Being and Knowledge

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The kind of knowledge which is pursued in philosophy; unlike in any other subject, is the philosophy which encompasses all knowledge; which is concerned with the totality of knowing; with the way that all different schools of thought, and all the different disciplines and branches of knowledge interconnect. Philosophy is concerned with the overview of the totality of knowledge. And, therefore, has given rise; over the centuries, to the various schools of thought and to the various methods of finding knowledge. In this work we are going to be concerned with a study of all those various schools and methods and procedures and principles of work in the pursuit, and the wooing, and the loving of knowledge, which in its highest form is the love of wisdom. Another stream of philosophical systems have engaged profoundly with the nature of knowledge and the whole scientific revolution, starting with Bacon and Descartes, thinkers in the west, developed and colonised the provinces of thought in the name of discrete sciences, and ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, the knowledge project has flourished in all the discrete departments of knowing, so we now have a plethora of individual knowledge specialists working in different aspects of the fields of knowing, so to speak, and this is particularly true since the development of information and communications technology, when diverse departments and divisions of knowledge have become hyper-specialised. Yet, the grasp of the totality of knowledge has become even more problematic and the specialists of knowing are less and less able to communicate with one another; even in some of the knowledge fields, such as medicine, the natural sciences, the humanities and so on. Thus we can say that modern man’s obsession with science grew out of love of knowledge. All this we explore in depth in our book. The other major pole that philosophy aggregates around-- is the mystery of Being, itself; the nature of existence. For, arguably beyond knowing is being. When the identity of the known and the unknown become established, and in the metaphysical schools of philosophy be that ancient Greek or Indian, there is a profound engagement with Being itself, which is elevated in some systems to that of the Deity, who alone has endurance and true being. Our own particular beings are seen as emanations from that central primal oneness. Philosophers have, therefore, explored in great depth, what being is, in and of itself. Aristotle famously defined the study of metaphysics as the study of Being in and of its Self. Later the word Ontology was invented to describe this. Therefore the study of Being has continued in philosophy, as an important subset of philosophical concerns, flourishing in the 19th and the 20th centuries, in the form of doing a type of doing philosophy, known as existentialism, particularly in the hands of the great existential thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Jasper, and Kierkegaard and many others who drew heavily on the works of earlier thinkers such as Duns Scotus, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas in the great Mediaeval theological systems of scholasticism, including Islamic thinkers who had also pondered the mysteries of being, such as Ibn Rushd and Mulla Sadra. So we have these twin poles of interest still continuing, yet, apparently far apart from one another’s concerns. We then we are confronted with the extraordinary fact that, while these are the two dominant concerns of philosophy, they have never actually been studied in relation to one another in a consistent, coherent, and methodologically exact manner in the history of philosophy before this present study. Being and Knowledge as such, have never been analysed in their relationships to one another, and yet they seem to be the primary foci by which mankind’s life revolves. The purpose of the present work is therefore to complete the trilogy of Being and Time and Being and Nothingness, with a third study, namely; of that of Being and Knowledge with which it is, I hope, intended to complement and to fulfil the lines of argumentation developed not only within those two former works, but also within many of the philosophical aspirations and intentions of other thinkers in different epochs, to point out the kinds of directions that mankind’s philosophical inquiry might usefully take if we are to confront the dilemmas we are facing both as individuals, and as a planetary culture in embryo.