Post on 14-Jan-2016
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 1/53
Transcendent Philosophy 1, 47-116 © London Academy of Iranian Studies
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
David Kuhrt, novalis@desres.biz
Abstract Normative discourse between people is possible only because the
existence of the world to which each party refers is assumed to be
self-evident. But although this self-evident reality is also the
substance of all traditional knowledge about that reality, and
about the location of the human within it, and although in thenormative occidental discourse of everyday life the world
continues to exist self-evidently (if not, everyday life wouldcollapse), purely theoretical accounts of reality derived from the
empirical sciences have prejudiced normative common sense
perceptions of the world to the degree that word and world are
scarcely joined. Institutions of state capitalise on this disjunction between thought and reality because the resulting loss of common
sense knowledge in the community accords priority to the
specialised narratives of professionals, within institutions, who
are assumed by the man in the street to know best. This process,
whereby the state suppresses the narrative of common sense
reality, is founded on an epistemological error about the nature ofintelligence. Intelligence is assumed to be the property (literally,
the possession of) individuals, whereas an understanding of the
cognitive event, in which representations of the world arise asthoughts, shows that thought (and therefore 'intelligence') is the
product of a conformity between the innate structures which
permit perception and subjective consciousness and the objective
structure of logos which once shaped and now formatively
sustains the created world. That is, the intelligence is given in the
structure of the world and mirrored in the cognitive acts of
individuals because evolution has predisposed them, subject to
their degree of self knowledge, to apprehend it.. Because
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 2/53
48 David Kuhrt
common sense perception of foundational problems in the
conduct of nation states is marginalised, contemporary crises in
occidental societies, are not resolved or confronted but
compounded. No resolution of this problem is therefore possible
without a revision of the epistemological preconception on which
it depends. The premises of the epistemological argument which
supports this analysis are supported in a concluding Appendixwhich symbolically represents the objective (given) relations
between knower and known in the movement of Being towards
existence. Within that framework we experience the logos which
determines the human as the narrator of an evolutionary process
which has become conscious.
Our knowing subject is not only the final link. It also holds the whole
chain together. It is the bearer of the whole development, and
materialism is thus an absurd attempt to deduce that which does the
representing from its own representation.1
Vladimir Soloviev
IntroductionIn informal conversation we hear it said that “the reality” is
known to this or that person “in his heart of hearts.” Yet, as far as
knowledge is concerned the general consensus on knowledge in
societies whose culture we call modernist, is, in the first instance
cited, that reality is not something we may legitimately claim to
know; and in the second instance, that knowing with the heart is a
meaningless figure of speech, since cognition takes place in the brain.
The fact that something exists as a matter of consensus in ordinary
discourse to explain, in pragmatic terms, the usage which gives
meaning to both “the reality” in which existence and events occur,
and to “the heart” as an instrument of knowledge about that reality,
does not breech the wall of prejudice behind which those with
professional claims to knowledge continue to elaborate rational
constructions demarcating theory from common sense and modernist
societies from the collective resources of knowledge in human history
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 3/53
The Social Construction of Reality 49
on which others still profitably draw, even as the crises of modernism
become increasingly apparent.
That, due to those same prejudices, the causes of crisis are not
apparent in reality, concerns that discipline of philosophy called
epistemology, which examines the problem of knowledge. As our preliminary remarks imply, this is not a purely theoretical problem, or
there could be no disjuncture of the kind implied between notions of
knowledge and reality in ordinary linguistic usage and those current
in the language of the élite we judge professionally competent to deal
with such issues; which we do in spite of the fact that opinion in that
sector on every subject, whether of the nature of the human, the
causes and remedies of social unrest, or of the reality itself of which
they are part, is no less conflicting than the opinion of a supposedly
inexpert majority on the same topics.
The complexity of the reality is thus evident in that objects
(including the objects of informal discussion and of scientific
enquiry) appear to have an indeterminate existence which depends on
their different appearance for each observer. In both informal
discussion and in scientific enquiry, indeterminacy can be removed to
establish generally agreed principles only by shrinking, or by limiting
a priori, the context of the reality in which the objects are comprised.
The notion that the reality in which objects are comprised can never
be directly addressed is the main premise on which the methodology
of science has hitherto depended in attempting to circumvent the
problem of subjectivity. In consequence, defined objects and theregularity of their phenomenal appearance, are taken to be more real
than the reality of which they are part. That reality, however, in
which even scientific discourse must take place, includes subject
thinkers who argue, presupposed objects of discussion, and the
antecedent history of human knowledge in time and space which
determine the viewpoint, circumstance and outcome of discussion.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 4/53
50 David Kuhrt
In practice, neither this context, nor objects of discussion,
could in reality, be indeterminate or fluid and infinitely variable, for
no stable continuum could then exist of the kind which presupposes
the existence of the world and of ourselves within it as a transcendent
and referential context. In other words, it is against this primary
intuition of an existing world that, in practise, we validate or disproveour experimental notions of reality. The existence of this common
sense world in reality provides the stable continuum to which all
argument refers; to this reality, even the most radical sceptic defers in
his practical conduct of everyday life.
It follows that if the reality, the being in and for itself of the
world we ordinarily suppose, were an object of direct perception
which could be quantified, nothing would need to be argued and
language could not exist. Neither could that being we call human
have evolved. Both existence in reality, and thought about it,
therefore presuppose, and are presupposed by our limited sentient
perception of an existence which necessitates language, the
instrument by which the reality, as far as knowledge is concerned,
becomes subject, in existence, to consensual agreement.
In ordinary discourse we call that presupposed existence,
nature; an existence which subsumes our own and all other
existences, the reality of which is only partly conscious. That part
consciousness is contingent on the being of the whole which is inter-
related, so that intellectual or rational knowledge is physically
determined by standpoint, including the predisposition we call personal. Fluidity and variability in the appearance of reality is
therefore the attribute of the uncertain relations of human cognition
with time and space in a created world whose form must be
objectively stable. The indeterminate is not an objective attribute of
reality but of our relations with it.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 5/53
The Social Construction of Reality 51
The nature of the relation between human cognition and its
perceived objects is thus the kernel of the problem of knowledge. In
this essay we therefore examine the social relations in society which
determine the product of knowledge. If rational presupposition limits
the imagination on which even acts of rational knowledge depend,
knowledge increases in inverse proposition to any ability to apply itin practise. For we maintain that the activity expressed in the
grammar and syntax of language, articulates an objective intelligence
within the created order to which It refers, but which is reduced and
limited in its referential scope as far as knowledge is concerned by the
rational constructs of intellect. Then, acknowledgement of the
primary intuition of existence in reality from which language emerges
to define that reality is deferred, pending a so-called empirical
corroboration by scientific methods.
On the contrary, we maintain that even a scientific proposition
makes sense only if and because the existence of the world we
ordinarily suppose is already predicated in the linguistic form of the
proposition. The grammar and syntax of language necessarily refers
to a stable structure which is a continuum in human experience; it
does so because that structure is given in cognition by the same
formal presence of Being which is expressed throughout time in the
evolution of the creation; this Being is articulated in the human in
consequence of that evolution. Our essay therefore concludes with a
description of the structural relations between Being and existence
which articulate the human within the creation so that the thinking
activity which imagines it first, before rational analysis, joins andcoheres what otherwise appears to intellect in a fragmented and
arbitrary form.
We shall validate this conclusion by showing that the primary
elements which order the appearance of the world and of ourselves
within it are time, space, form and movement. These elements inform
both the grammar and syntax of the language in which we express our
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 6/53
52 David Kuhrt
perception of the world and our being within it. These primary
elements are then constituent parts of that Being from which the
creation in time, in which the human evolves to articulate it, proceeds,
through the obscurity we call material, towards light. For light is, in
fact, present both in matter and in the cognitive activity of our
thought.
The reality we ordinarily supposeThe reality we ordinarily suppose is predicated, but not
expressly stated, throughout the grammatical structure of a discourse
which is specific only about parts of reality. In reality, things or
events are understood in a given relation, a relation which is assumed
because a greater, contextual reality is known by experience to inform
it. For example, the syntax and grammar in which a farmer expresses
himself about weather conditions when he feels like passing the time
of day with a neighbour, assumes the existence of the greater reality
within which both their lives are conducted. The reality of the world
they ordinarily suppose does not need to be argued on positivist lines
in order to validate the empirical verities which enable their
communication about the normative activity of farmers; each knows
from experience that every sub-set of facts assumed in their discourse
has been previously encountered in the unitary experience of a reality
which makes all knowledge relational. The meaning of a remark that
there will be a radical change of weather in a day or two is given,
among other things, by the mutual understanding of plant and animal
responses to atmospheric changes which are common experience;thus the knowledge which falls (from the point of view of
professionalism) into the limited remit of the meteorologist, the
biochemist or the molecular biologist (while the vet takes care of sick
animals) is necessarily assumed; the vet himself is entitled to practise
(and to speak shorthand with both farmers on the basis of commonly
assumed knowledge) without reference to nutrition experts or
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 7/53
The Social Construction of Reality 53
astronomers, even if the focus of discussion is breeding on which
such expertise may impinge.
In conversation, all three will suspend the theoretical problem
of knowledge because the common interest in stock-breeding crosses
the specialist boundaries. Moreover, it is informed by a tradition ofexperience which is pragmatic: each employs short-hand syntactical
limits in expressing himself which assume more relevant knowledge
than is given in separate specialist discourse, and this common
knowledge predicates a reality which is understood by all three.
The common sense knowledge we oppose to the claims of
scientific knowledge, is therefore not only the consequence of
observation: it is also instinctual in that it issues from the radical
desire of a species to survive in an unalterable form given by nature;
an instinctual knowledge, moreover, which is necessarily intelligent,
and whose formative structure (discussed below), necessarily
antedates the appearance of the human; for we maintain here that this
intelligent structure, which is present also in the human cognitive
apparatus, determined the emergent life-forms on whose development
the evolution of the human was, paradoxically, based.
