What do you think?
Rate this book
The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing
Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge—the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and “general knowledge,” charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library.
In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.
In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published May 15, 2019
8 people are currently reading
155 people want to read
About the author
Steven Connor
47 books10 followersSteven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 21, 2019
I had trouble engaging with this book. It may be that I was looking for something different than what the author, Steven Connor, had in mind to do.
What attracted me to the book was that it promised to look at knowledge from a different perspective than what I’m used to in philosophical treatments (Connor, after all, while well versed in philosophy, is a Professor of English). As opposed to epistemology — addressing questions of whether, how, and to what extent knowledge of external reality is possible — Connor wants to understand what he calls “epistemopathy” — addressing questions of how knowledge matters to us, how we experience and feel with respect to knowledge. The “pathos” of knowledge rather than its “logos”.
That sounds great to me. I’ve always been intrigued about why philosophers feel such a compulsion to defend knowledge from skeptical arguments, why Kant thought it a “scandal to philosophy” that problems of skepticism had not yet been adequately answered. And there are more sociological questions to talk about. Why do we esteem knowledge, why are scientists like Einstein, Richard Feynman, or Stephen Hawking so revered? Why are “dumb jocks” and “dumb blondes” denigrated? How do claims of knowledge, or reputations for being knowledgeable, get used to advantage? And how does it turn out, at least in some circumstances, that a lack of knowledge is considered advantageous or even virtuous?
I don’t really think I got my itch scratched. Maybe that just wasn’t the itch that Connor meant to scratch. It’s not as if he doesn’t address those questions, it’s just that he doesn’t travel along a direct line of investigation related to them.
What he does do is present a long and scholarly reflection on the ways in which knowledge has mattered to us. Those reflections especially encompass various ways in which we have thought of knowledge as ways to gain mastery over nature or over ourselves. The biblical story of Eve and Adam eating the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil puts us in a position to even have to master nature and ourselves — the fall from paradise puts us in that predicament.
Connor discusses both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at some length in his chapter on “Will to Knowledge”. Schopenhauer is always interesting and a bit paradoxical. After all, knowledge of objective reality, for Schopenhauer, is essentially knowledge of nothing, a ladder to be tossed aside once climbed and used to escape the illusion it sought mastery over. And Connor captures Nietzsche’s unique brand of pragmatism, in which knowledge and language pursue, in Vaihinger’s later terms, an empowering “fiction”.
The notion of mastery extends to Freud and psychoanalysis, where knowledge is freeing, a way of gaining insight, vision, and mastery over what otherwise may master us.
Other chapters address, among other things, the role and power of secrets, the charlatanism of knowledge (con artists and the like), the notion of riddles and their strategic social role, and, one topic that I especially found interesting, the social role played by our use of the word “stupid."
On stupidity, Connor relies on what sounds like a very interesting book by Avital Ronnell, titled simply Stupidity. Connor hits on some curious aspects of our talk of stupidity. Stupidity isn’t just an evaluation of intelligence — it’s a judgment of worth, as if a stupid person were actually less a person than people who aren’t stupid. After all, our species is called “homo sapiens”, and someone without sapience is going to register low on the scale.
Throughout all of these discussions, Connor relies heavily on the etymology of words associated with knowledge and intelligence — words like “cunning”, "quiz”, and “dunce.” All interesting and indicative of the social history of knowing, not knowing, claiming to know, and seeking to know.
Connor closes with two chapters that change tone from a more narrowly scholarly tone to one that’s more topical — the power and role of knowledge (and its lack) in our own culture. Those final chapters, Epistemotopia and Epistemocracy, touch on some familiar current issues in new ways — the ubiquity of information, the role of science, the rebellion against expertise, the social stratification that comes with access to and possession of knowledge, . . . All good stuff.
I guess my feeling that my itch wasn’t scratched is that, rather than following a line of questioning or argument about the place of knowledge in our social history, Connor took his subject matter (“epistemopathy”) and turned it around and around, observing and examining one side after another. If there was a consistent line of argument, rather than a consistent topic of reflection, I missed it.
What attracted me to the book was that it promised to look at knowledge from a different perspective than what I’m used to in philosophical treatments (Connor, after all, while well versed in philosophy, is a Professor of English). As opposed to epistemology — addressing questions of whether, how, and to what extent knowledge of external reality is possible — Connor wants to understand what he calls “epistemopathy” — addressing questions of how knowledge matters to us, how we experience and feel with respect to knowledge. The “pathos” of knowledge rather than its “logos”.
