Contaminated Knowledge
Philosophy as Channeling Unseen Forces
Anzac, Alberta
“Know thyself.”
So read the maxim inscribed above the doorway to the Delphic Oracle’s temple. It was there that Socrates was announced to be the wisest man of all. He was the wisest man because he alone could admit his own ignorance—that he knew nothing about the most important things.
Philosophers since Socrates have followed his lead in scrutinizing their every belief. However, they have departed from the inaugural philosopher in refusing to forego knowledge altogether. Rather, philosophy has become a discipline oriented primarily around knowledge. It has distinguished itself from other disciplines by monopolizing a type of knowledge for which few others have regard: knowledge of Whole. As a pursuit of knowledge, however, philosophy essentially resembles any other discipline.
Perhaps we have gotten ahead of ourselves. Perhaps we have forgotten something essential in Socrates’ philosophical project, and would be right to regain his skepticism towards knowledge. We have set off to the races in our search for knowledge without adequately understanding the preconditions for knowledge.
Indeed, it is right to be skeptical of knowledge itself.
How does one come to possess “knowledge”? The most common formula espoused, either explicitly or implicitly, is that knowledge is justified true belief. Belief is conceptually clear enough; I will leave “truth” aside for now; but let us examine the concept of justification.
A belief is justified if it conforms with widely acknowledged parameters for what is reasonable. A datum is reasonable if it is procured through the use of a sound cognitive method and coheres with established principles of reasoning. Methods can range from empirical to mathematical to logical, generally stemming from the laws of identity and non-contradiction. In tandem with a robust method, we use established principles as pillars. These function as heuristics so that we need not reason from the ground up whenever we form a judgement. Principles can be anything from the law of gravity to the blank slate theory of human nature to the fact that the French Revolution began in 1789. Principles can be at the fore of an argument, or implicit—lurking in the background.
Principles and methods emanate from our thought patterns. The foundational laws of Western logic that undergird reasoning are not ideals of how reason ought to progress, but are general descriptions of how humans under ideal conditions do reason. This would be unworthy of scrutiny if our thought patterns were innate, universal, and unchanging. However, it is doubtful that they are. For instance, take the logical treaties of Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti, ancient Buddhist thinkers whose systems of logic deny the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. This introduces an element of contingency into our criteria for knowledge.
Thought patterns are downstream of brain states, which do not persist identically over time. If men change in different ages and under different conditions, then their ideas must change also. If new forces are impressed upon the brain, and one’s thought patterns are irrevocably altered, then the ideas which shine forth may be different also. Different brain states suggest different principles and methods of proceeding towards knowledge.
We must, then, ask what causes underlie our brain states, for knowledge is ultimately downstream of these causes.
We wise apes pride ourselves on our knowledge, though this knowledge may rest on a shaky foundation. If the principles and methods, upon which our edifice of learning rests, are contingent and particular, rather than necessary and universal, then we may have to start from the beginning.
There may be imperceptible chthonic forces impressing themselves upon us at each moment in time, and in each phase of history, which bring forth different ideas. These forces meddle with our minds. Our very knowledge becomes contaminated with them.
We would do well to interrogate these forces, trace them across time, and cultivate awareness of how they infiltrate our minds and our knowledge. Only once we have done so can we confidently discern knowledge from falsehood. The following will constitute such an inquiry, proceeding from the concrete to the abstract—from the most obvious examples of external forces meddling with our brain states to the most subtle and imperceptible.
The clearest example is drugs that induce radically different mental states in their users. There is a wide spectrum between light medications such as antidepressants or painkillers and intense substances such as heroin or fentanyl, but each fundamentally changes one’s thought patterns. The continued use of a substance permanently alters brain chemistry.
Most antidepressants increase the production of serotonin in the brain. Anti-anxiety medication typically enhances the activity of certain neurotransmitters which induce calmness or drowsiness. Ubiquitous drugs such as alcohol or cannabis are both potent psychoactive depressants which alter brain chemistry in not insignificant ways.
It is commonly said that certain drugs, usually hallucinogens, trigger intense spiritual experiences, sometimes good, sometimes bad, which leave a lasting impact on a user’s mental state and beliefs, even after the effects of the drug have subsided. Ayahuasca and psilocybin are psychedelics famously prized as healing substances, which grant clarity and allow for direct communion with the divine. Timothy Leary championed the use of LSD as a cure for social malaise, arguing that it was an effective tool to expand one’s mind and find one’s personal truth. It hardly bears saying, but such claims should be met with the utmost incredulity. However, it is undeniable that entirely different ideas spawn from these radically different mental states.