The paradox, in this retrospective (teleological) sense, is that
while the human form evolved its antecedent morphology, and before
it emerged with that self-conscious capacity for reflective thought and
language which equips it to describe and know that reality, it did not
(could not) think. This formulation only seems absurd to the modernmind because we have forgotten that the perception of chronological
time is contingent on a form of cognition separating a reality which is
a continuum into intellect components. In non-human reality, the
before and after of evolution do not exist, so that the logic or form of
the creation which, in the experience of existence, evolved towards an
optimal expression in the human, was present throughout time as pre-
disposition and cause. Now that this form, on which self-
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 8/53
54 David Kuhrt
consciousness depends, has been established in existence, we are
entitled to suppose that the public reaction to genetic science
programmes manifests a normative instinct for self-preservation
which is intelligent. This instinct, however, is not selfish, for Being
contemplates its own existence as subject in a network of contingent
existences. Thus the reality we ordinarily suppose depends not onlyon personal survival but the survival of all other beings whose
existence we recognise consciously by virtue only of the human form.
Although as individuals we do not manage to live as
exemplary forms of the human, the exemplary form is instinctually
present, and from this half-conscious knowledge the taboos, customs
and moral codes which preserve and differentiate societies issue.
Naturally therefore, the production of all kinds of knowing, without
exception, is determined not only by objectively existing phenomena
but by a partial selection of phenomena which suits the intention of
the practitioner. The so-called “scientific method” of obtaining
knowledge may be more rigorously controlled, but it does not differ
in principle, or categorically, from the pragmatism demonstrated in
the acquisition of knowledge about reality by non-specialists. It has
been a consensus of non-specialists, and not the scientific community,
which drew public attention to the fact that neither the wind, nor
insects and birds which carry seeds, will respect a Ministry of
Agriculture ruling on the distances over which seed is carried to cause
cross-pollination between genetically modified and other crops. All
normally intelligent people know that such a ruling is nonsense
according to common sense, yet that knowledge has no institutionalmeans of representation which will affect policy before it comes into
effect.
Let us suppose therefore, as far as the problem of knowledge
is concerned, that all normally intelligent people know that the world
exists, and that argument to the contrary cannot adduce positive
evidence: the terms employed to disprove existence must presuppose
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 9/53
The Social Construction of Reality 55
it in reality. Such argument does no more than expose ontological
doubt (which is a personal problem) in the speaker about himself and
his relations with the linguistic community of others who, like
himself, address every eventuality which confronts them in practical
experience as if the existence of the world and themselves within it is
given. They know this because every previous act of pragmatism produced results which confirmed that conviction, even if it did not
confirm the wisdom of their intention or if the action proved
misguided.
They also know that the personal identity from which both
wise and misguided action issues is not given but plastic and evolving
in relation to the unknowable whole they loosely call “life”, from
which the objective reality of the world issues towards them. This
unknowable whole includes the tentative actions of others for whom
the mystery of life and their role in it is also seen “as through a glass
darkly”, and in the course of a personal evolution towards the
completion of knowing in which “I know even as I am known”.
Further, though the apprehension may not be clear, in passing through
the flux of events which I witness, there is, in normative experience
(though it may be obscured in the pathological condition by which we
accommodate to what is called “stress” in urban societies), an
intuition that the foundation of being on which ones own existence
and all others depends, is sustained by an objective intelligence. That
something of this sort inheres in the creation in spite of human
ignorance is, after all, also the theoretical premise of reductionist
argument in the field of molecular biology. The notion that geneticmechanisms which transmit biological forms constitute a river of
information “Out of Eden” presupposes that the mechanism is
intelligent, even if, prior to the advent of our species, that intelligence
had no human agent. Cognitive acts by human beings do not produce
intelligence, they manifest it (or not) depending on a quality not given
by the intellect: that is, a degree of elasticity in the psychic make-up
of the individual enabling him, in the moment of cognition, to bracket
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 10/53
56 David Kuhrt
presupposition and conform himself mentally to the objective
phenomena, to conceptualise it, and act accordingly. If his concept
manifests intelligence, we attribute that to the reality thus perceived,
and not to a personal intellect which distinguishes one brain from
another, for the existence of which there is no evidence whatever.
The elastic faculty we have called psychic, which is confused withintellect, is the individualised existence we call, in ordinary discourse,
the soul. The objective intelligence is neither in “the intellect” (where
is it, by the way?), nor in the soul, but in the creation. Thus far we
agree with the reductionists. However, since their theories fail to
account for the autonomous presence in human cognition of the
intelligence they ascribe to the objective being of nature, except as
hereditarily or environmentally determined brain functions, they
cannot escape the absurd conclusion that, as authors of their own
theoretical perspectives, they do not exist. The option of elective
non-existence is therefore a pre-condition of that precarious
autonomy in the creation which distinguishes the human from an
original – and still present – reservoir of non-being in the material
firmament from which Being emanates in Time.
Meanwhile in the reality we ordinarily suppose, we should
know that other communities elsewhere still enshrine in their oral
traditions, and in the ritual practises of received wisdom which
inform the fabric of daily life (and are therefore not “religious” in the
western sense of that word), concepts which enable them to grasp the
nature of Being which is and was active in the creation, and whose
intelligence both upholds the structure of the evident world andinforms the dimension of the human within it.
From such traditions we learn that no human being is one-
dimensional, even if he inhabits a materialist monoculture which
targets bodily needs as if no other dimension existed, and which turns
his interior substance into entertainment which passes as culture.
Both the former and the latter targets signify the human function as a
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 11/53
The Social Construction of Reality 57
consumer whose reliable conformism will generate a gross national
product on which the institutions of society and nation state may
depend to survive.
The function of individuals in that one dimensional scheme is
seriously in conflict with both personal satisfaction and the nature ofthe reality each ordinarily calls “the world”. In this moment of crisis,
the news that the normative order to which one’s own society once
subscribed has been sustained by others elsewhere will not reach the
headlines, especially when it concerns a whole continent, its human
and material resources, which has been systematically exploited
during four centuries to support development and progress in the
West.
Speaking of the tradition handed down by the griot-shaman in
the linguistic community of the Peule people in Africa (who are
dispersed throughout a territory which extends from Guinea to East
Africa), Amadou Hampaté Bâ explains that:
The notion of a person is thus highly complex. An interior
multiplicity is implied of concentric or superimposed levels of
existence (physical, psychic and spiritual on different planes), which
is therefore an un-interrupted dynamic.
The existence which starts at conception is preceded by a
cosmic pre-existence in which the human being belongs to the realm
of harmony and love, termed Benke-so [in the Peule language].
The birth of a child is considered the palpable evidence that an
anonymous constellation, a part of existence, has detached itself and
incarnated in order to accomplish a mission of some sort on our earth.
Particular importance is attached to the ceremony of baptism when
the “togo”, or forename, is given to the infant … He has been situated
within the whole community.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 12/53
58 David Kuhrt
… At no time is the human being ever considered as a
separate entity, limited to a physical body, but as a complex being,
inhabited by a multiplicity in permanent evolution or movement. In
no sense is this being static or complete.
The human being, like a plant seed , is evolving from an initial
capital which is his own potential . This will develop throughout the
ascendant phase of his life, as a function of place and encountered
circumstance. The forces released by that potential are in perpetual
movement , as is the cosmos itself.
Maa-Ngala (the Lord God) is self-created … the name Maa
being given to the human; that is, the first word designating his own
divine name.
As a vessel of Maa, the being of all-in-one, Maa-Ngala
conceived a specific body, vertical and symmetrical, capable of
receiving a distillation of all other existences. This body, called Fari,
represents a sanctuary in which the whole of existence finds itself
circumscribed …
… The soul of man is thus a complex unity. Like a vast
ocean, his known dimensions are as nothing compared to the
profound unknown.
… The great drama of humanity derives from his being situated at the nexus of forces in permanent movement which appear
contradictory, which only an evolution accomplished on the path to
initiation will permit him to resolve during the phases of his life.
… According to the measure that he integrates his true nature
(that of the primordial Maa), the human being becomes, within the
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 13/53
The Social Construction of Reality 59
creation, as an axis, one who is called on to preserve the exterior
multiplicity [of existences] from falling into chaos.2
From Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s account of the Peule people’s
knowledge traditions, we learn that the cosmos stands in a timeless
and dependable relation with the individual human being whoseexistence emerges from that greater context in spatio-temporal
circumstances which permit his development as a consenting agent of
a benign order; a cosmology which does not differ from the essentials
of knowledge traditions in Europe which modernity has displaced.
The knowledge that we have of the world and of ourselves in ordinary
experience, leads us instinctively to suppose that though we may be
physically limited to place and time, the reality of our being is
extensive through time and space, as it is indeed in memory and in the
experience of other beings physically elsewhere as immanent in
consciousness. Thus we may suppose that the ascription of the term
“modernity” to describe the particular set of cultural assumptions
which now characterise so many contemporary societies is not
accidental: “modernity” is the expression best suited to an ideology
of the human which limits being to a continuous present. From its
dominating parameters we escape in fantasy, and within them
(paradoxically, because the imagination seeks to combine, not reduce)
the exercise of the imagination leads, under conditions of modernity
which oppose and limit it, either to a painful isolation or to
intransigent fundamentalism. It does so because the imagination of
the human itself (of which the Peule tradition speaks so eloquently)
has been reduced to suit the profitable perspective of materialism.This contradicts the reality we ordinarily suppose until, in the
conversation with others which generates the vernacular and
determines the notion of reality which will characterise our epoch in
posterity, we deny or hardly dare admit its existence. We also fail to
deny the intellectual constructions which subvert it.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 14/53
60 David Kuhrt
The separation of instrumental and consensual realitiesIn confronting those cultural norms of western societies which
we are used to calling modernity at the turning point of the
millennium, no-one can overlook the fact that though “modernity”
may have seen an explosion of knowledge, there seems to be a
decrease in the ability of social institutions to apply it in the interestsof the common good. This development is compounded by the fact
that a consensus of intellectuals, commentators and scholars has
subscribed to the now prevailing notion in western societies that no
common good can meaningfully exist on the grounds that, being by
definition universally true, ‘the good’ cannot, in any meaningful
sense, be known and determined in particular cases, ‘the good’ being
always a matter of expedient settlement between opposite interests
and not a prescriptive universal from which justice can be adduced in
particular instances. The notion of the wise man or the elders in a
community to whom, as repositories of tradition and collective
experience, the commons might appeal, has therefore no foundation
in western judicial procedures, so that the burden of judgement is
carried by bureaucratic legislative procedures of ever-increasing
complexity. Yet it is clear from an understanding of science that
known laws defining the regularity of phenomena do not apply
themselves, and that therefore a selective judgement is required in
formulating the relational contexts within which ‘the good’ exists and
within which such laws may or may not apply, so that a priori, all
scientific laws are, as universals, not more meaningfully or
universally valid than abstract notions of the Good.
