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Reinventing Knowledge samenvatting in het Nederlands
Dit bestand is een samenvatting in het Nederlands van het boek Reinventing Knowledge voor het vak History of Knowledge (wetenschapsgeschiedenis)
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SAMENVATTING REINVENTING KNOWLEDGEIntroduction
We are living through one of the recurring periods in world history when far-reaching changes in
economics, culture and technology raise basic questions about the production, preservation, and
transmission of knowledge. People had different reasons for pursuing knowledge - to know God, to
unveil the secrets of nature etc - but all contributed to the “Western intellectual tradition” and thus
to the story we tell in this book. “The West” itself is better defined by its institutions for organizing
knowledge than as a set of cultural values or a region of the globe. If we can understand where our
heritage of knowledge came from, perhaps we can make educated guesses about where it is going.
This book mainly looks at ‘formal knowledge’: the kind organized by institutions by and for the wider
public world. This book is about the West but also draws comparisons with other great literate
cultures: China, Islam and India.
This book is a history of institutions of knowledge: the library, the monastery, the university, the
republic of letters, the disciplines, and the laboratory. These institutions have safeguarded knowledge
through the ages by acting as interfaces between scholars and the rest of society. Each institution has
moments of transition and innovation: they are all reactions to historical changes that discredited its
predecessor or exposed its limitations.
In this book not only “great men and big ideas” but more focus on occurring shifts among entire
communities of scholars and lesser-known figures. Ideas can communicate their effect only through
the institutions that organize them. ‘Raw materials’ for building an institution: speech and writing,
images and objects, and provisions to overcome the limitations of space and the ravages of time. This
book is not suggesting that the majesty of ideas can be reduced to the material circumstances of their
production, but they do play an important part (ex. new architecture because of shift from stone to
steel).
This book aims to demystify knowledge and to construct a skeleton narrative of its development. It
seeks to catalog the raw materials from which knowledge is fashioned, and examines the institutions
that transform these raw materials into powerful political, social, and cultural forces. Organizing
knowledge (categorization) is as important as knowledge itself.
With the Internet, we risk committing a serious error by thinking that cheap information made
universally available through electronic media fulfills the requirements of a democratic society for
organized knowledge.Many alternative ways of knowing, of learning, and of teaching have been lost
or submerged beneath the layers of history that underlie the present organization of knowledge. Each
chapter of this book tells the story of a familiar institution from an unfamiliar perspective,
emphasizing what made each one novel at its inception. Changes in the wider world, not the
activities of specific geniuses or intellectuals, have driven the reinvention of knowledge. Even today’s
“knowledge society” is but the continuation of a millennia-old pattern.
1. The Library (300 BCE - 500 CE)
“By transforming a largely oral scholarly culture into a largely written one, the library made the Greek
intellectual tradition both portable and heritable”.Demetrius of Phaleron: among the most pivotal
figures in the Western intellectual tradition. He ruled Athens, later became Ptolemy’s court
philosopher, and initiated and supervised the construction of Alexandria’s library and its Museum.
Three ways to tell the story of the library.
1. Institutional : tale of how libraries were founded and funded; how books were produced,
collected, copied, categorized, and stored; and how scholars made use of them.
2. Intellectual : begins with the philosophical rationale for collecting books in the first place.
(oral vs verbal knowledge)
, 3. Political : libraries have been supported by an astonishing variety of political systems down to
the present day. Libraries have reflected the wishes of those commanding influence and
resources, and meshed with the structures of social and political power.
Academic knowledge first emerged in the society of the Greek polis in Athens. Libraries reflected the
wealth and ambition of Hellenistic empire-builders who wanted to spread the hegemony of Greek
learning over the known world (also organization of knowledge in China). Alexandria’s library became
the model for three other imperial civilizations: Rome, Christendom and Islam.
Speech and writing in the classical polisAncient Greek was culture of masculinity; public life - the only
life that really mattered - was the domain of men. Misogyny and homoeroticism underlies the
brilliance of Greek philosophy. The male-male love for which ancient Greek is famous had its origins
in military comradeship. Greek education was designed to transform the male erotic bond into a
bond between mentor and protégé, to make pederasty into pedagogy. Physical education (‘gymnos')
was also important, but over time the most important education became mastering effective speech.
The shift from tyranny to democracy intensified the need for effective public speaking. Spoken
competition provided the means to channel violent conflict into nonviolent conflict. Epic (from
Homer) were transmitted orally, by bards or poets who moved from town to town. Sophists (coaches
for competitive speech) gathered in public spaces and explained poetry and taught their clients to
speak well. Effective speech conferred mastery over people, which was more important at the time
than the mastery over nature that science offers. Sophists were the first true practitioners of textual
scholarship. Books, as references (for grammar and rhetoric), were indispensable handmaidens to the
sophistic style of argument.Socrates believed the Sophists’ faith in the written word weakened
physical memory. His method, question-and-answer, is the expression of an oral pedagogy founded
on the productive friction between masters and students. Socrates: speech leads to truth, the written
word is untrustworthy and corrupting because it is detached from the actions, honor, and character
of whoever uttered it. We know this because Plato, student of Socrates, wrote things down. Plato and
his followers had practical dialogues about the best ways to live, to form character, the constitute
society, and to design institutions. This was the basis of the ‘philosophical school’. This Academy was
followed up by Aristotle’s - student and rival of Plato - Lyceum. Both schools were centered around a
charismatic founder. Problem: it’s institutional continuity is threatened by death or defection of
leaders and prominent members. Aristotle was able to coops his rivals by grounding his scholarship in
writing. Shift from speech to writing: speech thrives on one-sided positions, so argument can go on
indefinitely around the same questions; writing makes an inclusive, ecumenical approach both
possible and desirable.The library embodied on a large scale what Aristotle’s books embodied in
miniature. Libraries reduce complexity not by proposing a new simplicity, but by constructing a well-
made intellectual edifice where every doctrine has its proper place.
