Man’s Timeless Quest for Knowledge

Since there is no limit to human perception, comprehension, and investigation,

Knowledge is a timeless quest of humankind’s cognition to find

What is acceptable as a justified true belief!

(Mirza Iqbal Ashraf)

The quest for knowledge is with man from the time when he, a chimpanzee-like animal, descended from his nest on the tree and started walking in an erect position on his feet with hands free. Standing upright in an elegant posture, the biped no more viewed itself an animal; rather perceiving itself different from the animals set itself apart from other living creatures. As the biped started his journey of new life, with a stimulus of self-awareness evolved to find itself belonging to the species sapiens or wise of the genus Homo meaning “man.” According to one etymology amongst the Europeans the word “man” came from the Proto-Germanic Mann, or “person,” which originating from the Proto-Indo-European root, meaning “hand.” Thus, “man” evolving from his chimpanzee-like ancestry walking upright, with every step started his journey to know the world in which he had appeared and seek knowledge of everything around him. With free hands, man’s pursuit of freedom and knowledge started to know about himself and his world.

Karl Jaspers, in his book The Origin and Goal of History writes:

Seeing the earliest times man has attempted to picture the whole to himself: first in mystical images (in theogonies and cosmogonies, in which man had his appointed place). Then in the image of divine activity operating through the decisive events of world politics (the historical vision of the prophets), then as a process of revelation running through the whole course of history, from the creation of the world and the fall of man to the end of the world and the last judgement.¹

But seeing the whole in himself, he first portrayed himself in mythical images. As he progressed ahead, he depicted his presence in the world in the image of divine activity through the process of Divine revelation. From the creation of the world to his appearance on the planet earth, as his consciousness matured, he became more conscious of himself. He found “human” within himself. But the word “human”—of or belonging to man—which, in turn, comes from the Latin humanus, is thought to be a hybrid relative of homo, meaning “man,” and humus, meaning “earth,” in its sophistical form, developing from the French word humain was commonly came into use in Europe much later in the mid-thirteenth century. When the status of “man” got a raise to the level of a “human being” he displayed many unique characteristics incomparable to any other species.

The trait of “human” though hidden in him right from his birth that before he was openly recognized as human, voluminous knowledge of philosophy, science, humanities, literature, and art, dealing with the progression of knowledge—decidedly a big-bag of a treasure-trove—had already started appearing during the “First Explosion of Knowledge” which had happened in Greece during the sixth century BCE when the foundation of an everlasting Cognitive Revolution was set by the thinkers like Daedalus, Thales, and Anaximander. But a couple of millenniums before the Greek philosophers, we find a “heaven of invention of knowledge” situated in the ancient town of Ur in Mesopotamia—what is now Iraq—where around 2300 BCE, first poetic syllables originated and were rhythmically chanted. Angus Fletcher in his book the Wonder Works, writes about the invention of literature:

Sometime around 2300 BCE, in what is now Iraq, literature’s first known inventor was born within a great mudbrick palace near the snowmelt waters of the Tigris River. There, upon a fragrant cedar cot, the newborn-babe was lullabied to sleep. . . But soon the dreamful infant would become even more famous. Everywhere throughout the city-states of Mesopotamia, all the way from the silver mines of Anatolia to the beaches of Persian Gulf, her name would be sung. And her name was Enheduanna.²

The name Enheduanna was being chanted in fevered tone meaning: “She is the high lord of the moon” which in its original syllables, “En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna” is viewed to be the beginning of the invention of literature by man.

A couple of centuries after Enheduanna in the same corner of the world and from the same city of Ur, a race of men grew up calling themselves “Jews.” They created a new knowledge of faith founded on Abraham’s proclamation that there is one transcendent God who had made a paradise from which the first man and his wife through their own fault were exiled. The city of Ur in Mesopotamia, revered as a place of tremendous spiritual and cognitive imagination, is the same region where Abraham (2167-1992 BCE) the Prophet-patriarch of three revealed religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was born. It is the same region where the first epic poem known the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-1200 BCE) considered as the first great work of literature engraved on 12 clay tablets was found. It was the same region where appeared a religion revealed by Zoroaster (c.1400-1200 BCE) who presented a faith which made its impact on the cultures and religions that appeared after him.

Whereas in one small corner of the world, a race of men grew up guided by a chain of prophets descending from Prophet Abraham, calling themselves Jews and affirming the scriptural exposition of knowledge relating a temptation for knowledge to the first couple living in paradise which resulted in their being thrown out of the Garden into the wilderness. On the other hand in the south-eastern corner of Europe in a city known Athens in Greece according to a Greek myth, knowledge which became the foundation of progression of knowledge in the western civilization was gifted to man by a mythical god Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to mankind living on earth, a knowledge which invited mankind to enter into an urban life and establish a civilization. Berry Allen in Knowledge and Civilization has argued.