This epistemological impasse now also applies to all general
concepts of formal being which might be supposed (which once
generally were in Christendom and still are in Islamic thought) to
inform and explain our perception of specific existences in a real
world. Fortunately, in common sense ordinary discourse, this world
is nevertheless assumed to exist, notwithstanding the theoretical
objections of scepticism. In order to understand how such a conflict
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 15/53
The Social Construction of Reality 61
between positive and instinctual knowledge arises, it is necessary to
recognise that linguistic forms are the vehicle for the expression of
both, and to examine the issue of whether language is a self-enclosed
system of representation whose relationship with reality is therefore
arbitrary, or whether there are structural forms in linguistic usage
which necessarily predispose cognitive habits towards a reality whichunifies word and world.
In an essay on the failure of mechanistic explanations of mind
to account for the creative enrichment by language of the reality
mediated in sense perception, Noam Chomsky proceeds from
Déscartes’ description of language as “a specific human ability,
independent of intelligence”, to outline the notion of a “deep
structure” in the thinking substance, which generates language, a
structure whose grammatical forms necessarily answer the evident
formal structures of existence in the real world. “Mind”, conceived
as a passive instrument which records sensory stimuli, could not
generate language; it could not, merely by replicating sensory in-puts,
either combine these to correspond with the complex reality
denominated by language, nor elaborate on it creatively.
In the course of his discussion, Chomsky adds this footnote:
The idea that the “cognitive power” is properly called “mind”
only when it is in some sense creative has earlier origins. One source
that might have been familiar to Déscartes is Juan Huarte’s Examen
de Ingenios (1575), which was widely translated and circulated (Iquote from the English translation by Bellamy, 1698). Huarte
understands the word Ingenio to have the root meaning “engender”,
“generate” … Thus “one may discover two generative Powers in
Man, one common with the Beasts and Plants, and the other
Participating of Spiritual Substances, God and the Angels.”3
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 16/53
62 David Kuhrt
which is the difference, in our ontology, between rational
intellect and that knowing with the heart whose object (the logos)
comprises word and world within one order of which the human is the
articulate agent.
In closing, Chomsky says of his subject (the “renewal of thestudy of universal formal conditions on the system of linguistic
rules”) that it now becomes possible “to take up once again the search
for deeper explanations for the phenomena.” In this vein our
discussion on the production of knowledge will proceed from
observing the contradictions (which we have already noted) between
expressions of knowledge in the community which are instinctual or
common sense and those instrumental forms of knowledge which are
the production of institutions and civil powers. We shall do so by
examining the concepts of knowledge presupposed in both cases, and
concluding with an outline structural description of the reality
explored by language. We shall then represent the concept logos as
the being-in-us of the reality we ordinarily call “the world”. We also
say that this being structures language, because whatever informs the
structure of a creation which has evolved in space-time also informs
the language which denominates it. In other words, we are obliged to
recognise that whatever is known about the structure of that creation
can only be known by the being-within-it which articulates such
knowledge. Therefore the parameters of the language in which it is
formulated are necessarily determined by the structural intelligence
which is manifest in that creation; for if we cannot have recourse to
this certitude, all description is endlessly arbitrary. On the contrary,in the reality we ordinarily suppose, we can, in consequence of
antecedent experience, depend on the reliability of our utterance and
the expectations which shape them, as referring to that field of
phenomena we call “the world”, knowing that it exists consensually
for others and is not a figment of the subjective imagination which
needs experimental proof in advance of the unpremeditated actions
we normally undertake on the basis of prior and experientially based
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 17/53
The Social Construction of Reality 63
knowledge. This normative conjunction of unpremeditated
experience and the reality we ordinarily suppose, is necessarily
explained by a structural correspondence between intuitive thinking
and the objective facts of an evolving creation. For this reason, we
are calling this objective structure which is common between two
bifurcated spheres of a unitary existence (ie between the subjectivelyhuman and the objectively inhuman creation): logos, meaning the
denominator. That is, the active creative principle which expresses in
space-time the enduring structural intelligence to which the creative
evolution of space-time in the material world answers.
We represent this concept (logos) as the justification for
asserting another: that the intuitive or instinctual apprehension of the
reality, which is experientially known to be common, is given by the
logos in the human organism. It is therefore the foundation of the
reality of which each existence is part, but of which conscious
knowledge perceives only part due to the condition of the individual
will and ego. The ego circumscribes that being-in-us with subjective
self-interest. It may also, however, choose to subordinate self-interest
to a longer term in which the interests of self and other are
reciprocally and consensually determined.
For the time being, the corporate interests of policy-makers
and institutions in nominally democratic societies are the collective
expressions of minority self-interest whose vehicles are lobbying
procedures circumlocuting (or short-circuiting) the nominally
democratic process. Against this the scepticism of ordinary commonsense and its hidden discourse seldom prevails because it has no
institutional (that is, political) means of expression. This problem has
been thoroughly analysed by Pierre Bordieu: “ … at least outside
periods of crisis, the production of politically effective and legitimate
forms of perception and expression is the monopoly of professionals,
and is thus subjected to the constraints and limitations in the
functioning of the political field … the paradigmatic example of this
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 18/53
64 David Kuhrt
… is the competitive academic examination (concours): between the
last person to pass and the first person to fail, the competitive
examination creates differences of all or nothing that can last a
lifetime.”4
The effects of competition in the production and judgement ofknowledge have recently been illustrated in the United Kingdom in an
admission by the Lord Chancellor's department that allocation of key
posts in the legislature, such as Queen's Counsel, are, and have been,
effected not by ballot but by “secret soundings” among barristers and
judges; those consulted would, of course, be those whose conduct of
cases best suits the interests of the establishment.5 This circumstance
(the professionalisation of knowledge) is the cause of the tension we
have already seen exists in contemporary urban cultures between two
distinct kinds of knowledge whose realities do not match: one
informing ordinary discourse across professional and class boundaries
on important subjects of public and private concern, on which the
mediated pronouncements of specialists, scholars, politicians and
lobbyists have a determining influence; the other being the province
of public policy and corporate interest and investment, which together
engineer social progress to achieve what is called ‘growth’ (of which
‘modernity’ is the cultural product). The Gross National Product is
created by an inertia towards restructuring, re-building, re-educating,
re-defining, so that profit is created by making existing norms (and
products) redundant.
This process attacks the sources of instinctual knowledgewhich govern the ability of the human being to read and interpret the
data impinging on him from the environing world so as to make sense
of it, for when ordinary common sense is contradicted by public
policy and specialist claims to knowledge which disguise self-
interest, then the capacity for instinctual knowledge atrophies: the
will to believe in oneself withers. In consequence, individuals lose
their sense of identity, invent spurious personas, emulate super-stars
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 19/53
The Social Construction of Reality 65
and celebrities as role-models, or create a compensating notoriety in
anti-social acts of violence; normative conduct and normative
knowledge is forever called in question in the interests of more
progress and the profit derived from it.
Conflicts between intuitive, ordinary acts of knowledge andinstitutional positivism therefore presuppose an extension of
knowledge about the contextual reality in which such contradictions
are resolved. Acts of knowledge and matters of fact are true or false
in contexts limited by the expectations and intent of a proposition.
Hence leukaemia in infants near the nuclear processing plant at
Sellafield is said not to be caused by radiation levels from that
establishment because the statistical incidence of cases, measured
against national averages, does not match any measured increase in
radiation which is sufficiently higher than levels of so-called natural
radiation to justify the assertion. However, the hidden preconceptions
which govern this conclusion are themselves not scientifically
proven: a safe threshold of radiation has been assumed on the basis
of safe and unsafe quantitative levels of radiation for which there is
no proof. The absence of proof is then taken by scientists to deny the
claim that a causal relation exists in spite of the fact that the human
organism is so delicately balanced between health and illness that a
body temperature increase of only 0.3 degrees may signify a serious
illness. Crucial consequences for the product of scientific knowledge
are therefore contingent on prior assumptions about the nature of
reality, human and not human.
It is evident then, that institutional science does not
acknowledge the existence of any structural foundation in thinking
which is given by, and corresponds to, the structure of an objective
reality which it predicates; instead the latter is presupposed to consist
of experimentally verified ‘facts’, even though the definition of facts
necessarily depends on unverified preconceptions about reality. The
structural foundation of thinking requires the notion of the being of
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 20/53
66 David Kuhrt
those structures in the reality and within the phenomena, in order to
penetrate the nature of the epistemological prejudice thrust upon us
by the proponents of modernity. According to this prejudice,
although we experience ourselves as being , the phenomena we
represent and contemplate are not being but material aggregates, in
which case there is no reality: what is, and has being, inheres in andinforms matter, but the notion of being is a pure abstraction when
removed from the existence it supports in space-time. As Soloviev
observes (in our opening citation): we cannot “deduce that which
does the representing from its own representation.” The
entrenchment of scientific prejudice against this evident fact is
nowhere more evident than in the prevailing theoretical premises of
the biological sciences.
Whether we are speaking of the natural environment in which
our food is produced (including crops and livestock) or of the
environment of the body, the main opposition to the notion that
genetic mechanisms determine life-forms finds expression less in
theoretical debate than in public opposition to the application of
derived technologies; that is, we see clearly that though social
institutions and the production of knowledge within professionalised
compartments isolate theoretical debate about knowledge from the
reality which it is à propos, and although it may seem beyond public
competence to arbitrate between conflicting theoretical viewpoints
(indeed, both professional interests and the state which thrives on
them insist that this is so), public reactions to the consequences of
applied theoretical knowledge are cannily à propos and intelligentlydirected, in spite of presumed academic ignorance, at the reality. We
may claim therefore that this reality, predicated secretly in the
abstruse jargon of theoreticians and their dependent executives, who
would implement technologies which promise increased productivity
and profit as if there were no theoretical debate, is instinctively
known by the community on whom the effects of inconclusive debate
about its nature will impinge, so that the reaction, à propos the
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 21/53
The Social Construction of Reality 67
reality, is not arbitrary at all, but follows logically from hidden
premises constraining theory towards a definition of a reality which
unifies word and world coherently. Since instituted knowledge
militates against the emergence of that consensual knowledge which
optimally represents reality (and does so because the political norms
of representation we call ‘democratic’ are in practise inequitable),theoretical viewpoints which would support public misgivings are
aired far less frequently in the press than the views of scientists who
believe that genetic explanations for life forms are sufficient.
