When studying philosophy at university, a dispute broke out over the awarding of a degree. One examiner assessed the student as “first class honours with distinction”, a second rated her as a “fail”. How could that be so? Easy: one was a Wittgensteinian, the other an Empiricist. Reading philosophy is sometimes like that. One moment the insights excite and enthuse, at other times the reverse: “What is this drivel?” One has to make the effort to get into the mind‐set of the author to understand what they mean by particular words or concepts, to understand their weltanschauung – rather like being on an enquiry desk and determining the correct level of discourse, the dialectic, appropriate for a particular enquirer. Take Peter Baofu, the author of this book reviewed here. What on earth is meant by the title phrase, “post‐human knowledge”? “Human knowledge” surely means what you and I – humans – know, but what can be known by “post‐humans”, whatever they are? Again, take the phrase in the sub‐title, “theory of methodology”. Can methods have a theory? And “ontology”? Tut, tut, this pedantry will never do! Let's find out what the author means.
But here we meet another problem. This is no ordinary book. Granted it has chapters – six of them – a bibliography and an index, but the opening prose of each chapter quickly morphs into a sequence of tables, 51 in total, together accounting for almost half the text. Together with the copious use of headings, sub‐headings, and sub‐sub‐headings, this book resembles more a government report, a scientific treatise, or a programmed text. It is certainly no easy read, nor is it intended to be. Writes Baofu: “The book, like all previous ones of mine, is written to challenge conventional ideas and values, both past and present.” His reward in writing the book, he says, “is the amazing sentiment of suggesting something new about the world in a way that no one else in all history hitherto existing has done before.” Wow! We are clearly in the presence of a large ego here, a fact confirmed by a listing of 16 of his previous books to which he regularly refers. The Future of Human Civilization (2000), Beyond Civilization to Post‐Civilization (2006), and The Rise of Authoritarian Liberal Democracy (2007) are three of them.
We start off quietly enough, with Meno's Paradox: if you know what you’re looking for, inquiry is unnecessary; but if you don't know what you’re looking for, then inquiry is impossible; therefore inquiry is either unnecessary of impossible. By paragraph three we are into Immanuel Kant's 12 categories of understanding. In paragraph four our author asserts that “there are some fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind the categories of understanding”. Two pages on and we are in “The Dilemmas of Ontology” which seem to arise because our understanding of reality pre‐determines the nature of our enquiry: “general” vs “special” ontology. The author then identifies five major theoretical approaches to enquiry and knowledge: the objectivist, relativist, ambiguous, intuitionist, and the instrumentalist arguments. To which he adds a sixth, “my original contribution to the literature”, the holistic. Not only does Baofu have a new theory of knowledge: The Holistic Theory of Knowledge, but he also has a new methodology, “Sophisticated Methodological Holism”, and a new ontology, “Existential Dialectics”.
After an introduction to the Baofu thesis in chapter one, the following four chapters look at knowledge in relation to, successively, the mind, nature, culture, and society, and their particular features. In the concluding chapter, the author looks at the role of ontology and the limits of knowledge. Underlying any category of understanding or method of research is tacit knowledge, the unspoken categories of our thought processes, the instinctive rules of investigation – in Baofu's terminology, “the fundamental dialectic”. These “rules of engagement” affect how reality (assuming there is such a “thing”) is understood. Consider, for example (and these are my examples, not the author's) how a pre‐Darwinian would think of human progress, or a medievalist who thought the world inhabited by spirits, or a physician who understood medicine in terms of fluxes and humours. We can't, and that's the point!
That's the problem. So what's the answer? We need to discover what are the fundamental dialectic principles hidden behind our world views, to understand what presuppositions we use.
The author is good at analysing the problem, though his constant reference back to his previous books is tiresome and his coining of new terms irritating. “Ontics”, “ontomethodology”, “ontologic”, “ontosemantics”, “ontopragmatics”, “meta‐knowledge”, “existential dialectics”, and other neologisms have the reader screaming for his linguistic comfort zone! The use of “holism” is the clue to the Baofu universe, where discrete methodologies and ontologies are superseded by an all‐inclusive one. Whether there is something deeper is hard to determine. On the one hand, the author's literary style is a barrier to understanding, and on the other, we are at the limits of language – back to the Wittgensteinian “language is the limit to our knowledge” vs the empiricist “world beyond our senses” argument.
There is no specific connection made to librarianship or information studies in this book, which is a pity. What Baofu does, if not very well, is to make us more aware of our assumptions and methodologies, of our contexts and lack of critical thinking. More library and information philosophy is badly needed. But this is a step on the way.
