Concrete Utopia

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about society and knowledge, and things like that. I've been trying to figure out what society is capable of and what it isn't. And I've been thinking that maybe for knowledge to reach its completion it will be necessary to unify the opposites that make up our society into a unity.

To start off. We are all individuals, particular entities with our own subsistence and activity. But we live in a society. One of the ways a fact is made real is if it is recognised as such by the whole of society. Similarly, we rely on social recognition to confirm our ideas about ourself and to provide specialist knowledge of the world that our limited experience and world view is not sufficient to cover.

So we have our current situation where the individual is the sole arbitrator of truth and the particular entity which finds its own essence in its own activity. But the truth it finds is the necessity of an arbitrator of truth beyond itself, and its activity is what builds a society in which its particular individual activity is just a vanishing quantity.

To overcome this, the particular individual needs to have a role in constituting truth. Truth qua law is defined in democratic decision making. Truth qua knowledge in a democratic form is being discovered in wikipedia and internet use in general, where all individuals have a place in the critical process of knowledge creation.

There's more, society has to abolish the perceived difference between social capabilities and individual capabilities. In short, any expansion of the capabilities of society should feed through to an expansion in the capabilities of people within societies.

Most importantly of all, society must somehow bring the individuality of individuals fully into itself. This can only be done if society makes its essential activity into individuality so that it turns the non-identical qualities of individuals into a social quality. This means more than toleration of differences, it means that society should foster new divisions and creative expressions of individuality within itself.

Now, society as I have described it is society as it interacts with knowledge. As far as I can see knowledge takes two forms in its interaction with society. That is, knowledge as law and knowledge as fact. Knowledge as law is brought to some level of conclusion in what I have already said. In essence, law is what maintains the possibility of work to stamp human will onto objects in a concrete way.

But knowledge as fact relates to the objects as they are in themselves and for us. Knowledge of an object for us is expressed in science, where we see what an object is capable of, what its uses are, how it can be categorised, etc. But knowledge of an object in itself is found now in religion and art, where an object is appreciated regardless of its references to other things on its own merits. This is its inherent value.

Inherent value and value as an object to be catalogued find their unification in humanity. I believe we might be entering an era where humanity will become capable of conceiving of its potential. Religion must grasp this value and bring it to science. When science is conducted in the knowledge of the value of mankind and of life then it can be full knowledge, in and for itself.

At this point science and technology would replace and become one with religion as that which unfolds the human spirit into the universe and provides the basis for its moral and psychological development.

With technologies like space travel, genetic modification, psychotherapy, etc humanity would actually be able to achieve its values, and the quest to understand the universe would become one with the quest to actively and concretely change it. At such a time the difference between science/religion and government as individuality would dissappear inasmuch as both work towards the same end.

This is, of course, impossible. I'll come to why tomorrow, maybe.