Furthermore the same scientists argue that philosophical debate about
the evidence is invalid, in any case, on logical grounds: genetic
knowledge (it is alleged) shows thinking itself, and consciousness, to
be the product of brain chemistry. Since the latter can also be
genetically explained, theory (and philosophy) must defer to
conclusions which are given by the phenomena themselves in
controlled experiment. The fact that “the phenomena themselves”
have, in reality, no voice but that of the scientist who proposes their
existence, escapes these theoreticians; they are not the philosophers
their claims imply, for without the subjective experience of being
which informs the phenomena in our thinking “the phenomena” could
not be perceived; with regard to knowledge, they can be known only
in cognitive acts by thinking subjects.
In consequence, as far as dissenting theoretical viewpoints are
concerned, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake is now more widely read
among those for whom publishers cater under the rubric ‘mind-body-
spirit’ than among those professionals who read scientific literature.Yet Sheldrake’s work is the continuation of work done on life forms
by a community of scientists and researchers which is supported by,
for example, a collaboration in the 60s and 70s between the biologist
C H Waddington and topologist R Thom6. From this work it is clear
that if biological forms endure through time, neither the behaviour of
discrete molecular entities nor encrypted genetic coding explains the
endurance; for duration, as Bachelard marvellously explains, cannot
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 22/53
68 David Kuhrt
inhere in a succession of separate instants: it is the will in our
thinking activity which discovers (or recovers) the unity of being
which cannot inhere either in a succession of separate instants nor in
the molecular substratum of physical reality. It does so, according to
Bachelard, because the enduring forms of our thought world are given
“in the grammar, in the morphology as well as in the syntax”;7 for, aswe have observed, both the sentient created world and our
corresponding thought world are informed by this logos. In the
activity of thinking, we literally correspond with the reality of which
we are part, and in a dialectic which gives the root Latin meaning of
conscience: con- (with) science (scientia, knowledge) knowing with.
If therefore the existence of normative biological forms in
evolution has no material explanation, then structural phenomena
must exist to inform them which are atemporal and immaterial, and
which explain endurance, for the material constituents of all life
forms are continuously in flux, so that they would otherwise be
imperceptible.8
If it is precisely those people who have no pre-conceived
prejudices about the nature of reality who provide Rupert Sheldrake’s
popular audience, it is because they are disposed to recognise that true
knowledge cannot be contrary to normative intuitions derived from
ordinary experience, for whatever the mediated consensus on
knowledge may be, and however it may depend on the experimental
evidence of professional expertise, the instinctual knowledge which it
invalidates is also gained empirically in the course of an experiencewhich is conducted pragmatically (of the kind which takes place
between farmers and vets).
Knowledge of this kind is communal; it is not the product of
arbitrary individual guess-work but the product of experience
accumulated and transmitted over generations. This reservoir of
memory has been objectified and stands in accord regarding the
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 23/53
The Social Construction of Reality 69
essential ontology of the creation and of the human, across all
cultures and throughout time. In relation to the resources of this
reservoir, the products of the individual imagination have the same
knowledge status as do the experimental conclusions of scientists
whose fantasies have generated monstrous technologies in the name
of progress, for their methodological premises are necessarily limitedto exclude any reference to the nature of the human and the meaning
and the ontology of the creation. Their conclusions therefore, also
necessarily, are neutral with regard to all knowledge of those three
factors because all positive proofs apply only within limits imposed
on the field of phenomena by experimental conditions whose
premises exclude such knowledge. It cannot therefore be the business
only of scientists to make judgements about the relevance and
application of such limited knowledge which will have important
social and political consequences. Only within the framework of a
democratic consensus which is independent of economic and political
influence can judgements be made about knowledge and reality
which, for better of worse, will determine the social future. The
social and political crises of modern and post-modern societies are, as
proofs of the failure of positivism, proofs of exactly the same order as
those which Bacon offered against what he presumed to be the
obscurantism of the religious knowledge which prevailed during the
Middle Ages whose thinking had failed to keep pace with reality.
The turning point or revelation which confronts our age is that
the instinctual or common knowledge of the kind which still prevailed
in Europe prior to the Renaissance and the New Knowledge of thenatural sciences, which we have been pleased to call ‘empirical’ (of
the kind which dominates our age), evidently do not stand in
contradiction: there is but one reality in which their respective
cognitive norms are joined. That they continue to stand in
contradiction is a consequence of the fact that, due to the political
structures of nominally democratic societies, the product of scientific
knowledge is appropriated by the state in the interests of what its
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 24/53
70 David Kuhrt
institutions deem to be the common good: “I am labouring”, Bacon
said, “to lay the foundation not of a sect or doctrine, but of human
utility and power.”9 He did so in the belief that the resources of the
ill-educated commons were too feeble to deserve any franchise in the
exercise of power. He did so, moreover, believing that by virtue of
those privileged to acquire power as the natural consequence ofsuperior knowledge, the state would necessarily benefit all. It would
exercise a power delegated to it by the powerful, who were
necessarily the instruments of the New Knowledge as he had defined
it. For this reason, in spite of the privilege of political
enfranchisement which is ours in democratic societies today, the
relationship between the production of knowledge as Bacon defined it
and power has scarcely been modified. The professionalisation of
knowledge has simply overseen the transfer of its prerogatives from
the privileged institutions of the medieval world to those of the
modern state.
By contrast, in Muslim and African traditional societies, the
role of the umma and the madrasa, the griot-shaman and village
assembly in transmitting received knowledge, has permitted (and
permits) the rehearsal of established traditions and expressions of
common knowledge in public spaces where dissent, the departures
from accepted norms of the gifted and the marginal, can be
assimilated to the consensus. Discussing knowledge and social
practice in Mediaeval Damascus, Michael Chamberlain notes that:
“Although the a’yan [civilised élites, who “had little of the ‘natural’
taste and ‘good breeding’ of hereditary aristocracies, nor the ideologyof bureaucrats and professional associations”] often punished
severely transgressions of their control over ‘ilm [knowledge] and the
adab [exemplary comportment] associated with it, a group of
marginal holy men known as the muwallahin lampooned their
dominance with impunity.” Further, in this society, neither could
“Law, institutions, even knowledge itself … be thought of as formal
domains … they did not possess the institutional means” (described
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 25/53
The Social Construction of Reality 71
by Bordieu as cited above) “of limiting to a small number the socially
recognised capacity to articulate truth through degrees, certification,
or ordainment.” In such societies, a structural relation of divorce
between knowledge as power and the general intuition of common
knowledge in the community, did not and does not exist, even if the
exercise of political power (as in the case of medieval Muslimsocieties) is despotic: “throughout the period … , rulers never had the
knowledge, the agencies, and the independent coercive power to co-
ordinate and control the subordinate élites upon whom they depended
to rule.” Although it belonged to the mosque, the madrasa was a
meeting place “for the transmission of knowledge”. But “madrasas
did not create or train an institutional élite, still less a bureaucratic
one. They were not the means by which the state trained its cadres or
by which civilian élites transmitted social and cultural capital to their
descendants. Instead, to the civilian élite, madrasas represented …
spaces in which they interacted.”10
Knowledge formation in Islam and the institutionalisation of
knowledge in the West
We have distinguished between two kinds of knowledge
which, under certain politically determined circumstances, appear to
conflict: ordinary common sense knowledge and institutional
knowledge; the one related to the language of unpremeditated
ordinary discourse, the other to the language of professional expertise
and institutions. As we have seen, it is noteworthy that although
authority, in western societies, is allied almost exclusively with thelatter, in Muslim societies this has not been the case.
This has been due to two related factors: on the one hand to
the determining effect on philosophy and jurisprudence in the Islamic
world of the revelation of the Qur’an; and on the other to the role
played by the preservation of traditions about informal utterances of
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 26/53
72 David Kuhrt
the prophet, and by commentaries on them, which have been held by
scholars to clarify the sense of the Qur’anic Suras.
The importance of this on-going reappraisal and interpretation
is twofold: first, it cumulatively defines that body of knowledge
which, in Islam, is called ‘hadith’, and whose definitive state remainsopen to debate within a community of scholars agreed by the
community to be qualified. Secondly, the revelation of the Qur’an
was given by Mohammad at a moment in history when he judged the
communities of both Jews and Christians to have failed in their
testimony, so that his followers perceived Islam to be the continuation
of a single knowledge tradition which began with Abraham.
Furthermore, Mohammad’s revelation was given at a time when
traditions of knowledge which had remained in a certain sense stable
during the Roman Empire (due to the continued influence of Greek
philosophy), were being destabilised. Following the closure of the
school at Athens by Justinian in 529 AD, latent Neoplatonic,
Zoroastrian and Manichean undercurrents, and imported narratives
from India, exerted an increasing influence in a region which had so
recently seen radical political upheavals. Although Mohammad had
not been educated as a philosopher, his singular attribute is reputed to
have been the gift of inspired eloquence. As a merchant, he travelled
and is known to have consorted with sages, so that if the language of
the Qur’an is not that of intellectual philosophy, its discourse is
wholly informed by the substance of contemporary debate which
prevailed in the region. This substance included, of course, what
Mohammad perceived to be a common standpoint in both Judaismand Christianity with regard to their insistence on the moral
responsibility of man, according to the Covenant, for the husbandry
of the earth, and to make the unitary nature of the Godhead visible in
the fabric of society. This moral imperative – that sacred and secular
be unified - being precisely what, as it seemed to him, the practise of
contemporary Jews and Christians conspicuously lacked in a post-
Roman world of commercial self-interest, a world in which those
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 27/53
The Social Construction of Reality 73
civic postures and customary assumptions on which Roman secular
power depended still prevailed: “For … men did bend the knee – if
not to the ancient gods, at least to other men, to the emperor and to
the powerful, for whom adoratio, full-blooded reverence, was
deemed an utterly appropriate gesture … The ancient collective
representation of the mundus gave to such people – to Christians asmuch as to pagans – imaginative room for manoeuvre. Its many
layers reconciled faith in the One, High God with dogged, indeed
reverential, concern for things of the saeculum ...”11
As we have seen above, in the 13th Century Arabian Middle
East, the process by which a consensus of knowledge and a dependent
social order was established in communities was not institutionalised
and remained informal. By contrast, “In the Latin West documents
were unmistakable proofs of privilege, exemption, competence,
precedent, honour or possession … nations, classes, corporations,
religious bodies, families, status groups, and factions fought out their
struggles with documents …” Above all, “The most sensitive studies
of the period have realised that formal entities, agencies, institutions
and groups did not determine social relations in the Middle East to the
extent that they did in the Latin West."12
The parallel development in Europe of institutions and trained
élites on whose production of knowledge the state depended,
contributed incrementally to the gradual erosion of traditions of
communal knowledge in western societies. It is difficult to appreciate
the scale of this transformation, its effects on political conduct, andthe degree to which this loss is conducive to social conformity in a
society professing the protection of individual liberties as its
foundation. However, keeping one’s eyes open, one may witness the
operating pressures which induce conformity and ensure that the
sectarian interests of the professions dominate, so that, in
consequence, communal knowledge scarcely thrives. A poster
currently advertising the services of a head-hunting employment
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 28/53
74 David Kuhrt
agency to commuters awaiting their trains shows the tail of a
tyrannosaurian trapped in a closing lift door, below which is the
legend: “Waiting for home time? You’re on your way out.
