THE CIRCULARITY OF

KNOWLEDGE

Culture and knowledge do not sit together easily.

Hence the need for a chapter on the ways they

relate to one another. The problem can be stated

simply: while every notion of ‘culture’ – especially

in a book like the present one – represents a

form of knowledge, this latter can never wholly

be separated from cultural influences. To define

‘knowledge’ is thus to enter a twilight zone of

sorts where success presupposes what it seeks to

explain. In this respect, the scientific analysis of

‘culture’ is no different from other forms of

scientific inquiry: it, too, is caught in a circle

where knowledge and its objects are mutually

constitutive elements. This chapter explores the

ramifications of the initial arrangement set out in

the preceding two sentences. It contends that

both the concept of ‘culture’ and its academic

pursuit can profitably be understood as attempts

to address the involvement of knowledge in the

workings of societies. In other words, ‘culture’ is

one key epistemological answer to the mutual

constitution of science and its objects and thus to

the problem of circularity that has troubled and

continues to trouble the (human) sciences.

To develop this argument, the chapter pro-

ceeds from a historical reconstruction of knowl-

edge and the problems that have traditionally

been associated with its constructed character to

the role of ‘culture’ in the attempts to create novel

and illuminating forms of insight. Already, this

may strike some readers as a highly contrived

setup for a chapter addressing the cultural side of

epistemology. And I would agree that we do not

normally perceive of knowledge in this manner –

as an object itself, rather than a condition. Still, it

is appropriate for a chapter addressing ‘the nexus

between culture and knowledge’ to be clear

about its own limitations. In fact, the impulse

itself that makes us seek clarity concerning the

boundaries to knowledge has been one of the

guiding principles of epistemology, the branch of

philosophy concerned with knowledge. Here

scepticism has arguably been central, at least

within the western canon of philosophical texts.

Such scepticism has variously attached itself to

the relationship between ‘understanding’ and

‘knowledge’ and that between ‘experience’ and

‘knowledge’, and arguably reached its pinnacle

in the work of the seventeenth-century author

René Descartes (Hookway, 1990).

We shall have numerous occasions to revisit

the emerging and quintessentially modern battle-

ground between the optimistic and pessimistic

views as to how best to break free of the circu-

larity at the root of epistemology – a circularity

that binds ‘knowledge’ to its objects without

allowing the latter ever to be independent from

the former. Before we do so, we need to make

clear that ‘circularity’ does not in and of itself

pose a limit to any kind of knowledge. Rather, it

imposes a no less important structural character-

istic. Recognizing this trait, we can say that any

attempt to delineate spaces of knowledge has to

address what is often merely implicit in many

other definitions of knowledge: the self-referential

nature of its constitution. To give examples here,

the uncritical invocation of ‘knowledge’ is rather

akin to the explanation of an apple through refer-

ence to an apple tree or the definition of a ‘thief ’

through reference to an activity called ‘stealing’:

one has to be familiar with the one to make any

sense of the other.

A still more fitting analogy would perhaps

liken the limits to ‘knowledge’ to the closed

reference system of a thesaurus or an encyclope-

dia, where in order to understand a definition a

28

The Culture of Epistemology

Ulf Strohmayer

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