That sounds great to me. I’ve always been intrigued about why philosophers feel such a compulsion to defend knowledge from skeptical arguments, why Kant thought it a “scandal to philosophy” that problems of skepticism had not yet been adequately answered. And there are more sociological questions to talk about. Why do we esteem knowledge, why are scientists like Einstein, Richard Feynman, or Stephen Hawking so revered? Why are “dumb jocks” and “dumb blondes” denigrated? How do claims of knowledge, or reputations for being knowledgeable, get used to advantage? And how does it turn out, at least in some circumstances, that a lack of knowledge is considered advantageous or even virtuous?
I don’t really think I got my itch scratched. Maybe that just wasn’t the itch that Connor meant to scratch. It’s not as if he doesn’t address those questions, it’s just that he doesn’t travel along a direct line of investigation related to them.
What he does do is present a long and scholarly reflection on the ways in which knowledge has mattered to us. Those reflections especially encompass various ways in which we have thought of knowledge as ways to gain mastery over nature or over ourselves. The biblical story of Eve and Adam eating the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil puts us in a position to even have to master nature and ourselves — the fall from paradise puts us in that predicament.
Connor discusses both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at some length in his chapter on “Will to Knowledge”. Schopenhauer is always interesting and a bit paradoxical. After all, knowledge of objective reality, for Schopenhauer, is essentially knowledge of nothing, a ladder to be tossed aside once climbed and used to escape the illusion it sought mastery over. And Connor captures Nietzsche’s unique brand of pragmatism, in which knowledge and language pursue, in Vaihinger’s later terms, an empowering “fiction”.
The notion of mastery extends to Freud and psychoanalysis, where knowledge is freeing, a way of gaining insight, vision, and mastery over what otherwise may master us.
Other chapters address, among other things, the role and power of secrets, the charlatanism of knowledge (con artists and the like), the notion of riddles and their strategic social role, and, one topic that I especially found interesting, the social role played by our use of the word “stupid."
On stupidity, Connor relies on what sounds like a very interesting book by Avital Ronnell, titled simply Stupidity. Connor hits on some curious aspects of our talk of stupidity. Stupidity isn’t just an evaluation of intelligence — it’s a judgment of worth, as if a stupid person were actually less a person than people who aren’t stupid. After all, our species is called “homo sapiens”, and someone without sapience is going to register low on the scale.
Throughout all of these discussions, Connor relies heavily on the etymology of words associated with knowledge and intelligence — words like “cunning”, "quiz”, and “dunce.” All interesting and indicative of the social history of knowing, not knowing, claiming to know, and seeking to know.
Connor closes with two chapters that change tone from a more narrowly scholarly tone to one that’s more topical — the power and role of knowledge (and its lack) in our own culture. Those final chapters, Epistemotopia and Epistemocracy, touch on some familiar current issues in new ways — the ubiquity of information, the role of science, the rebellion against expertise, the social stratification that comes with access to and possession of knowledge, . . . All good stuff.
I guess my feeling that my itch wasn’t scratched is that, rather than following a line of questioning or argument about the place of knowledge in our social history, Connor took his subject matter (“epistemopathy”) and turned it around and around, observing and examining one side after another. If there was a consistent line of argument, rather than a consistent topic of reflection, I missed it.
April 15, 2021
I got a lot out of the introduction alone. I shared a few key points on Medium that are just from the introduction. (There is more esoteric stuff in the introduction, too, about psychological and narrative "fantasies" of knowing, on which frankly I am not quite yet prepared to share my reflections.) The rest of the book is similarly full, though eventually the point is gotten. The final chapter doesn't exactly wrap up or finish with a bang. But once you unroll a few dozen of these recursive sentences, you are capable of drawing your own conclusion anyway.
October 3, 2022
fascinatingly sprawling exploration of knowledge in many forms. i love his use of literature, theology (although his ideas about religion seem quite ill-informed, christian-centric and frustrating at some points), and especially etymology to illustrate his points - something i haven't come across before yet which is definitely in line with the style of writing utilised by my favourite thinkers.
yet its sprawling nature is both a blessing and a curse - it feels somewhat limited by its broad scope, and the point it eventually reaches is fascinating though definitely requires work on the part of the reader to discern (which isnt necessarily bad!)
yet its sprawling nature is both a blessing and a curse - it feels somewhat limited by its broad scope, and the point it eventually reaches is fascinating though definitely requires work on the part of the reader to discern (which isnt necessarily bad!)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews