Truth against Arrogance: Insights and Eclipse, Investigation and Insights Again

Knowledge, rather than being a constant virtue of one’s mind, is an acquaintance of an unsteady, precarious character. Contrary to the expectations people like to associate with it, it is neither indisputably gained nor is the keeping of it ever assured. Still, there is the endeavor called scholarship, and a part of that endeavor is the promise to attain indeed unequivocal knowledge about the subjects taken up for study, and then to have this knowledge available lastingly. The promise sustains, boosts, and ennobles the activity of scholarship. It incites ambition, and the ambition sublimates all the hardships and sacrifices that scholarship entails. Without the sting of ambition the existence of scholars would be a rare, indeed a very rare occurrence. This is meant to be a strictly empirical remark, not the slightest moral judgment is here intended. Scholars may justly claim to be engaged, by their search for knowledge, in a noble, if not the most noble project for humans. Still, both the noble nature of their design and their purposeful aspiration to succeed with it pertain to their work. It is, in existential terms, not “pure.” Whatever the actual cognitive plan, the “research design,” might be, the established auxiliaries of ambition—accepted methods, trusted experiences, habitual judgements, seasoned emotions, professional confidence, collegial sharing of views—accompany it. Their influence on one’s scholarly work varies, of course. It can, in comparative terms, be greater or smaller. Much depends upon the nature of a scholar’s self-awareness. Is it a source, we may ask, only of self-regard, of gratifying ideas about one’s science, or rather of a critical view on the likely non-scholarly elements in the general and perhaps even one’s own practice of that science? However that may be, the auxiliaries of ambition of which I speak are invariably a formative force in the exercise of erudition. But to what extent? And are the people concerned conscious of them? Or are they not? Do they reflect on their “knowledge”? Or are they blind to the uncertainty of it? Do they recognize the limitations of their scholarship? Or do they excel by more or less doctrinairely confining their curiosity? Such questions arose in my mind when I read Paleolithic Politics, Barry Cooper’s new book.1 The story he tells illustrates, in a striking way, the arrogance that scholars can assume vis-à-vis the communication of essential insights rendered by the material they have chosen for their study and against which they have barricaded themselves with—remember the auxiliaries of ambition—an array of ingrained methodological, doctrinal, social, professional habits and preconceptions. In their “science”, truth—things unveiled—is eclipsed. It is “lost” barred from everyone who continues to practice that science. Barry Cooper amply portrays the study of Paleolithic art in such a state. A whole scholarly discipline, we are told, remained, throughout its history, blind to the true significance of the objects it was concerned with—paintings on walls in caves, scratches on bones, lines and geometrical figures engraved on rock. The eclipse held, though not exclusively. A few individual scholars emerged, typically on the margins of the discipline, who shed the cloths of professional arrogance and approached those objects with empathy, if not with modesty. Renouncing on a principal dogma of their discipline, they assumed that the humans in the Paleolithic era were by no means “primitives”, whose intellectual capacities were much lower than those of humans today. They ascribed to the people of the Paleolithic the dignity of a full humanity. Those people, they held, had a sense of meaning as we have. There was something to be understood in studying those paintings in the caves, scratches on bones, geometrical figures on rocks. However, what was it? What did the people of the Paleolithic intend that could and ought to be understood anew?