, whose cartesian foundations have quite rationally led to the Hume's skepticism.
However, be this as it may, it remains unclear how this kind of knowledge or its implications regarding truth, is relevant to my request for clarification of the claim you seem to make that possessing some hard truths is likened to imprisonment.
More generally, for the sake of argument, let's concede that knowing the truth doesn't liberate at all, either because there's nothing we need to free ourselves from or because truth isn't the appropriate tool for it. This by itself doesn't mean that knowing something true imprisons us.
It seems to me, the claim that knowing the truth is like imprisonment would still need further clarification.