Should you specialize... or cover a wide range?
Foucault on "epistemes", Kuhn on "paradigms" - knowledge as a CULTURAL CREATION
Hello!
The first rule of social media is that you must specialize and “own” a certain topic. On Twitter/X, think PlanB for Bitcoin, or David Perrell for writing. You cover that topic exclusively and relentlessly, and that is how you grow a big audience.
I’ve never been totally comfortable with this, if only because it’s a little boring to write about one thing and nothing else. I want to post about anything from self-help to philosophy to the economy to politics, even if it leads to fewer followers.
The presumption underlying the single-issue influencer is that they “know” something. Well, according to the current standards of their area of knowledge, they do.
But what if their discipline or knowledge area is defective in itself? You might have been an expert on phrenology in the 19th century, and lauded for it, but phrenology is now seen as a pseudoscience.
In his 1966 book, The Order of Things, Marcel Foucault claims that knowledge is always a cultural product reflecting the prevailing worldview.
Foucault’s basic idea is that each era, or “episteme” is redolent with a “positive unconscious”, a way of seeing the world that it is quite unaware of. Our linear minds are used to taking a particular discipline, such as biology or economics, and seeing it as an evolving area of knowledge from its earliest conceptions to the present day.
But this does not reflect reality. The way that people saw the science of life (biology) in the 17th century, Foucault says, has more in common with the way they saw wealth and money in that era, than it has with 19th century biology.
The book arose in Foucault’s mind when he was reading a 1942 Borges essay, and laughed out loud at a passage which refers to a Chinese encyclopedia that divides animals into: “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off ‘look like flies'.”
The comic weirdness of Borges’ list comes from there being no order or linkage between the things listed, no “ground” of knowledge.
What is the ground on which our own categories rest? What is it we assume to be true or not true, linked or not linked, in our culture and time?
Foucault wanted to replace the traditional history of thought (“so and so discovered something, and his influences were”), with an analysis which tells us what anyone would have thought or believed in a particular era.
On an archaeological dig you are not looking for a particular person, Foucault observes, but want to know how a whole community lived and what it believed. If you are researching Linnaeus, for instance, it is not enough to outline his discoveries – you must understand the intellectual and cultural environment (or “discourse”) which allowed them to be expressed and taken note of. In other words, the “unspoken order” of the times.
Foucault’s notion of epistemes is in my view not that different to Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigms”, and indeed Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out only four years before Foucault’s. This is perhaps evidence itself that knowledge does not proceed from the individual, but emerges organically from the “mindsphere” of a civilization at a given point in time.
Both books are an antidote to the conceit of current knowledge, and remind us that the ground of knowledge in any field can suddenly open up and be swallowed by a new paradigm.
That should make us a little more humble about offering ourselves as an “expert”. We are rather an expert in what our current civilization believes.
It’s possible that people in 200 years time will laugh at our categories and associations, just as we do Borges’ “Chinese taxonomy” today.
What’s the connection?
Someone looking at the body of my own written work might wonder what the connecting principle was. I started out writing on the classics of self-help literature and motivation, moved on to spirituality (sort of a connection there), then began covering the great books in psychology, philosophy, politics and economics. The audiences for personal development and for these harder disciplines are very different. Many people who read my earlier books didn’t read the later ones, and vice versa.
So is there a connection? Well, an individual advances within a society. Even Napoleon admitted this. Jeff Bezos said recently that he could only build Amazon because it was built upon an existing postal service infrastructure. You can’t understand “success” at a personal level without knowing something about how society works, and what has been built by others before our time. That’s why, when I think about self-help and motivation, I have to think about philosophy, politics, and economics too.
Even so, I’d forgive anyone for thinking that my writing output looks like a Borgian-Chinese Taxonomy. In the last few weeks I’ve published new things on the Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Sun-yat Sen (the father of modern China), the history of Public Relations, and what being “in accord with nature” means in Stoicism. By my bedside are books on Shantideva (Buddhism), Stalingrad (History), and the “rebel” personality type (Self-Help).
There is nothing really linking these things other than the fact that one mind was interested in them. An influencer would advise me to stick to one thing, but there is too much to be fascinated about. And who knows, I may find some way to link them all in the future.
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My commentaries on The Order of Things and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are in 50 Philosophy Classics (updated 2022 edition).
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That bedside book is The Rebel Code: 12 Steps to Find Your Place In The World and Win by Joe Barnes. I’m always on the lookout for new motivational books, and find personality typing interesting. Joe’s categorization of Leaders, Followers, and Rebels is an interesting one. I’d never thought of myself as a “rebel” but found myself ticking yes to his criteria. The Kindle version of this book is next to nothing so perhaps worth a download.
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A number of new foreign editions of the 50 Classics titles have come out in 2023, including:
50 Philosophy Classics in Korean
50 Politics Classics in Korean
50 Psychology Classics in Chinese (mainland)
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I’m taking a sabbatical and traveling in Australia and the Subcontinent the next few weeks so probably won’t post anything. A sedentary life gives way to moving one.
Wishing you a very happy Christmas if you celebrate it, and an exciting 2024!
Really appreciate having you as a reader and friend.
Please post any comments below.
Thank you.
Kind regards,
Tom
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Author of the 50 Classics series
Editor of the Capstone Classics
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Tom - thank you for sharing this! Your commentaries on the social sciences are so valuable precisely because you have such a strong background in the other stuff, IMHO. Have a great sabbatical. I look forward to hearing from you next year.