I
"Wisdom is a stasis: Knowledge is like the "snake
of eternity", constantly eating itself and never finishing."
This
is the opening epigram of the book. I believe it best to begin commenting on the
first statement through a few other epigraphs from the book.
"Wisdom
is a stasis: Knowledge is like the "snake of eternity", constantly eating
itself and never finishing."
"Our
urges are ever ubiquitous, affinities change, and Knowledge becomes redundant."
Finally,
one of my favorite quotations...
"
Mind, body, ego and all things are formulated from desire; to desire forever..."
The question
here is why the ubiquity of our urges and the changes of affinities would have
anything to do with knowledge becoming redundant? Generally "Knowledge"
is taken to be some sort of internal conscious grasp or representation of some
external stable entity. A possible answer is that if mind, body, ego and all things
are formulated by desire, the growing, altering, expanding nature of desire gives
rise to an every changing, growing, altering mind, body, ego and world. To quote
Heraclitus, "Everything flows..." in the continual pulsing flow of constituting
desire.
Wisdom, then, is a stasis; a stabilizing of ever flowing desires
which, of course, can not last. Note that here I am taking "wisdom",
because it is "stasis", to have a negative connotation. I could be wrong.
Are Wisdom and Knowledge meant to be equated here?
Notice how Knowledge is
pictured here as devouring (itself). Knowledge is generally seen as a "grasping"
an "enclosing-representing" and thus a "capturing". Knowledge,
in its outward (intentional) stretch beyond itself is a form of Desire. Knowledge
is born of the desire of consciousness to devour (grasp) the world. It is this
desire, though, which actually constitutes both consciousness and world, and so
knowledge, continually driven by its desirous nature, is constantly forcing itself
into redundancy and devouring itself. Desire creates both the drive to know the
world and the changing unknowable world so that it, desire, may continue unabated
forever. This idea of constituitive desire has great resonance with the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze, which is perhaps an avenue worth pursuing in the future.