Evolution favours the professional.” The message is that
advancement depends on dedication to objectives which require the
suspension of any reflection about the nature of the reality determined by existing norms which presuppose purely instrumental goals for
individual existence. With regard to the alleged (by Francis Bacon
and the rationalists who pronounce in the same vein against religious
knowledge now) superstition of medieval beliefs, if, in consequence
of Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolved round the sun (a fact
which had been previously known to Indian astronomers for several
millennia), attempts had been made to persuade his contemporaries
that they did not see what they saw (the sun rising above the horizon
and appearing to revolve round the earth), there would have been a
conflict of knowledge of the kind now endemic in contemporary
urban cultures. Fortunately, the man in the street in Galileo’s time
was not on his way to the office or, rarely witnessing either sunrise or
sunset, he might also have been disenfranchised of the common sense
knowledge which puts Galileo’s discovery in its proper perspective.
For though we know that it does so, and no-one has actually seen the
earth revolving round the sun while standing on earth, only the blind
have not seen it roll up over the horizon, incontrovertibly circling the
earth in human experience.
The consequences for knowledge of industrial revolutionThe institutional changes in European societies which saw the
eclipse of common sense knowledge, proceeded slowly: the
opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to the New Knowledge of
natural philosophy succumbed by degrees to an accommodation with
the political power of the new nation states, whose institutions thrived
on the New Knowledge and its derived technologies at the expense of
the old, as if the natural discourse of ‘the old’ had belonged to another
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 29/53
The Social Construction of Reality 75
planet; as if, in spite of Galileo (whose knowledge does not contradict
it) we did not stand on the earth witnessing the passage round it of the
sun; as if, with so much knowledge, we could not educate our
children to understand both viewpoints without contradiction so that
we lie to them about the status in reality of their subjective experience
before they begin to acquire knowledge.
The impact of this development and its contribution to
modernity cannot be underestimated: recalling how Francis Bacon’s
“The Advancement of Learning” pronounced that experimental
knowledge had superseded the “superstitious” knowledge of tradition,
we may be reminded that pharmaceutical companies are now
discovering, and capitalising on, the accuracy of pre-Renaissance
traditional knowledge of plant remedies in Europe; yet Francis
Bacon’s views prevailed until, and beyond, the Industrial Revolution.
As Vladimir Soloviev explains in his remarkably prophetic analysis –
written at the end of the nineteenth century – of the import of the
positivist philosophy of le Comte, Saussure et al, in the nineteenth
century, the nominal materialism of the preceding centuries took a
new turn towards what William James called the “stubborn and
irreducible facts” of empirical science; for objective processes in the
material world could no longer be represented as if the scientific and
philosophical propositions which entailed them had no foundation in
the thinking subject.13
The twentieth century discovery that the perception of matter
itself at indeterminate levels in particle physics, must answer to theviewpoint of the observer, nurtured the emergence of a new tendency
in the philosophy of science in which, it seemed, the empirical
certainties of the material world depended on the ontological relation
of thinking in the human subject with its objects: the field of material
process which pervades every phenomenon (in the reality we
ordinarily suppose) is also constitutive of the human body, whose
location determines the physical position in that field in space and
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 30/53
76 David Kuhrt
time at which we are cognate with it in our thinking. The realisation,
of moral autonomy by the thinking subject, is the consequence of the
social transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution of
relations between the product of individual labour and the gross
national product on which the community depends.
The creation of what Marx called “the urban proletariat”
effectively suspended any linkage between ordinary perceptual in-
puts about the reality of the world on the part of the majority who
were producers, and the consensus of knowledge in the executive.
Hitherto, the means of production had been commonly owned, and
production depended on traditionally transmitted skills. Now, the
thinking of this “urban proletariat” was precipitated by political
enfranchisement into the realm of institutional political discourse
whose agencies were the professions, for which, first, ordinary
common knowledge, and then later the specific knowledge of
tradesmen’s guilds became, by degrees, redundant. The Industrial
Revolution interposed mechanical processes of production between
the subject consciousness of individuals (who, hitherto, formed
communities of producers), and the objective world of raw material
which they previously transformed with manual skills and simple
technologies. The Industrial Revolution, therefore, situated the
community (including the complex linguistic usages of its
tradespeople), at one remove from the real world as far as the exercise
of common knowledge was concerned. This interruption of servitude
in the natural economy is the cause of that augmented sense of moral
autonomy in individuals which distinguishes post-industrial urbansocieties from all historical precedents.
But the political enfranchisement of the nineteenth century
which followed those changes in the social relations of production
carried with it only the semblance of democracy. Although the
activities of reformers and philanthropists contributed to the
atmosphere of liberalism in which the lot of the commons improved,
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 31/53
The Social Construction of Reality 77
following the injustices attendant on unprecedented urban growth and
industrialisation, the Education Act of 1890 in the United Kingdom
(to take one example) was not instituted by Parliament with
disinterested concern for the democratisation of knowledge:
“education for all” would ensure the ready availability of the skilled
labour on which the success of the economic growth promised by theIndustrial Revolution depended. According to the report to
Parliament of the Cross Commission of 1888: “We do not profess to
give these children an education that will raise them above their
station and business in life – that is not our object – but to give them
an education that may fit them for that business … indifference in this
matter would seriously affect the commercial prestige of the
nation.”14 This concept of education hardly comprehended the
underlying social pressures towards democracy. In fact, whereas the
increased wealth which might release the majority from poverty
depended on the fact that one man’s productivity, with mechanical
intervention, could generate a value previously requiring the labour of
one or several extended families, no legislation was enacted to ensure
the equitable distribution of that augmented productivity as far as the
creation of wealth was concerned. Those who invested the capital
therefore continued to reap proportional benefits which reflected a
social status quo obtaining before the Industrial Revolution. Thus the
proclaimed emancipation of the labouring classes proceeded within
limits determined, with regard to the prerogative of knowledge
distribution, by privileges concerning access to political power which
had accrued during the previous four centuries.
On the evidence of the relations between communal
knowledge and political power in the recent history of democratic
societies in the instances cited above, the compulsory education and
nominal political enfranchisement of the majority in urban societies
since the Industrial Revolution has resulted in increasing and
dangerous tensions between the individual’s augmented sense of his
potential value to the community and his actual ability to impinge on
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 32/53
78 David Kuhrt
or affect the social, ecological and environmental policies of
democratic states. That is, there has been an ontological reduction in
the dimension of the self which the creative power of language and
the imagination presupposes.
Once, self-esteem was measured by the degree to which theindividual distinguished himself in an hereditarily-determined social
structure as a valuable member of a community whose belief systems
(including acceptance of his circumstances of birth as divinely
ordained) were universally shared; even if, with regard to ‘upward
mobility’, few enjoyed any measure of enfranchisement. Political
enfranchisement in the nineteenth century, might therefore have been
expected to augur a society in which the true dimensions of the
individual, from the point of view of the proclaimed ideology of
democracy, found expression in his ability to participate, equal with
all peers, in the creation of a future foreseen as the product of
common knowledge, within the framework of new institutions whose
democratic intent was to enable precisely such a degree of
enfranchisement. This did not occur, so that the contradictions we
have cited between common sense knowledge and the instituted
policies of state, now invalidate common sense and serve the
privilege of those interest groups on which the state depends. Clearly
the nominal idea we mean by “democratic progress” depends on a
preconceived and invalid concept of both knowledge and the nature
of the reality to which it refers. It is then evident that although a
social future might be commonly foreseen, the nature of the reality
which answers to our crises remains unforeseen and pre-determinedin advance by the vested interests of the institutions which shape
presently expedient policy. From such forlorn perspectives we then
permit so-called experts to extrapolate our futures.
If the immaturity of the democratic process at the time of the
Industrial Revolution secured the increased value of one man’s
production only for those empowered by capital to sponsor its
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 33/53
The Social Construction of Reality 79
creation, the disparity of wealth which existed then between rich and
poor has scarcely changed, a fact which improved living standards for
the majority conveniently hides. The price paid for the generally
increased wealth of the community has therefore been the surrender
of independence on the part of individuals as knowing beings; for
these injustices are articulated, if at all, by parties whose ideology polarises responsibility between oppressors and the oppressed, as if
the dispossessed and underprivileged were incapable of any remedial
acts themselves without institutionalised leadership. It is on the
premise of such predicated powerlessness that democracy survives in
the variety of its presently haphazard forms across the globe.
Paolo Friere explained the realities of instrumental political
power in his literacy projects among the Peruvian poor in the 60s and
70s: that the structural relations between governed and government
depends on “manufacturing consent” (to use Chomsky’s apposite
expression), so that the oppressed internalise those norms which
maintain power by representing themselves, in imagination and in
their discourse, as powerless.15 It is a tribute to the ingenuity of
human intelligence in justifying the necessity of a status quo dictated
by forces outside its practical control, that intellectuals and the
majorities they speak for in Western societies fail to perceive the very
limited nature of a democracy which is enjoyed at the expense of the
poor in societies elsewhere which they deem undemocratic, failing to
perceive also that the relations of instrumental powers with subject
populations are, in principle, the same, whether those populations
consent or are coerced. Thus J K Galbraith, discussing the structuralnorms by which post-industrial capitalism determines consumer
habits, refers to “the techniques by which the individual is made to
conform to the planning process – how our behaviour is guided so
that we will not, by undue independence of will, upset the
convenience of those [corporate interests] who serve us.”16
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 34/53
80 David Kuhrt
If the majority, on whom we wish to confer a responsibility
equal to that of a minority who determine their future within
institutions which effectively remove power from democratic control,
continues to adjust its purchasing habits to suit marketed trends, so
that this year’s product or fashionable commodity is either redundant
or unavailable next year (because statistically projected returns on thecapital investment have been secured and redundancy of the product
will ensure next year’s returns), it does so (we do so) because
together with its monopoly of power, the state also acquires a
monopoly on knowledge. We refuse to contemplate the fact that
whereas before the Industrial Revolution only a minority went to a
tailor for their clothes, we, the majority have become incapable of
making our own. That is to say, we have no democratic control over
the means of production, nor over the distribution of the increased
wealth which industrial revolution has made possible. The freedoms
thus acquired (energies released from the effort of manual
production) are not communally directed to secure optimal benefits
locally and globally, for these are not the goals of institutions without
democratic controls; instead, those released energies are literally
spent on and absorbed by the growth of leisure industries and
entertainments which distract our attention from the reality. Hence
Gurvitch observes that political knowledge (he means the institutional
product of plural democracies), “is legitimised by, and manifests in,
the reciprocal relations which operate within the associated functions
of a system of economic production … and are inherently disposed to
maintain an equilibrium whose component elements constantly renew
each other … here, the knowledge we call common sense is accordedthe lowest priority. Given the wider diffusion of philosophical,
scientific and technical knowledge, thanks to compulsory secondary
education for all, common sense knowledge normally plays almost no
part whatever in education except at primary levels.”17
The notion that democracy is derived from enfranchisement
only, is not a socialist but a fundamentally conservative doctrine
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 35/53
The Social Construction of Reality 81
which suits the competitive practises underpinning capitalist growth;
a premise which has survived in democratic institutions from the
nineteenth century in that form of pseudo-Darwinism known as the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest. According to this doctrine, once
upward mobility becomes a statutory right, all those who have been
suitably equipped by nature, will, all things being equal and given the ballot box, rise to occupy positions in society which enable them to
contribute their best. This doctrine is conservative in the sense that
whereas the law of natural selection may have applied to the
evolution of the human in competition between species for optimal
adaptation to the global environment, once the human has emerged,
real progress depends not on competition but on fraternity; that is,
neo-Darwinism is retrogressive. It is so because that progress which
is purely material, which produces the growth of the state at common
expense and depends on competition, is incompatible with fraternity
except in a social context where production, distribution and profit
(which benefit from competition) are subject to consensually agreed
social controls. Therefore, if societies do not legislate to compensate
for inequality of access to the institutions which confer power on the
state, there can be no consensus of knowledge from which fraternity
might derive. If within nature a predatory order does exist, it is
limited by the laws of evolution which favoured the appearance of the
human. This being, unlike its predecessors, thinks and acts
autonomously and not necessarily in conformity with the laws of
nature it still depends on. It must therefore think what kind of social
order must be given by legislation in order to provide, in education,
for the production of that knowledge which enshrines those principles.18 For those principles are derived from a hierarchy of
being within which the human has achieved an ascendant position,
the cause and consequence of which is a reflective capacity to think
and to articulate a position of responsibility within the creation. That
responsibility is his, but the creation itself is not. Hence the
intelligence which recognises this contingence is not his either. It is
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 36/53
82 David Kuhrt
the gift of that creation; whether or not its origins are accidental is
irrelevant.
The paradox cannot escape us that the ability to think confers
upon the human simultaneously a consciousness of dependence on
nature, common to all other beings, and a capacity to operateindependently of nature and to transcend it. If we are constrained in
society to consolidate self-interest in competition with others, the ego
which benefits becomes incapable of transcendence. Plasticity in
thinking, empathy in social conduct, love which binds and is
voluntarily bound, become redundant capacities. This suits the
interests of state: that is because the corporate state depends on a
Gross National Product which increases optimally on the basis of
competitive egoism. There may therefore be a case for saying that the
gross national product of the institutional economy in nominally
democratic societies stands in inverse proportion to the loss of
communal knowledge, and that the effect of political enfranchisement
is to have enabled the capitalisation of the state on the basis of that
loss.
If, following political enfranchisement, the democratic process
had not been subverted by the interests of commerce and economic
growth, a process which began in the urban centres of commerce
throughout Europe at the end of the nineteenth century,19
enfranchisement of majorities within nation states would have
provided the occasion for the evolution of a trans-national social
order rooted in locally controlled democracies whose independent political controls would have been compatible with cultural pluralism.
However, failing the enactment by political states, to which the
enfranchised majorities were subject, of legislation which guaranteed
democratic equality independently of inequality of economic or
professional status, the powers invested in aristocratic oligarchies
prior to the Industrial Revolution were simply transferred to a new
managerial class. Nation states therefore continued to exist as powers
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 37/53
The Social Construction of Reality 83
competing against each other in the economic sector; and if the nation
state is now called in question, those global and corporate interests
which will, in turn, displace their waning powers, are already in place
threatening a further escalation of political disenfranchisement so that
seething and increasingly migrant populations can be effectively
managed.
In this situation of dynamic conflict on which nation states, or
the corporate interests displacing them, continue to depend,
participating individuals who might have been expected, following an
enfranchisement called ‘democratic’, to enact a consensus, within an
appropriate institutional framework, in which each contributed to the
formation of a commonly foreseen future, are permanently exposed to
pressures towards a conformity which is effectively opposed to true
enfranchisement. Now that the means of immediate global
communication exists, an awareness of the proximity of others is
enhanced incrementally, so that internal social tensions increase
accordingly. An endemic political quietism appears to have replaced
the political activism of the 60s and 70s which responded to the major
injustices of a now terminated Cold War.
Although the overtly political quiescence of the majority
guarantees its material reward, the ordinary discourse of informal
relations between individuals in democracies reveals the scepticism
with which the majority views both the activities of the politicians
who, nominally, represent them, and their conduct of the state. The
existence of this undercurrent of dissent does not need documenting.It is a main source of income for journalists who do so; however, the
idea, which may cross a journalist’s mind, that the uncensored
existence of media forums, precisely de-marks democratic from
undemocratic societies, is, of course, an example of the self-induced
myopia which keeps the juggernaut of progress going, for there are no
public forums in democracy (excepting those controlled by the
media) within which any true consensus of knowledge might find
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 38/53
84 David Kuhrt
expression. In default of the existence of any such forums, the social
future cannot be other than an extrapolation of existing norms which
are the evident cause of recurring crises.
The social future therefore cannot be deduced from those
norms. A society which is functional in relation to rationallyconceived aims does not suffer recurring crises. Individuals are not
predisposed to serve purely personal and competing interests on
which the corporate profit of states depends: there is a supra-sensible
dimension to human existence in which each experiences the
limitations of his present existence in the context of a being-together-
with-others in one world. By “supra-sensible” we do not mean here
an intangible spiritual dimension, but the actuality of an all-inclusive
reality which includes the existence and perspectives of other beings -
from the inanimate to the human. The spiritual dimension is that
realm of reality which structures the unity of the whole which
individuals, within different consensual norms, will perceive only in
consequence of moral effort. Whether they express it in disinterested
political activism or in the acquisition of esoteric knowledge has to do
with the chosen quality of their relationship with time, for the same
unitary reality is expressed throughout every level of being. Hence,
in spite of the existence of divisive political states, the experience of
being-together-with-others in a unitary reality is an instinctual and
half-conscious form of objective knowledge which is common to
individuals in all cultures. This experience is an extension of feelings
generated first in local communities; the extension (beyond clan and
tribe and race) is given in the discourse of received traditions byelders, griot-shamans, if not by teachers in schools, and has nothing to
do with the narratives of a demagogue who subverts popular epic
tradition to purely ethnic goals which are irrelevant in our time. The
instinctual sense of being-together-with-others which generates local
knowledge traditions is, on the contrary, supportive: the
disappointments of immediate circumstance are perceived in a long-
term perspective which is universally human, and which is hoped for
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 39/53
The Social Construction of Reality 85
and expected in oral and written forms. This unfulfilled expectation
is called Zion in Jewish literature, where it is represented as the goal
of humanity. The same expectation informs the narrative of the
Qur’an, and in both its given outline determines a tradition of
knowledge concerning the ideal state of the human. It is also
consonant with the English libertarian tradition which is expressed inthe notion of a commonwealth we have yet to see. It is therefore,
being in this sense universal, the product of a structurally existing
reality, from whose formal constraints proceeds both the created
world we ordinarily suppose and the cognitive forms which enable its
expression in language.
Material reality: the intellectual obstacles of knowledgeIf no social forms have yet evolved which answer to that
structural reality, that is because preconceptions exist about the nature
of knowledge which determine the product in favour of instrumental
power and marginalise the sources in communities which nurture
such knowledge. Through the foregoing, we have therefore posed the
epistemological question which is fundamental to all notions of
knowledge: by what criteria do we know, and what qualifies all
claims to knowledge?
There is an apocryphal story in the Upanishads about a sage
who proposes to his acolytes that reality – what the world is really
like – cannot be the subject of positive knowledge for the same reason
that the blind, having been brought to an elephant and feeling whatconfronts them where they stand, would deny the reports of their
fellows differently placed round the animal, each being unable to see
that all were addressing the same object. Each individual knower,
being human, is likewise limited in his knowledge of the universal to
a spatio-temporal location which is unique, specifically his own, and
given by the body.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 40/53
86 David Kuhrt
The purpose of this parable is to show that no positive
knowledge is absolute: even though “we must bring men to
particulars, and their regular Series and Order” as Francis Bacon’s
inductive method recommends,20 “and must for a while renounce
their Notions and begin to form an acquaintance with things”, the
things which are ordered in their series by the inductive method are soordered by that method to suit preconceptions about the nature of
reality which are not necessarily closer to truth than the preconceived
“Notions” they are designed to displace. Hence, paradoxically, even
the meaning of the parable depends on the empirical fact that the
existence of elephants is presupposed, in a consensus given by others
who have seen them, or the parable would not be understood.