Toting up traditional lore on the mythical personages of the past, Homer’s contemporary Hesiod, says that Prometheus “knows more than anyone in the world about anything.” His gift to humanity (as enumerated by Aeschylus) include architecture, astronomy, domesticated animals, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, the riddling art of divination, and the paradoxical gift of blind hope. Greeks praised Promethean knowledge for its metis, or cunning intelligence. The daidala (ingenious works) of Daedalus exemplify metis, as does Athena’s intelligence, “cunning, technical, and magical, all at the same time.” It was she [Athena] who invented the ship and taught the Argos shipwrights how to measure with a rule. The conceptual theme of metis is effective performance, especially under uncertain conditions. Its weapons are those of thought, and perception rather than brute force: nets, lures, traps, snares, pitfalls; anything twisted together, woven, plotted, arranged, or contrived, including chains and magical bonds. Such knowledge is admired for its flair, wisdom, foresight, subtlety, deception, resourcefulness, opportunism, and skill—all powers that excel in dealing with the transient, shifting and unpredictable.³

As the Greek investigators understood what can and cannot be reasonably said and rationally explained about human nature and good life, knowledge with the advent of Christianity from its Promethean metis evolved into an illusionary apprehension of metaphysical philosophy with greater focus that knowledge is whatever God reveals. But before Christianity, the Jews were God-obsessed and finally followed by the Muslims created a golden period of knowledge from eighth to thirteen, particularly when the advent of ninth century heralded an era of Islamic Renaissance of knowledge and the philosophical and scientific progress created by the Muslims was passed over to the Europeans.   

Arguing cogently, we find, though progress is in the nature of almost everything, the pursuit, passion, acquisition, and progression of knowledge in all fields, is exclusively a human legacy. The great mystic poet of thirteenth century, Jalaluddin Rumi speculating about knowledge believed that everything is made known to mankind by its opposites:

Just as everyone in the matter of gnosis (Divine knowledge) describes the unseen differently, a philosopher too gives various kinds of explanations. A scholastic theologian tries to deny the philosopher’s statement. Not all of them are right, become sure, nor are they all astray. If there were no lies, there would be no truth. Falsehood gets its power from the truth. Do not say then that all this (the world) is false and imaginary. There is no idea without its reality. He who says, “All is true” is foolish and he who says “All is false” is damned.⁴

Rumi speculating about the evolving process of human life and knowledge said, “Every moment the world is being renewed but we are unaware of the changes for its form seems unchanged. Our life in our body keeps on freshening like a stream of water, although it appears static in form.”⁵ But moving away from metaphysical concerns about the nature of everything the scholars of the Western philosophy defined the study of knowledge “epistemology”—a term derived from episteme meaning knowledge by the ancient Greeks. Philosophers of epistemology, both ancient Greeks and today’s Westerners urge the higher value of contemplative truth of knowledge which they defined as “pragmatic truth of knowledge.”

Though we know that human beings learn and teach more and more from day to day, for conceptual awareness to overturn metaphysical philosophy it took almost a millennium for the scientists first; to present a scientific theory of the evolution of man presented by Charles Darwin (1809-1892) through biological science and second; from the idea of knowledge by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Despite his belief in skepticism, Nietzsche was no more skeptic about his views regarding knowledge which he comprehended more realistically than most of the other epistemologists. Debunking most of the claims of classical philosophy, his views are more modern which make us wiser about our will to knowledge. Nietzsche in his The Gay Science Book V remarks:

We philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old God is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us, our heart overflows with gratitude, astonishment, premonitions, and expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an “open sea” exist.⁶

Human beings, thus, started constantly creating and adding new knowledge, but the progression of knowledge carried forward in the Western world is a continuing story of dynamics of human knowledge. Richard Tarnas in his book, The Passion of Western Mind has expressed.                                                                                                                                                                                        

The history of Western culture has long seemed to possess the dynamics, scope, and beauty of a great epic drama: ancient and classical Greece, the Hellenistic era and imperial Rome, Judaism and the rise of Christianity, the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism and onward to our compelling time. Sweep and grandeur, dramatic conflicts and astonishing resolutions have marked the Western mind’s sustained attempt to comprehend the nature of reality—from Thales and Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle, from Clement and Boethius to Aquinas and Ockham, from Eudoxus and Ptolemy to Copernicus and Newton, from Bacon and Descartes to Kant and Hegel, and from all these to Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and beyond.⁷  

