Ethico-Philosophical Reflection on Overly Self-Confident or Even Arrogant Humanism Applied to a Possible History-oriented Rationality of the Library and Librarianship

Abstract

René Descartes, the early French father of modern philosophy, looks like the “postmodernist’s bogeyman” (Guss, 1991, p. 1156) within library, information, and documentation (in continuation, LID) studies Now and then, we can see somehow routine-like, “by the way” style remarks on Descartes as the source behind fallacies of what is called modern. The understanding of Descartes’s own thought seems often not so thorough, but the verdict can be severe and straightforward. Being a “Cartesian” seems to mean that one is hopelessly wrong. My thematic in this chapter is a somewhat provocative claim of an analogy between particular themes with Descartes and the German hermeneutician, Hans-Georg Gadamer. There is some irony here, since typically these two philosophers appear to represent quite opposite positions. Then again, the basis of my claim of analogy consists of one particular, though not so insignificant remark on both sides In general terms, we can find with both Descartes and Gadamer a claim that we can never exhaustively conceive of the foundation of our capacity to know and understand anything. Consequences of this in this essay are ethical by nature: if we cannot conceive of the foundation of our knowledge and understanding, an overly self-confident attitude could approach arrogance. I shall elaborate it with a reference to a possible formulation of the particular rationality of the practice of the library and librarianship. Within this conception of the rationality of the library and librarianship, there might be some Cartesianism. In spite of this, however, the conception could find a foundation of legitimacy if we considered the analogy that I am going to claim between Gadamer and Descartes.