Knowledge in relationship

Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors (Part #4)

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Whilst it may be acknowledged that knowledge can be embodied, the term "embodied" serves primarily to conceal the significance of such embodiment. The person may indeed be a significant attractor in a social system, but how insight is associated with this is quite unclear, notably in the case of charisma. However it is much clearer when it is recognized that such significance is recognized through relationship, namely through how in practice the person interrelates concepts, things or people, or encounters others -- notably in dialogue. This may be seen as a catalytic or ordering function. A higher form of ordering is engendered.

Both in East and West, one manifestation of this capacity is acclaimed as leadership. Much effort is made to focus on the identification and training of leaders. Leadership training has itself become a commodity -- although little is said of how the followers of leaders trained in this way rate the knowledge embodied in their leader. It is perhaps useful to make a radical distinction between such an ersatz leader and a natural or charismatic leader -- as experienced in practice by the followers. But perhaps it is more appropriate to recognize the truth in the often-cited phrase that "people deserve the leaders that they get" -- with the knowledge they hold, or of which they are an expression.

In the West there is increasing value attributed to "human relations skills". A wide variety of consultants promote these skills. They may be sought -- as a commodity -- in weekend workshops. In the East they are typically exemplified by attitudes to (extended) family relationships, especially in relation to elders. In the West emphasis is placed on the skills in interpersonal relationships, notably in marketing or between sexual partners. In all these cases overt behaviour is understood to reflect a form of knowledge.

But it is especially the way in which those embodying knowledge relate to the features of their natural environment that is most striking -- whether it be (following Feyerabend, 1975) the capacity of a musician, the laboratory skills of an experimental physicist, a gardener, or a chef. But perhaps less evident and more fundamental is the way they may relate to the landscape as a whole, as in the case of many indigenous peoples for whom their knowledge is effectively embedded in their environment. This is notably the case of the Aborigines of Australia whose spatio-temporal relationship to their landscape tends to be quite beyond western comprehension and the concepts of the western legal system.

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