The tradition of knowledge from which this wisdom comes –
the Vedas – predates the classical period of Greek philosophy, but we
cannot, in spite of later Greek philosophical scepticism about received
knowledge (of which ‘modernity’ is no more than an elaboration),
escape the fact that all knowledge is relational: we can know nothing
in particular absolutely until we know all things generally in relation.
Though positivists who claim to know particulars absolutely are
therefore closer to God than they thought, the reality itself of which
they know particular parts, can only be half-consciously intuited in
the premise of an experimental proposition. In ordinary discourse
that proposition remains a generally given conceptual framework no
different from the “Notions” which Francis Bacon, who founded the
method, disparaged. Propositions are elaborated in argument between
opposed viewpoints in relation to particular experiences seen, by eachspeaker, as à propos a reality which no-one quite grasps. The
conduct of argument in the vernacular, when each (if he hears what
the other is saying) replies: “Yes that may be true but it is also like
this”, nevertheless reveals the degree of common understanding about
the necessary existence of a contextual reality which unifies their
opposing perspectives.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 41/53
The Social Construction of Reality 87
This contextual reality, which necessarily informs all ordinary
discourse, we are entitled to call supra-sensible. Although this reality
manifests in particular circumstances and, in ordinary discourse, is
subject to a plurality of standpoints, there are esoteric traditions in
which it finds complete symbolic forms of expression. In traditions
which are communal, and where knowledge and power have not beenconflated by the interests of state, this knowledge exists not
esoterically but as received and transmitted structural explanation
which situates and orders the individual within the cosmos, as in the
case of the Peule people reported above by Amadou Hampaté Bâ.
Where such knowledge exists within established traditions,
the nature of the reality itself, by contrast with modernist societies, is
seldom called in question, and it has therefore been the burden of
such traditions in every culture throughout history, to articulate a
structural foundation for knowledge which unifies and explains the
divergent viewpoints expressed informally in ordinary discourse.
From this point of view (of symbolic knowledge about reality) both
the utility and also the limitations of scientific knowledge, are derived
from its capacity to define the particular knowledge of things and
processes. This enables an intervention in nature which may serve (if
democracy exists) human welfare. Such positive knowledge is,
however, veridical only in strictly delimited experimental conditions.
It follows therefore that, as we now understand it, science has
nothing to say about the nature of reality, and that it is not normally
the business of religion and of esoteric traditions of knowledge toargue between standpoints which are clearly opposed only in
consequence of the material limitations of accidental physical
existence. However, in the present century, humanity has entered a
new dimension of experience: viewpoints which, in previous history,
seemed incommensurate have been radically juxtaposed; a
circumstance caused first by the social transformations attendant on
the industrial revolution, and second by developments in scientific
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 42/53
88 David Kuhrt
knowledge which have breached the notion of predictability and
precipitated the subject observer into a realm in which all perceptions
of the reality clearly depend on an understanding of the relation
between knower and known in all acts of cognition. The very notion
that scientific and religious knowledge stand in contradiction
suddenly appears untenable.
In consequence we may conclude that knowledge does not
exist independently of thinking beings who know, neither does it exist
in thought alone independently of the language it must inform for the
purpose of communication. If I know in my mind that something is
the case before saying so, that is because the language which makes
the thought conscious has normally been previously acquired. If the
structure of language and thought seems inseparable, then we must
also conclude that the structure which is given (as previously
described, by the logos) in the reality of the world we ordinarily
suppose, is present throughout all the existences which combine in
the human to compose both the subjective being which refers to its
object and the existing object; then, whether or not they speak, all so-
compounded existences participate in the being of both the subject
who speaks and the object, which may or may not be animate, and
may or may not also be a speaker. If not, the fact that human beings
who are deaf and mute but clearly comprehend the reality which is
common to others and signify their consensual participation in it,
could not be explained.
It is in arguing the evidence for “deep structures” whichinform human cognitive activity and generate grammar that Noam
Chomsky cites Déscartes’ reference to the example of those who,
“being born deaf and dumb, are in the same degree, or even more,
than the brutes, destitute of the organs which serve the others for
talking”, yet “are in the habit of themselves inventing certain signs by
which they make themselves understood.” That they do so, Chomsky
takes to be evidence that man has “a unique type of intellectual
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 43/53
The Social Construction of Reality 89
organisation which … is undetermined by any fixed association of
utterances to external stimuli.”21 That thought forms in
consciousness are given, and therefore predisposed to apprehend the
objective reality presupposed by the use of language, indicates that
the cognitive threshold of consciousness is not established in
individuals by the habit of acquiring language but by the conjunction,consequent on the fact of birth, between a structural form common to
the species and the specific being of the individual, irrespective of
both the particular intelligence he develops and even his capacity to
articulate it verbally.
This structural form is not only present in the generic being of
the human, but the structure of the generically human focuses and
centres within consciousness the whole of being which is other than
human, and which radiates from that center. It radiates both
downwards (so to speak) through the animated organic, the sentient
and mineral realms towards the non-being of the materia prima, and
upwards, returning and referring, in acts of cognition which are
redemptive as far as the limitations of time and space are concerned,
the accidental and specific existences which are comprehended, to the
essential, the one unitary Being from which they proceed. This
generically human form, which has passed through all other existing
forms in evolution so that they are constitutive of that whole, this we
call logos, following the tradition of knowledge elaborated on the
basis of Greek and Jewish esoteric traditions in the early Christian
world.
The activity of thought is therefore a vehicle for the
expression in consciousness of Being itself as contingent in space-
time; that is, dependant on, or surrendered to, separate and accidental
existences. But the space-time which governs the created world
within which that Being is contingently present in existence, is itself
the product of that contingence, in that human consciousness
perceives it only in consequence of a conjunction (which we have
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 44/53
90 David Kuhrt
already described) between the being which is present throughout and
the specific bodily standpoint of the human. Outside that human
existential context given by cognition, which separates the component
parts of existence according to time and space after the fact of its own
embodiment, there is but one omnipotent Being. Thus, in reality, the
being of the whole endures in spite of spatio-temporal contingenceand the existence of the human which might upset it.
All contingent existence throughout time is therefore coeval
and co-present as far as Being is concerned, and it is this co-presence
which is reflected in the structures of cognitive activity we call
thought. That logos, to which Chomsky’s “deep structures” almost
refer, therefore sustains and underwrites the enduring generic form of
the human while individual thinkers fail, in personal existence, to
bear it out and enact it; for if a recovery of the unitary nature of being
in personal existence is consequent on the consensual will of
individuals to achieve it, then the thought activity which bears that
will is the highest possible expression of love; that is, coition. It is,
however, impossible to understand either the use of such symbolic
terms in an epistemological context or the role played by
metaphorical usage in ordinary discourse (including poetry) without
revising the current philosophical usage; for here, we accord reality to
non-being in the physical realm of space-time and non-being to the
realm of thinking activity. For if not here, where else can we be
cognate with the world we ordinarily suppose exists?
The structural phenomena in thought activity which areexpressed in the grammar and syntax of language are not material
beings. The existences in the phenomenal world to which language
refers are spatio-temporally present in matter which is in a state of
permanent flux, so that the formal entity we recognise is perceived
only because its existential presence elsewhere answers to the
corresponding presence in us of the same being. The so-called
problem of knowledge, which turns on the question of how and in
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 45/53
The Social Construction of Reality 91
what sense an entity which is spatio-temporally present elsewhere can
be ‘in’ consciousness, does not arise once the difference between
being and existence on the one hand, and the absence of stability with
respect to time and space of the phenomenal entities we perceive on
the other hand, is reconciled in a redefinition of terms which admits
those realities. In failing to do so, we are confronted with theintellectual absurdity of a denial of both personal and objective
existence; a denial which, in the prevailing tendencies of
contemporary philosophy, separates language as a closed system of
inter-related terms from its referential objects. This account of
knowledge is then obliged, in logical consequence, to explain all
mental phenomena as self-organising neurological constructs without
reference to the ontological problem of the speaker who proposes the
narrative in the first place.
Thus the reality we ordinarily suppose is divided into subject
and object only in human acts of cognition and not in reality. The act
of cognition (which we have said is an act of love which engenders
co-presence) produces a concept which, as such, forms part of that
structure we call mental, and which operates as a unity; from which
also personal identity and existence is derived. It (the act of
cognition) joins together in conceptual form the being of subject and
object which is separated at birth by physical embodiment together
with the memory. The illusory veil which divides reality between
subject and object in cognition is a consequence of the failure in
thinking to confront the moral dilemma posed by the existence of
others whose assertions about reality are prejudicial to pre-conceived personal interest. The agent which subverts the mediated reality in
which other existences and our own are joined into an interpreted
representation favouring ourselves, or those institutions to which we
belong, at the expense of theirs, is the intellect. The intellect is not an
impartial provider as far as knowledge is concerned but an
entrepreneurial and creative spirit, a usurper, whose activity is
divisive. This agent in us of the intelligent world is, however, neutral
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 46/53
92 David Kuhrt
with regard to the outcome of this conflict in that, once its role has
been identified, the same instrument must also serve the moral
intention of the thinking subject. Until then, the intellect obscures the
reality in favour of a partial view suiting undeclared personal interests
which, in a social context with others who are like minded, are also
political interests.
The focal point and mirror of realityThe four principle components in that realm of being, logos,
which shapes and sustains both language and its referent world are
Time, Space, Form and Movement. In time, each of these is a being
in itself whose activity is given by the being it answers to: the logos.
Time is given in the interval which separates being-at-one-
location from being-at-another. The passage between becomes
conscious only in human consciousness, and only then because it
inhabits a body defining viewpoints, so that one location is ‘here’ and
another is ‘there’.
Space, the composite entity encompassing all separately
perceived locations given by the body, is the external correlate of
internally perceived time. But both space and time are the product of
a separation in Being itself caused by the intervention of
consciousness, since individual existence (and therefore
consciousness) is caused by being at, and in, the specific location of a
body. The twinned constraints on Being itself of time and space, both
derived from incarnation, are related to the twinned functions inreproduction of (respectively) the female and male genders, the one
essentially (that is archeptypically) disposed inwardly towards
temporal extension in time; the other outwardly towards spatial
extension. The product of time and space together, both structurally
in the hierarchy of the logos which operates between being and
existence to reconcile being and non-being, and biologically in the
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 47/53
The Social Construction of Reality 93
reproduction of the species which mirrors that structure, is Form,
which becomes the object of sentient experience in creation.
