Confusion is a sign of having understood at least something.
Pangnotology
I would like to define pangnotology here as the science that deals with unconscious dynamics and conscious techniques and strategies that cause uncomfortable gaps in knowledge to disappear or not to become visible in the first place. As such, it would be the complementary counterpart to agnotology, which is about dynamics, techniques and strategies to discredit, relativize, marginalize or even delay uncomfortable knowledge. This is preferably done by contrasting inconvenient knowledge with convenient pseudo-knowledge as at least equal. Agnotology, introduced by the historians of science Londa Schiebinger and Robert N. Proctor, became known in particular for dealing with science denial in relation to the dangers of tobacco use and climate change. This originally involved techniques and strategies of manipulation and deception by commercial enterprises and associations. Interacting with this, however, individual and collective dynamics of self-deception, self-soothing, and repression became important, and consequently their influence on cultural and political dynamics. The focus of agnotology, however, has so far been on the conscious collective level. There has not yet been a decidedly individual agnotology.
Like agnotology, pangnotology is a art term. Both are not concerned with the conditions and prerequisites of the emergence of knowledge (epistemology) but with its manipulation out of more or less existential individual or collective emergency situations. While agnotology is concerned with the interest-led manipulative destruction of individual and collective certainties, pangnotology is concerned with their production. The prime example of a pangnotological dynamic is the blind spot in the retina in the eye. Since at least every conscious perception is always a holistic one, the content of a blind spot is quasi automatically replaced by what is already known or expected. Pangnotological distortions, however, do not only take place in perception but in all areas of cognition. It is extremely difficult to grasp one's own non-knowledge, since it always requires an elaborate self-observation or metacognition to discover one's own blind spots. The simplest method is a change of perspective, but a blind spot that is deeper than the change of perspective survives it unscathed, so that only the combination of empathy into the perspective of another person together with their feedback remains. Dynamics can be particularly destructive, in which someone is confronted by another with their not-knowing, and their perception of the criticism changes from the factual to the relational level. Since this not-knowing has not been part of the self-image so far, the situation is unsettling and the criticism is taken personally. Derogatory intentions are hallucinated (e.g. in the form of projections) and statements are reinterpreted accordingly. The blind spot is filled, as it were, with a primitive personal attack. The insecurity is not seen as the result of one's own non-knowledge, but as a directly intended devaluation. According to my interpretation, something similar also played the decisive role in the condemnation of Sokrates described in the Apology of Socrates.
Accordingly, I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself, and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
By confronting important citizens of Athens with their ignorance through his philosophizing, Socrates unsettled them and fell out of favor with them. In this respect, the death sentence against him could be described as a pangnotological murder. While Socrates reflects on the limits of his knowledge, trying to map the areas of his own knowledge, so to speak, in order to demarcate them from the epistemic terra incognita, deviating approaches inevitably lead to pangnotological dynamics. Even if certain unconditional knowledge is impossible, there are, at least in mathematics, statements that have been proven on the basis of conditions, which are eternally valid as certain conditional knowledge subject to the reservation of error.
The completeness of a body of knowledge can be assessed dialectically by three criteria. In the breadth, the question arises whether all areas and topics have been covered, and in the depth, whether this is also the case for all preconditions, reasons, rationales, etc. down to the very bottom. Thirdly, the question arises whether the level of detail is sufficient to include all relevant historical, personal, methodological and ideological facts. No matter how one stands to the thesis of the end of history, and which contradictions and deep gaps all would have to be remedied or bridged before, the currently still existing considerable gaps between theory and practice suggest that our existing theories are still undercomplex and somewhat wrong. As a consequence, it is less and less conceivable that one individual could possess all relevant knowledge. The consequence is a trilemma. The selection of two criteria inevitably leads to trade-offs in the third. I would like to describe the three possible extreme combinations, in each of which one of the three criteria is neglected, as pangnotological ideal types.
At regulars' tables, you can sometimes see a species that is capable of providing information on every topic in every detail. However, their explanations lack profundity above all. Since no well-founded reasons and derivations can be given, the argumentations often consist of wild associations and gross simplifications. In connection with this, no great value is placed on the truth content, but rather on a self-satisfied demonstrative display of one's own opinions or attitudes, which can be more or less strongly populist in nature. However, people who come close to this ideal type can also be highly educated, such as the philosopher Richard David Precht, whose detailed variety of topics is accompanied by a clear lack of depth in my view.
Experts are expected to have profound and detailed knowledge. They are expected not only to have penetrated their subject intellectually in depth, but also to know as precisely as possible about all the facts and conclusions relevant to their subject. In the sciences, the explosion of knowledge over the last few centuries has led to ever-increasing specialization. The independent further development of each specialized discipline meant that it became increasingly difficult to think beyond one's own field and to classify one's own activities in a meaningful way.
The third possibility results in a claim to breadth and depth with the consequence of a lack of detail due to high selectivity. Strong eclectic tendencies and dialectically convoluted argumentation are difficult to avoid here. The anti-expertocratic claim to focus on the big picture and cross-connections can lead to fractures and to false or exaggerated generalizations. The resulting lack of precision and stringency makes critique-resistant self-immunizations easy. Encyclopedias are such selective summaries of bodies of knowledge that are as broad and deep as possible according to certain criteria. Moreover, they are in a sense anti-expertocratic, since they focus on the availability and accessibility of the broadest possible range of perspectives and viewpoints. In the scientific field, on the other hand, a certain anti-encyclopedic attitude can be found, since stringency and precision are more important here. In encyclopedias, experts have to put up with being confronted with criticism and contradiction, whereas within the scientific community there are effective ways of avoiding such things. Even if encyclopedias are only collections of authors and lemmas, there are many forms of interaction between them, just as the sciences are more than just collections of scientists and their works. In Wikipedia, articles that attempt to summarize as clearly as possible a broad spectrum of sources, theories and viewpoints on a particular topic are, on the one hand, often quite rightly under suspicion of original research. On the other hand, a successful compilation can sometimes implicitly show the possibility of a theory synthesis and thus simultaneously fulfill and violate the original research prohibition.
World explanations are always suspected of being presumptuous. This is all the more true the more they correspond to one of the three pangnotological ideal types, since presumption and one-sidedness often go hand in hand. Encyclopedic necessarily complex dialectical world explanations should always be experimental and provisional, otherwise they degenerate into totalitarian ideology. Experts should likewise restrain themselves with world explanations, since they run on the other hand the risk of generalizing their expert knowledge inadmissibly. For regulars, on the other hand, it is advisable to refrain from any complacency in their world explanations and not to consider them to be more than vague hypotheses.
With regard to the question of the purpose of knowledge, it is still possible to distinguish between do-gooders and truth-seekers. Extreme do-gooders use their theoretical knowledge more or less unquestioningly for their goals, thereby generating strong ingroup-outgroup dynamics, and thus favoring a buildup or solidification of enemy images. In particular, however, this makes the pursuit of even large goals much easier. Extreme truth seekers, on the other hand, question everything more or less unrestrainedly, which makes it easier to break down enemy images, but makes it much more difficult to pursue larger goals.
In their book "Hubris: The Journey of Mankind between Departure and Failure," Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe ask what was different about our ancestors who left Africa 70,000 years ago from those who lived in the Middle East 180,000 years ago. The Eemian warm period, 126,000 to 115,000 years ago, offered climatically even somewhat better conditions for the invention of agriculture than the Holocene, which has lasted from 12,000 years ago until today. What was and is the reason for the aggressiveness of "Homo hubris", whose unusually rapid global spread is traced in the book on the basis of the latest archaeogenetic investigations? Despite an intensive search, no cultural or religious gene has yet been found that distinguishes us from our ancestors 180,000 years ago. The answers I try to give in my texts are based on the hypothesis that about 70 000 years ago we started to develop a highly dimensional and multilayered abstracting language, which enabled us to describe much more than to explain. The associated explosion of uncomfortable knowledge gaps unsettled and generated anxiety. The resulting knowledge deficit tension led to the development of culture and religion, which served to compensate, distract and self-soothe. In particular, religions prevented a state of metaphysical homelessness. The price for this was vertical tension combined with a guilty conscience, which in turn led to new anxieties. The result was an increasing alienation from our inner and outer nature. At some point, after we had torn down all bridges to our past, we could no longer imagine ever having been anything other than creatures created by divine beings. Only the vertical tensions triggered the struggle for recognition that Hegel writes about in his The Phenomenology of Spirit. The bad conscience at least did not result primarily from repressed acts of violence, as Freud conjectured in Totem and Taboo, but from the repressed or compensated uncomfortable gaps in knowledge and the perceivable own inadequacies in the face of superior divine beings. With the invention of money and the associated revolutions of human psychology, society and culture came another explosion of uncomfortable gaps in knowledge, and we also became alienated from each other. Also only by the vertical tensions and the developments connected with them the evil came into the world. This I try to describe as a spiral of personality deficit tensions, psychopathy, bullying and humanity deficit tensions. If unconscious pangnotological dynamics still have an innocent quality to them, this changes when people consciously decide to at least temporarily reduce the various tensions with the help of pangnotological techniques and strategies, e.g. by externalizing them.
The most surprising discovery for me in working out these texts was that the three pangnotological ideal types fit both my personality typology and my philosophy of history, so that it is possible to define pangnotological ages. The one from 70,000 years ago until the invention of money I would like to call the histrionic regular age. This was followed by the narcissistic expert age in which homo hubris mutated into homo hubris avaritia. Somehow I try to convince myself that on January 15, 2001 a new age has begun, which could be called anti-authoritarian and empathic participatory age, because it integrates all three pangnotological ideal types equally. Unfortunately, so far only vague beginnings but no resilient indications are recognizable for this, and the current popularity of authoritarian promises of salvation points once again to the strong desire for an at least partial return to the histrionic age of regulars. Perhaps Homo hubris is transforming into Homo sapiens. Alternatively, we could also be at the beginning of an age of new ideological empathy denials, depending on how successful we are in overcoming the extreme ideological schismogenetic tendencies of the first two ages. At the moment, however, it unfortunately looks as if an ecologically sustainable society will only be achievable after a global system collapse.
Literature
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807
Johannes Krause, Thomas Trappe, Hybris: Die Reise der Menschheit zwischen Aufbruch und Scheitern, 2021
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913
