Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

as urban civilisation. However, this necessarily includes the enormous human capacity and advanced knowledge required for its maintenance.

Higher knowledge quite specifically therefore relates to the human moral truths embedded in the way human society interacts with nature and in the way in which technological existence is achieved and sustained. Allen suggested that when humanity strives to meet the higher goals of existence, this can be considered as ‘superlative artefactual achievement’ (2004, 60–71). Conversely, counterproductive forms of knowledge are systems, procedures, and technologies that might illustrate some degree of rational elegance but prove futile in practice. Any number of examples exists, from the way in which cities are designed around inefficiencies and unsustainable consumption patterns to the way in which global food markets and distribution systems create wasteful abundance and agonising scarcity.

This view of knowledge and how it leads to moral reasoning is quite distinct from logo-centric propositional forms of understanding from the Greek analytic tradition, where knowledge derives predominantly from abstraction and theory. In this sense, pragmatic knowledge is the tacit understanding deriving from human interaction with material culture. In no way does this formulation undervalue propositional and abstract forms of knowledge; rather, it embraces them as essential prompts to speculation and problem solving. In this way, the human imagination is expressed in the creation of the cultural, material, and living artifice of human existence. The definition synthesises knowledge embedded in the intricate working artefact of human urban existence with the ability to theorise, imagine, plan, and navigate a course into the future. This line of thinking and scholarly inquiry has a rich provenance in Dewey's instrumental notions of knowledge and in Hegel's dialectic progress of history. Nietzsche was supporting pragmatism when he dismissed much of classical analytical philosophy as ‘fraudulent’ and ‘delusional’. His answer to his own question about the nature of truth was ‘A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’. Truth is something that ‘in itself’ is quite ‘incomprehensible’, yet, it is the very thing that man seeks most, not ‘pure knowledge that has no consequences’ (1979,