Alexandria: Greece abroad
Books (or papyrus scrolls) were in circulation long before the first Hellenistic libraries, but their
collection was a private affair. The physical act of writing was disdained by cultivated men. Only with
the shift from polis to empire and the founding of libraries at Alexandria and elsewhere did the
collection of books become a public affair.After Alexander the Great died (323 BCE) a larger-scale
political organization became the rule. These new states elevated cultural competition from the level
of individuals to the level of dynasties; such dynasties commanded the resources to establish
institutions outlasting their founders (and sponsored them). The wealthiest and most powerful was in
Egypt: Alexandria, the ultimate multicultural city of antiquity. The Museum (temple to the Muses)
was a paradise for scholars: members enjoyed tax breaks and free use of residence halls, dining
facilities, personal servants, teaching rooms etc, and most important: the famous library. This
Museum (“birdcage for bookworms”) was part of a policy to lure talent from all over the Greek world.
Through Demetrius of Phaleron’s initiative, the Ptolemies set about acquiring as many books as
possible (paid huge sums for everything available and started copying).
, Hellenistic scholarship
Greek knowledge pushed under the aegis of empire took on a more depoliticized character. Instead
of only “philosophy”, various fields of learning: literature, philology, poetry, geography, ethnography,
medicine, mathematics, and experimental science. Philosophy itself failed to thrive in Alexandria -
because it feeds on oral interaction, and profits from a lack of texts.Forms of scholarship first
established in Alexandria:
I - Collation : to edit and recopy manuscripts, to recombine their contents and add
commentary and analysis. Result: classics circulated in many versions. Point of pride:
Alexandria tried to establish a reliable edition of Homer’s epics (did more harm than good).
I - Translation : Ptolemies undertook to make the most important books of various
Mediterranean people available in Greek; began establishing the hegemony of Greek learning
among non-Greek cultures.
I - Synthesis : reflected the influence of Aristotle’s encyclopedic approach. Callimachus:
compiler of Alexandria’s first library catalog, the ‘Pinakes’. These “tables” (thematic groupings
and cross- references) were an improvement over the first-letter alphabetization. Most
important: made books readily and rapidly accessible to roaming encyclopedic intellects.
Critical reading became “a source for further writing” at Alexandria, spawning new genres like
the commentary, the glossary, and the index. Erudition, eclecticism, and a penchant for
system-building, still the vices and virtues of the scholarly mind, were the manifestations of
the new scholarly style.
Cultural Patronage
Why have great rulers so often patronized academic scholarship? Multiple explanations:
I - Political : rulers invest in cultural capital to burnish their reputations and paint their rivals as
base warlords by comparison.
I - Scholars play special role in the establishment of languages of power and commerce. The
museum/library acted as a beacon. Neither of these explanations can account for why
specifically writing offered the Ptolemies the most efficient means of achieving their
objectives.
Greek vs Chinese
This was the age of Confucius, and of a host of dynamic rival schools (Legalist, Daoist, Mohist etc).
But 221 BCE the Qin (“Chin”) emperor put an end to this: he created China’s first unified empire.
Li Si (chief minister), Legalist, clamped down all rivals and did a general book-burning: “having
access to private learning meant that scholars trusted their own teachings instead of the
emperor’s orders”. Political unity was bought at the steep price of cultural conformity. However,
connected with more positive cultural policy: standardization of written Chinese. As with the
book-burning, Li Si intended to clear the cobwebs of history and establish Qin as the zero hour in
China’s subsequent development. This “saved Chinese civilization”, because of the many dialects
the only way to communicate with other Chinese regions was by writing. Its unity reposed in its
textual tradition.The book-burning had the unintended effect of preserving wisdom: many books
survived because it aimed its fire only at “private teaching” and suffered from limited and
ineffective enforcement. China’s first imperial libraries date to the Han dynasty, aimed to
recoverall Qin had destroyed. Problem: Chinese books more perishable and more prone to
physical collapse (bamboo and silk).
Another problem: loss of sequence. Han scholars reconstructed Confucian classics on stone tablets,
result: reliable copies of these canonical texts. This use of permanent materials (and mechanical
reproduction) was unknown in the Hellenistic academic world, because of multiplicity scholarly texts.
Comparison Greek and Chinese: Whereas Chinese libraries were founded to stem the decay of a
vanishing and partly destroyed intellectual tradition in their own homeland, Hellenistic libraries
developed to render an existing body of knowledge reliably reproducible and physically portable.
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