With some caveats, we should believe those who say that their perspective has changed through the use of drugs. New mental states furnish them with different principles and methods. There may very well be different and not inferior knowledge brought forth from the use of hallucinogens. I only contest that this knowledge is as thoroughly contaminated as most.
Harder drugs more evidently alter one’s psychological state to the outside observer, whether under the immediate influence of the drug or not. One must only observe the average fentanyl user to see that they have an entirely unique epistemology and radically different criteria for truth.
It is perhaps arrogant to say that a sober man is more reasonable than one who is intoxicated. They are both equally reasonable, only reasonable according to different methods and principles.
Under the effects of each drug, no matter how severe, brain chemistry is altered, leading to different thought patterns, leading to different principles and methods, leading to different knowledge. Something as innocuous as caffeine becomes epistemologically suspect.
Less obvious is the effect of food on our brain chemistry. That food does significantly bear upon our minds is, however, well-documented. Healthy eating corresponds to a healthy brain—in other words, a properly functioning set of cognitive equipment (though we can, of course, question what is and is not “properly functioning”). High-fat diets and obesity generally have been shown to lead to a higher propensity for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s. It has been demonstrated that high national consumption of fish is inversely correlated with depressive behaviour (though of course this is not the only relevant factor). We can never know the precise degree of impact, but it is hardly absurd to say that different diets usher forth different belief systems.
My thoughts when eating home cooked meals are perhaps entirely contaminated, just as my thoughts on the open road while living off gas station food and energy drinks. If what I say is true, then we have no grounds to say which are epistemologically superior.
On a global scale, we might better understand the formation of different metaphysical traditions and belief systems as the result of a confluence of factors including diet, geography, technology, and physiognomy, rather than being either purely rational or irrational phenomena. Beliefs do not arise in a vacuum.
What this suggests, moreover, is something the Modern philosophers tried to deny, but which evidence makes undeniable: an intimate connection between body and mind. One cannot isolate the mind and examine it, for it is part of the same body that works, senses, and plays. The mind does not form belief independent of that body, but rather, belief is often downstream of the information carried to the brain by that body—or the information encoded in that body itself.
Bodily health impacts mental health. In fact, it is hardly useful to separate the two concepts. Bodily health is mental health. Physical health problems significantly increase the risk of suffering from mental malaise, as does mental malaise increase one’s risk of bodily health. A meagre body produces stagnant knowledge. An active body produces kinetic knowledge.
The effects of the genome on one’s thoughts, indeed, cannot be ignored either. Beliefs are often downstream of genetic disposition. Though genetics are innate, they are particular—they do not give us a universal foundation for knowledge.1 They meddle with and shape our thoughts; in extremis, genetic differences between peoples produce entirely different knowledge traditions.
If the Orient holds that time is a cyclical recurrence, while the Occident holds that it flows in a linear progression, the proper way to evaluate each is not to take it as a purely logical proposition, but to hunt down the material causes underlying such beliefs to see in what ways both of these views are contaminated by the land that bore them and the conditions which facilitated their spread.
The forces discussed until now are merely those which act upon the mind through the body. It remains to be shown that many objects have direct access to our minds. Marshall McLuhan’s work on media helps illustrate exactly how.
For McLuhan, the medium is the message. What he means by this famous quip is that the vessel in which information is contained is often more important than the information itself. Indeed, the vessel is not merely a neutral entity that transmits information, but it shapes the information as it carries it, shapes the mind of the user before he even moves to externalize his thought, and shapes the disposition of the recipient.
The paradigmatic example for McLuhan of how a new medium created entirely novel psycho-social states is the invention of the printing press. In The Gutenburg Galaxy, McLuhan argues that the logic of the printing press was instrumental in the rise of nationalism, rationalism, standardization, dualism, and strides in scientific progress. The ability to standardize a text and widely disseminate it lead to uniformity on a large scale which was never before possible. The parochial Germanic states were set on a path for unification. Standardization of weights and measures and the spread of scientific research galvanized scientific progress. A culture which was previously aural—meaning that men reacted most strongly to their audible sense—was replaced with a visual culture, as text, not voice, became the dominant means of transmitting information. These societal changes reflected changes which occurred within the human mind at the time. Man became a rational, visual, national creature, as opposed to a spiritual, audible, and parochial one.