Form thus appears to sense-perception in consequence of the
re-cognition of Time and Space in matter. But the presence in matter
of form is not immutable: every formal existence is inmetamorphosis as far as its being in matter (which is governed by
Time and Space) is concerned, for every existence passes through,
and is in, the material fundament. Existing things have duration
which mirrors their relations with Time and therefore determines also
their existence in Space. Thus mineral formations are more enduring
than botanical ones, although the appearance of flowers depends on
the transformation of minerals which otherwise, without the being
and essence of the plant, are differently subject to Time, and may
appear in another Form. That is, minerals may appear in anything
from rock formations to human excrement, depending on their formal
content, which in turn depends on their relations with Space and
Time.
The conjunction of Time and Space in matter which produces
Form, is therefore also the cause of Movement, in consequence both
of the volatility of the matter in which forms reside and of the
different relations of Form with matter which are consequent on
Time. Movement is therefore that realm within the structure, the
logos, which is closest to the operation of the thinking activity in
human cognition: we re-cognise the world because, in thought, the
spirit (Being itself) is con-formed to its objects. As AmadouHampaté Bâ puts it, the evolving human being, the cognate thinker, is
“in perpetual movement , as is the cosmos itself”.
The being within that realm of non-being we call matter, of
Time, Space, Form and Movement is therefore the condition of the
human. The human re-cognises and re-members the passage through
Time of those antecedent evolutionary forms on which its own
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 48/53
94 David Kuhrt
depends, and which are perceived in the externalised form of the
world, the world we ordinarily presuppose in cognition. This world is
apprehended prior to ontological doubt and prior to any theoretical
scepticism about existence which uncertainty with regard to positive
knowledge might generate. Thus the universally human is formally
present, following the interaction of Time, Space, Form andMovement which mediate between the ascent of the purely material
and the descent into it of Being itself. The logos therefore irradiates
the whole of Being from that symbolically conceived center. This
Light, as opposed to that of the intellect, therefore reconciles what, as
far as positive knowledge is concerned, would be an anomaly
between Being itself, present throughout time, and its formal presence
in spatio-temporally determined existences.
Below that realm of the definitively human are the envelopes
of being which are derived from those forms of existence in the
material world which preceded the human: animal, plant and
mineral; each of which are radically distinguished by their relations,
as existences, with Being itself, even if contemporary science has
disappeared the ordinary, sentient realities which distinguished
sentient and vegetative existence in previous classifications. For the
existence of objectively separated realms of being corresponding to
ordinary reality is logically prior to any understanding of our
subjective relations with the whole Being within which we must
suppose, the separate existences we perceive exist in concert. Thus
the relations established in thought between the human and the
antecedent forms of existence on which its own depends, illuminatesthe path by which the knower ascends towards and recovers his
identity with Being itself. That is: the source both of the human and
of the reality expressed in the sentient world which preceded it in
Time, which continues, and in which the human participates, through
the material substratum, in consequence of his body.
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 49/53
The Social Construction of Reality 95
In those realms below the existential being of the human
existence in consciousness, the animal is elevated in Time above the
sentient; the sentient in Time above the mineral and the mineral in
Time above the formless realm of pure matter, in which every
existence passes from non-being to Being, before, during and after
Time.
The animal is elevated above the sentient in consequence of
Movement, which in the human is expressed as desire, to which
sentient existences in the rooted plant realm do not aspire.
The plant, which inspires and inhales to stabilise its existence
between the light of space and the darkness of matter by
photosynthesis, is elevated above the mineral, as Form, without
Movement which, in animals, is caused by desire.
The mineral is elevated above the pure plenum of the material
in consequence of Space, for spatial entities which have physical
extension are the product of molecular association which manifest the
material in extension as solids.
Finally, matter itself is distinguished from, and subordinated
in opposition to Being itself, by Time, since no duration within its
undifferentiated state is possible without the intervention of Space.
But Space, as extension, is the consequence of formal presences, and
Form is dependant on Movement, so that the being together of these
elements constitute the logos, of which the human form is the radialnexus of the created world. That they are so together in Time, and
that matter, as non-being subordinated to it, becomes the matrix from
which non-being ascends towards and recovers its origin in Being
itself, refers to all those representations in occult tradition in which
the female archetype is secreted in matter and the male in spirit. The
logos therefore structures the knowledge which joins these extremes
and informs the created reality of the world in which they are
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 50/53
96 David Kuhrt
perceived. Their differences therefore are accidental in Time and do
not concern the essence of the transcendental human.
As far as the expression of logos in the structure of language
is concerned, Time is expressed in tenses; Space, and the relative
location of ingredient existing objects, is expressed in conjunctions;Form by nouns and Movement and corresponding temporal location
with verbal conjugations. The situation of the subject who speaks in
relation to the objective matter and content thus given is represented
by modifying that complex structural product with pronouns and
possessive forms which reveal the nature of his subjective
relationship with the comprised reality as he experiences it; this is
what he means. The reality as he apprehends it has been expressed
and understood by others who experience it, in varying degrees,
differently; but others nevertheless know with him, and assume
consensually, the existence of one reality to which each necessarily
refers in spite of those differences; for, if not, if the one reality is not
in that non-veridical and provisional sense known , nothing could be
understood. This nothing includes those propositions which are
agreed to constitute positive knowledge on a scientific basis. That is
to say, as far as positivism is concerned, that scientific propositions
are meaningless as knowledge unless the consensually agreed world
of ordinary discourse is acknowledged as existing a priori, in
ordinary discourse and in common sense. A context which makes all
assertions meaningful in a social consensus which has yet to be
determined.
References
1 Vladimir Soloviev, The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Lindisfarne Press, 1996)
2 Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Aspects de la Civilzation Africaine (Présence Africaine,
1972)
3 Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (University Press of America, 1966)
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 51/53
The Social Construction of Reality 97
4 Pierre Bordieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Polity Press, 1994). This book is
of particular importance in the context of our discussion concerning the conflict
between instrumental and spiritual notions both of reality and of the human in thatBordieu points out the social limitations of Chomsky’s structurist view of universal
forms in language. In his introduction, the editor, John B Thompson, summarises
Bordieu’s difference with Chomsky: “The notion of competence, understood as the
capacity of an ideal speaker to generate an unlimited sequence of grammatically
well-formed sentences, is simply too abstract. The kind of competence that actual
speakers possess is not a capacity to generate an unlimited sequence ofgrammatically well-formed sentences, but rather a capacity to produce expressions
which are appropriate for particular situations, that is, a capacity to produce
expressions à propos.” The pertinence of this observation is borne out in the
example we proposed above of conversation between two farmers and a vet, in
which assertions à propos imply the understood (universal) context of the reality to
which they apply without direct reference to it.
5 “Minister backs ‘secret system’ for legal posts” (The Independent, 8 October
1999).
6 Editor: C H Waddington, Towards a Theoretical Biology (Edinburgh UP, 1970).
Rupert Sheldrake, inter alia: A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Formative
Causation (Blond and Briggs, London 1985); The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Collins, London 1988).
7 Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’Instant (Editions Stock, 1992)
8 Letter on ‘hidden constraints in evolution’, David Kuhrt (London Review of
Books, 6 June 1996): “ … all formal definition of type or species … describe a
constraint outside time and space to which material evolutionary progress is
supposed to conform; therefore the rhythm and pattern of their realisation in space-
time is determined by material constraints already operating in the natural world as
a result of prior evolution at any given time … In this case, we cannot even discuss
the existence of hidden constraints if we accept Occam’s (and others’) stricturesabout the nature of reality, for this determines our ideas about existence.”
9 Robert Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress (Rowan and
Littlefield, 1993)
10 Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practise in Medieval Damascus,
1190-1350 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Concerning knowledge production
in other forms of society, primitive, theocratic, liberal-democratic etc in past and
present history and their cognitive systems, see: George Gurvitch, Les Cadres
Sociaux de la Connaissance (Presses Universitaire de France, 1966). This book
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 52/53
98 David Kuhrt
opens with the sentence: “Of all the productions of civilisation, it is knowledge
which, at first glance, appears to be the most detached from the social reality.”
11Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred, Aspects of the Christianisation of the
Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
12 Michael Chamberlain, op. cit.
13 Vladimir Soloviev, op. cit.
14 In Charles Birchenough, History of Elementary Education (University Tutorial
Press, 1925)
15 Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin Books, 1973)
16 J K Galbraith, The Rise of the Industrial State (The Reith Lectures, in The
Listener ….. 1965)
17 Georges Gurvitch, op. cit. (see reference 11)
18 See Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom
(Columbia University Press, 1960), in which he discusses how education (in thesense given by the context of our discussion of neo-Darwinian determinism), and
the moral imagination it nurtures, replaces, in human societies, the function of
genetic mechanisms during evolution.
19 Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Life, Civil Rights and the Economy (offprint from The
Hibbert Journal of July 1921, published in pamphlet form by The Threefold
Commonwealth, London 1922 ) Rudolf Steiner ascribed the origins of the FirstWorld War to the transfer, in Middle Europe prior to the collapse of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, of political power from the aristocracies to the emergent
bourgeois merchant class at the expense of any real devolution of power to the
nominally enfranchised masses. In other words, though enfranchisement took
place, no legislation was enacted to neutralise the political advantages of those with
privileged economic status. Emergent economic interests created by the rapid
ascendance of the bourgeoisie were therefore increasingly inimical to the interestsof the aristocracy so that tensions across national frontiers in Europe between the
unrealised political aspirations of the enfranchised masses and the oligarchies to
which they were subject were exacerbated by the entrepreneurial ambitions of the
new middle classes; tensions which then found expression in the assassination ofthe Emperor Franz Josef at Sarajevo which destabilised the balance of power in
Europe.
20 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Routledge, 1898).
7/18/2019 ++++ the social construction of reality 53.pdf
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/-the-social-construction-of-reality-53pdf 53/53
The Social Construction of Reality 99
21 (Cited in Chomsky, op. cit.) Réné Déscartes, Discourse on Method (The
Philosophical Works of Déscartes, translated by E S Haldane and G R T Ross, vol.
1).