The dynamism of progress of knowledge in Western civilization, is a narration of a unique story of human knowledge aroused by wonder, imagination, love, emotion, and faith, which is being carried on by the Western Civilization. Although there are many scholars in every corner of the world, but almost all of them are embraced by the dynamism of Western knowledge. It is believed this progress will perennially continue and will never cease as long we are living on this planet. Progressing from rationalism, there appeared new direction in the theory of knowledge. Whereas knowledge was generally defined as a familiarity with facts, information, or skills obtained and perfected through cognition and experience, as in Socrates’ view, “Knowledge is perception, knowledge is true belief, and knowledge is justified true belief” philosophers have never been satisfied with the definition of knowledge by Socrates.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in his “Theory of Knowledge” expounded, “At first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is, in agreement with facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.”⁸ But I believe: “Since there is no limit to human perception, comprehension, and investigation, knowledge is a timeless quest of mankind’s cognition to find what is acceptable as a justified true belief.”⁹.In the modern time, the pursuit of knowledge is closely integrated with the sciences. It is viewed the workings of the universe are revealed through scientific theory, pragmatically explained, and scientifically developed. Up against the biological limits of what the brain can absorb and perform man today believes he can reach beyond the world around him.

Stepping into the third decade of 21st century our new generation is following the scientific view which advocates that the first order of the universe was mathematical—based on the laws of physics or it was all numerical—which in modern sense is digital. Whatever was originally born by physics with the appearance of mankind changed into metaphysics? But we, in the present century are turning back to the scientific origin of the universe—the mathematical, physical, and digital. I would say we are no more being guided spiritually but are being guided rationally and are led digitally. We see that in modern age humanity’s social, political, ethical and moral challenges can be fixed by the digital technology with the right set of algorithms based on the best data loaded in the fastest computers. But we are unaware, though we invent and develop things with the best of intentions for our benefit, there can appear unintended, negative, and deadly consequences. Just as no one could predict that nuclear fusion could also produce the atom bomb, in the same way, the after effects of the digital dilemmas need to be taken into consideration before it is too late. Thus, before activating our own created digital doubles, we must consider that we are creating all time friendly codes of algorithms which would not become humanity’s deadly executors.

The magnetism of modernity has remained human being’s perennial passion since his earliest days. A born thinker, philosopher, scientist, and discoverer, man has cognized to define his identity striving incessantly to shape it according to his contemporary period. Liberating himself from the deterministic modes of his existence and viewing to be no more at the mercy of biological and natural forces, he endeavors to be woven like a tapestry by his own hands for himself. Intelligence communicates instantly with intelligence, wherever and in whatever way it acts. This is so between people, between a teacher and his student, a mentor and his disciple, between a musician and his instrument, between a thinker and his idea; even between an idea and an idea. A true scientist listens to the intelligence of Nature in a form of dialogue. But a true spiritual, views, listens, and communicates with the invisible intelligence of the Absolute Spirit.  

With advent of twenty-first century knowledge of modern science and technology, which has bequeathed man an unprecedented power, has become a menace unless we learn the intrinsic value of knowledge and implement the basic enlightenment idea of science and technology to achieve social progress through our knowledge of internet technology (IT) and artificial intelligence (AI). But the crisis of modern time is that we have science without the wisdom of philosophical knowledge. Whereas science has helped mankind improve their lifestyle by provide many comforts in daily way of living, by providing better health care it has raised our life span resulting into population growth. Scientific knowledge, without wise consideration, has alarmingly helped create lethal war weapons to an extent that today’s wars, terrorism, pandemics, air, sea and earth pollution, and destruction of rain forests have affected the climate change, raising alarm that there may also be a time when knowledge could not be useful for the mankind.

Moving forward from the period of “Third Explosion of Knowledge” which is marked by the emergence of “Information Technology” (IT) and “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) we have established new scientific perspectives of philosophical and intellectual outlook. Today, human legacy of past geniuses is being challenged by the Silicon Valley’s Robotic Geniuses. What is much more important than human genius is the developing culture of inventions of IT and AI. Traditionally, in the past, knowledge has remained focused on four basic subjects, that is religion, reason, logic, and ethics; but modern technology has taken over all four subjects of knowledge as a “scientific form.” Today, instead of the old centers of knowledge, we have Silicon Valley of Digital Geniuses—a valley of modern culture of inventions and reinventions—run by the Siliconian-Geniuses who do not fight for or against change but embrace it and empower human quest for more inventions.

Copyright © 2023 by Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

Notes:

1. Jaspers, 2021. p. 3

2. Fletcher, 2021, p.1.

3. Allen, 2004, p. 2.

4. Rumi, vol. ii, verses 2923-2942.

5. Rumi, vol. I, verses 1144-1145.

6. Nietzsche, Book V, The Gay-science/aphorism-343.

7. Tarnas, 1881, pp. xii-xiv.

8. Russell,

9. Ashraf,