The ideas born of this psycho-social state were entirely different than the ones produced before.
When a man uses different media, and in different contexts, the contents of his thought change. The newspaper conduces to presentism, curt analysis, political partisanship, and brevity. Books conduce to evergreen subjects and sustained reflection. The television conduces to flashy pictures, intense stimuli, and brief plots, whereas movies conduce to narrativity and prolonged interest. New technologies always open up the door for new media, which cultivate unique psycho-social states and, in the end, new forms of knowledge.
There is a knowledge which emanates from books. This is markedly different from the knowledge that emanates from television or, indeed, from Substack.
Whereas people often limit McLuhan’s analysis to media such as books and television, the scope of his project is far broader. In Understanding Media, he defines a medium as an “extension of man.” Not only television and books constitute media, but shoes, hammers, democracy, and the atom bomb. Anything can be a medium, really. However, it is still acceptable to use the term medium as, for McLuhan, each of these things transmit information.
At the very least, things such as shoes convey sense data. These data are all the more potent, given that they enter our minds subtly and imperceptibly. This suggests that all technology shapes our minds in a fundamental way, as all technology conveys information. This information infiltrates the mind and provides grounds for the underlying premises of our thought.
Shoes open up entirely new possibilities as to where we can go. The power generated from oil and gas opened up new possibilities for the course of civilization. The automobile granted man inner knowledge of his positive and negative freedom. The atom bomb showed man his destructive potential. These are not merely things that exist statically, nor are they merely neutral tools. These media force upon us the ways they ought to be used.
But not only that. It is becoming more obvious that there is a literal and material expression of these forces impressing themselves upon our brains.
Take the case of oil. It may sound strange to assert that oil impresses itself upon our minds, that there are thought patterns which oil instills in us, or that there is a distinct kind of petro-knowledge. But, in fact, oil has immensely shaped the modern consciousness.
Oil allows for lubricity—the seamless flow of parts working together as a unified whole. When the world is so entirely lubricated with oil, mediation ceases and immediacy prevails. Opposites oscillate so quickly that they become identical.
Oil generates massive amounts of energy, which instills in us an understanding of our power and freedom as a species. With oil, we are able to undertake massive industrial projects, travel great distances at high speeds, and manufacture a wealth of products with ease. Oil all but makes man invincible—it empowers man, while also trapping him in a cycle of dependence. With oil, we are everything, and without it, we are nothing. Any talk of freedom in the twenty first century is infested with oil, just as any denial of freedom may merely be a desperate attempt to flee oil’s grasp.
In fact, oil is surrounding us and entering us at every moment. It is on our skin, seeping into our pores, in the case of petroleum-based skin care, lotion, and makeup. We breathe it in constantly, with noxious fumes pouring forth from the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks. Oil lubricates the machinations of the global order, and forms the basis of the most versatile material known to man: plastic.
On the subject of plastic, I must note the persistence and pervasiveness of microplastics: miniscule plastic particles which do not break down for more than a few human lifetimes, which are found inside most living beings, and which accumulate at each trophic level. They have been found in the depths of the ocean, on the heights of remote mountains, in the human bloodstream, and indeed, in the human brain.
When microplastics fill our very brains, how can we think outside oil? How can we know what ideas flow forth naturally from us, and which are imposed upon us from the outside? We are only beginning to understand the effects of microplastics. If they are literally inside our brains, then it is clear that they are meddling with our very thoughts.
In any case, our knowledge is contaminated with oil.
And take the case of the atom bomb. This was not merely the invention of a new technology. The atom bomb radically changed man’s perception of himself and the world. Never before was man so acutely aware of his potential to change, and indeed, destroy, the world around him. Never before had the lines between creation and destruction, chaos and order, been so blurred. Man came to fear himself and his creation, to question the myth of progress, and flagellate himself for his existential sin.
Timothy Morton argues that the invention of the atom bomb already marked the end of the world.2
Since the first nuclear detonations at Los Alamos in 1945, radiation has pervaded our atmosphere. In addition to omnipresent background radiation (which is not without consequence), there is Iodine-131, a byproduct of nuclear fission, which still haunts the ends of the earth. Though the half-life of this product is only eight years, there is still Iodine-131 all across the globe owing to each and every nuclear detonation of the past century. Additionally, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 are isotopes still monitored by the American EPA, and of which they detect traces to the present day.
