Abstract
In this historical conjuncture where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, Savransky argues that we need to cultivate new habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling in social inquiry. That is, a new set of ethical sensibilities, or what he calls a ‘care of knowledge’. Drawing on a range of philosophers, including John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and A. N. Whitehead, the introduction provides an integral definition ethics as an entire manner of inhabiting the world and proposes that we simultaneously need to rethink what ‘relevance’ is, and to cultivate a radically empiricist care of knowledge that resist bifurcating reality between a realm of appearances and one of causes, and instead seeks to come to terms with the heterogeneous nature of experience.
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Notes
- 1.
Translated by Anne Mclean as From the Observatory (2011).
- 2.
Throughout this book, the notion of habit is not intended to connote a certain conservativeness. Rather, it is employed in the more neutral sense put forth by Dewey (1922: 66), as ‘an ability, an art, formed through past experience’. Conservativeness is not intrinsic to habit but depends entirely on the character of the habit in question: ‘whether an ability is limited to repetition of past acts adopted to past conditions or is available for new emergencies depends wholly upon what kind of habits exists.’ This is why the work to be developed here is not a fight against habits but an attempt to cultivate different ones.
- 3.
This should be not confused with the Western trope of ‘know thyself’, which both Hadot and Foucault have so dextrously discussed in terms of a care of the self. I should also point out that by posing the question of ‘how is one to know?’ I am not suggesting that knowledge or cognition is our primary or in any sense privileged mode of relating to the world. Far from it. I am simply highlighting it because it is, after all, a question that very much concerns the sciences, whatever one takes this latter term to mean or include. More accurate however would be to say that the question ‘how is one to live?’ must involve the question ‘how is one to experience?’ and that what we call knowledge is a particular form that experience may take.
- 4.
I will explore the specificities of such exercises in more detail in the coming chapters. Only by way of illustration, however, we may think about the positivist fascination with ‘scientific method’ as providing value-free access to the real, objective, social facts; the interpretativist and symbolic traditions that sought to account for social phenomena by accessing a non-apparent realm of ‘meaning’ informing them; the Marxist tradition that sought to explain social and cultural phenomena by recourse to an underlying set of economic forces; the structuralisms that searched for unconscious, universal, and transhistorical patterns organising human culture and society; the social constructivist stances that placed ‘social construction’ as the real ‘cause’ of what might otherwise appear as natural phenomena; the post-structuralisms which, although rejecting the possibility of accessing a realm of factual reality beyond value, still seek to strip away experience from its self-evidence.
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Savransky, M. (2016). Introduction: The Care of Knowledge. In: The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_1
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