Knowledge Incorporated:
past and future

lecture given on 3 May 2000, slightly revised 2017

1. The Transmission of knowledge

Knowledge is transmitted. Without that, human beings would not have survived or prospered. There are different forms of transmission, but the main one is through the medium of language. Language was, perhaps, the first and most important human technology, a technology since it is a tool which can be shaped in many ways for many different purposes, even if, as some say, the language ability has an innate basis. But when knowledge is, as it were, solidified into packets of language, it runs a risk. It can become inert.

2. Incorporating knowledge by taking it in

Knowledge is there to be used: it must be understood, and must do some work. If it remains inert, it might as well not exist, and it is fruitless to pass it on. This is what Bergson said about our evolved ability to understand items of knowledge:

‘Human intelligence is in no way the kind of intelligence depicted by Plato in the allegory of the Cave. It does not have the function of watching vain shadows pass by any more than of turning round and contemplating the blazing sun. It has other things to do. Yoked, like plough-oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plough and the resistance of the soil: the function of human intelligence is to act and to know that it is acting, to enter into contact with reality and even to live it, but only in so far as it is concerned with the job being done and the furrow being ploughed.’

We have to incorporate knowledge into ourselves, and make it do some work.

3. Incorporating knowledge by making organizations

Perhaps the first steps towards incorporating knowledge in the second sense, and making it like a commodity, were taken in Ancient Greece five centuries before the common era. The background was the erosion of the feudal system in Greece, and increasing mercantile activity, involving, among other places, Greek colonies all round the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Remember too that the Greek city states never had any central authority. All this gave rise to some generations of free-thinkers, and to a need for new kinds of knowledge.

The need was met in part by itinerant teachers or ‘sophists’, which means roughly ‘people who made a business of knowledge or wisdom’. The first of these, Protagoras of Abdera, is reported to have charged the rough equivalent of HK$1 million to take on one pupil. Plato disapproved of this, and described the sophists as ‘hunters of the young’. Even so, he founded his own school, the Academy, which was to last for a thousand years. But let us skip forward to the beginning of the second millennium of our era, and go to Bologna.

4. Beginnings of the University

Once more we are at a time when feudal systems are beginning to unravel, and commercial activity is increasing. This created a need for new forms of knowledge, and, in particular, for an improved legal framework. The Justinian code was rediscovered, and Irnerius set up in Bologna to teach law. He introduced the technology of ‘glosses’ or marginal commentary. Soon, many others came to teach not only law but other subjects in Bologna, and students flocked to Bologna from all over Europe.

5. The first ‘Universitates’

Predictably, the city became expensive. So the students, especially the ultramontane students (those from ‘beyond the mountains’), formed corporate bodies (universitas being the medieval Latin for any corporation) to protect themselves. Their first success was to control prices for books and lodging. They then turned on their ‘other enemies’, and imposed strict rules. Teachers could not be absent from duty even for a single day without leave. They were not to leave the city without paying a deposit, and if too few students attended a class, the teacher was fined. Soon the teachers formed their own corporation, to protect themselves in their turn. They also introduced the requirement of a licence to teach.

6. The seven liberal arts

Let us now turn to the standard medieval curriculum, consisting of the seven liberal arts. Grammar, logic and rhetoric formed the meeting of three ways, or trivium (‘trivial’ means roughly ‘first year stuff’); and music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy formed the second part, the meeting of four ways, or quadrivium. But this curriculum was doomed. Scholarship was in its heyday in the Muslim world through the medium of Arabic and Syriac. There was a great flourishing in mathematics, in pure and applied sciences, in architecture, in astronomy, and a special place was given to Ancient Greek writings, especially those of Aristotle, who was called, simply, ‘the philosopher’.

7. The Schools of Oxford: Henry of Renham’s copy-book

Here is a page from Henry of Renham’s copy-book. In the middle is the main text (part of book IV of Aristotle’s Physics translated into Latin from the Arabic translation from the Greek). The glosses on the left are from the commentary of ibn Rushd (known in medieval Latin as Averroes). The glosses between the lines and on the right are by Henry, who did this work by attending lectures in the Schools of Oxford. You can see that Irnerius’s glossing technology has developed. We are beginning to get manual precursors of today’s hyperlinks.

8. The renascence

Thanks to the effect of this Arabic legacy, the Western Europeans rediscovered their past, however indirectly, and by the time Raphael painted The School of Athens, the renascence was under way, and a new humanities curriculum for European Universities was beginning to be formed, based on the study of Greek and Latin languages and literature, and Greek and Roman history and philosophy.