To make Geiger counters—devices which measure radiation—it is impossible to use any metal produced in the present day, given that each and every ounce of metal is currently irradiated to some degree. Instead, to make these devices, it is necessary to source metal from an age before the 1945 nuclear blasts: in sunken vessels from the great wars.
Everything is irradiated in the modern world, not least of which are our brains. We must ask, with each passing thought, if we are not merely channeling the atom bomb—if our thinking itself is not irradiated.3
In the modern day, there arises a technology with even greater potential for creation and destruction—that of artificial intelligence. Now, not only do we offload our knowledge into books and annals (about which Socrates warned us)—but we offload the very process of thought itself. We task a mere text generator, whose motives and mechanisms the common user seldom understands, with the activity of thought. What becomes of knowledge then?
But let us return to Socrates for a moment. When he was tried by an Athenian jury for corrupting the youth, questioning the gods, and inventing new gods, Socrates presented a rather peculiar defense. His activity was not his fault; everything he did and said was on the advice of a daimon whispering in his ear.4
Though the jury did not find this line of argument convincing, instead sentencing Socrates to death, we should take his suggestion seriously. There are far more things in heaven and earth than imagined in our science and philosophy. As with other media, if one denies their power, that only leaves them more susceptible to their interference. Whether one conceives it as demonic or daimonic activity, we must always be open to the possibility that we are conduits of divine or underworldly forces, and that our edifice of knowledge is not produced by us alone.
McLuhan is right to note that each medium affects our thoughts in myriad ways. However, I entirely disagree with his use of the word “medium” and his definition of a medium as an “extension of man.” In his vision, there is a human user and the thing that is used. However, this account is deeply anthropocentric, which prevents us from getting at the heart of the problem of contaminated knowledge.
We should embark on a veritable Copernican revolution to view man not as a user of media, but as a medium himself through which other users act. A medium is not an extension of man, for man himself is a medium. As we have seen, man is a conduit of information which is not his own. For these reasons, I prefer the term “object” to “medium” as it levels the playing field. To paint something as a medium is to suppose that it is a passive vessel, though I think this is entirely inadequate. There are no passive vessels—every thing is active, acting constantly upon everything else.
If we understand things as transmitters of information, then this begs the question—from where does this information flow? There are three answers, as I see it. 1) We can posit that the information flows from us, in which case we are projecting information into the world, only for it to bounce back to us through these objects. In this case, the information would not be new. It would be within us all along. However, this would preclude us from receiving new information at all, which is an absurd conclusion, and trap us in Kantian solipsism. 2) It is some kind of transcendent divinity working through objects as media to present us with information. One does not have to deny the existence of divinity to view this suggestion as fanciful. 3) The information emanates from the objects themselves, in which case we must grant objects a degree of agency, autonomy, and activity. For, if the information is not contained within us, or does not descend from a transcendent source, then ordinary objects must be said to present us with information. I think the third possibility is by far the most likely.
If we accept option 3, then this strengthens the case for contaminated knowledge, as we must accept the existence of forces beyond our control which act upon us, altering the human mind, ushering forth new principles and methods, leading to entirely different knowledge.
But with such an attack leveled against knowledge, what is philosophy to do, priding ourselves on the edifice of Western metaphysics and our great compendia of wisdom? I suggest that the task of philosophy in the modern world is to pivot away from knowledge, towards something more fundamental: awareness. To do so is hardly an abandonment of the philosophical tradition, but a return to our Socratic origins. Philosophy was never meant to be about cultivating knowledge—there is more than enough of that floating around, now as always. Rather, it was an activity oriented around scrutinizing that knowledge to the utmost extent and tracing it to its sources.
Just as Socrates channeled the voice of his daimon, so too must the new philosopher become a conduit for the chthonic forces that pervade his environment. He must become a medium for the land, the highway, oil, God, the atom bomb, and everything in between—giving these objects a human voice and thereby cultivating awareness. It is through humility that we will begin once more to interrogate our knowledge and understand how it is contaminated. We must take a step back and re-evaluate the foundations of our knowledge so that we may forge ahead once more.
The present account must not be seen as relativism. To claim surely that all knowledge is suspect would be an implicit claim to knowledge, after all. I am merely making the suggestion that our knowledge is contaminated and showing which forces may be present. Remember, my attack was not aimed at truth, but at justification.
