Knowledge Naturalised

Abstract

The philosophy of divine science, or the epistemology of subjectless knowledge, despite its basic orientation, is forced to account for the vehicle of knowledge; for to be eliminated the subject must at least be recognised. The Cartesian inner eye, surveying internal mental representations, needs a mark signalling either the reliability and divine origin of an internal representation, or its infidelity and human descent. The epistemology of divine knowledge, then, uses the sign for cleansing the human mind until the divine purity, and treats the empirical subject, i.e. the concrete human being, as merely a temporary vehicle and home of Pure Reason, or Ideal Language, or Objective Knowledge. Because of its contingency and temporality the empirical subject — after being analysed and fully described — has to be removed so that not a single trace of it remains on knowledge. Such a knowledge, it is hoped, would then imitate the divine identity, or at least achieve an unmediated unique correspondence between knowledge and what is known. The epistemology of divine knowledge and its surrogates are epistemologies of a self-annihilating subject. However, as God withdraws from the world, both natural and human; as metaphysics dies with Him, and loneliness and ordinariness of human existence becomes conspicuous, the whole stage undergoes radical change. Pure Reason, Ideal Language, and Objective Knowledge, all impregnated by the structural metaphors of divine knowledge-as-identity and human likeness to God, lose the ground; and it has been only a matter of time before the hidden background of the surrogates would be made apparent, tradition wholly abandoned, and a full blown explicit theory of the empirical human subject demanded.