Knowledge, Power and Self as Distinct Spheres

Abstract

The terms “knowledge” and “power” are so general in nature that we must first venture some observations concerning the clash between these two major concepts. The first is that knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, imposes its rationality on power, which is based on arms, laws, traditions or even on fragile and sometime manipulated movements of opinion. This idea of reason crushing privilege and tradition, and more specifically those who enlighten the population while crushing kings and priests, has played an important role in the Western world. Freemasons opposed the Catholic Church in the name of freedom of thought and the rights of science, while at the same time retaining an organization and ceremonies of a pseudo-religious nature. The advisers to the Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, before the 1910 Revolution, called themselves the “Cientificos”. Many Marxists, and Engels in particular, appealed constantly to natural sciences and to a dialectic that was itself perceived as the law of historical change. Going back a little further in time, did the Enlightened Despots in Europe and elsewhere not combine absolute power and knowledge to destroy a society that was enmeshed in its ancient networks of privileges and practices? Faced with this rationalist ideology, do we have to stress once again that knowledge cannot be the foundation of power? That power must always have its own legitimacy, whether based on tradition, charisma or rational legal authority, to use the terms of Max Weber? — and that legal authority, which we can also call bureaucracy, was and still is an instrument in the formation of the modern States (Rechtsstaat) whose existence does not rely on knowledge, but on the capacity of power to impose general rules of conduct on every sector of the population. The end result of all these ideas, which are really ideologies, is that knowledge leads to oligarchy rather than towards democracy. This was repeated by those liberal, but not democratic thinkers, the English Whigs, the founders of the United States