Nor does this account preclude the search for knowledge entirely. It merely muddies the waters and forces us down a longer road. For, though I have criticisms of McLuhan, he offers us the best means to purge our minds from their many contaminants. In Understanding Media, he argues that, through cultivating awareness of the effects of different media, we can counteract their influence on our thought. If there is a solution to the problem of contaminated knowledge, it is through awareness.
However, McLuhan’s account comes up against the problem of mediation. If, as he conceives, we are users of media, then direct access to the nature of these media is prevented, as our understanding of them is mediated by the senses. Our sense apparatus is taken as given, and the ways media affect us are mediated through this. Maintaining a fixed subject-object barrier and conceiving objects as passive media is a deep anthropocentrism in McLuhan’s thought. Anthropocentrism, in this case, is not a moral error, but an epistemological barrier.
But there is a way out. If we allow for a Copernican revolution in our thought, shifting from an anthropocentric to an object-oriented metaphysics, then we are offered a path forward. For if human thought extends to the objects to collect information, then bounces back for us to receive it, then we are trapped in Kantian solipsism. But, as we have established, information inheres in objects. And far from us being mere subjects and things in the world being passive objects, we must level the playing field to permit the possibility that we are as much media as the objects we encounter—that objects act upon us directly.
The conception of man as medium suggests that we have direct access to objects by virtue of their activity leaving imprints upon our mind, by us channeling them and pouring forth their contents in our every word, our every breath, our every thought. Any claim to knowledge must be conscious of the influence of external forces. Philosophy, then, becomes the activity of giving these forces a human voice and cultivating awareness of the ways in which they contaminate our knowledge.
Philosophy becomes the activity of channeling unseen forces.
Man is a microcosm of the confluence of forces that exist around him. In the mind lives oil and the atom bomb, angels and demons, democracy and tyranny, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, one’s genome and one’s country, shoes and hammers. The human mind reflects each and all of the complexities of the manifold. In it are contained the traces of the external world, and through these traces alone might we come to knowledge.
Descartes, sitting upon his armchair, sought a firm epistemological foundation. He aimed to achieve this by subjecting each of his beliefs to doubt and isolating those which were indubitable. Knowledge of the external world was brought into doubt, as it was entirely mediated through the senses. He settled upon knowledge of the self as foundational, as thought was not mediated in its direct access to the self.
If only it were that easy.
We do have direct access to the mind, but to understand the mind’s activity, we must understand the external forces which act upon it. If we naively take the mind as given, as distinct from the world, then we will be misled, taking thought patterns as innate which are, in fact, imported.
Our path to knowledge must be circuitous. We cannot proceed from the self to the world, as Descartes attempted to do, nor can we proceed from the world back to the self, as would the materialists. Our path must take us back and forth, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, filling in spaces here and there like a crossword puzzle. If we discover a force in the world that acts upon us, we must turn inwards to examine its effects. If we discover its presence within our minds, then we must turn outwards once more to see how this force has contaminated our knowledge of the world.
This argument can be turned upon itself, of course. How can I know that what I write is not contaminated?
I can only say, firstly, that I never said knowledge was impossible—only that it has potential contaminants. Secondly, the present essay is hardly an attempt at knowledge, but an exercise in probing the depths of the human mind, and suggesting a course forward. I argue that this course must be based upon something more fundamental than knowledge: awareness. Awareness, after all, is the crux of the matter. To develop awareness of the ways in which our thoughts are not our own is a necessary task if we are to restore our faith in knowledge.
If Socrates’ fate is any indication, such an account will encounter resistance, not least of which by those who pride themselves on the grand edifice of scientific and philosophical knowledge which we have accumulated. We must supplant such arrogance with humility, and remember, as the Marquis de Condorcet wrote, that “the truth belongs to those who seek it, not to those who claim to possess it.” The inaugural philosopher himself was incredulous towards knowledge. Perhaps we would do well to follow his example.
Socrates’ daimon instructed him to wander about the agora, bringing low those who laid arrogant claim to knowledge and wisdom. He fully admitted that his thoughts were not his own.
What is your daimon telling you?
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013), pp. 7.
Many ideas in this section were born of reading and conversing with
, whose writing on the atom bomb deserves more attention.Not a demon in the English sense, though the two words are etymologically related. A daimon in the Greek sense is merely a lesser divinity, neither definitively good nor evil.