Pure knowledge

The drive for purity in knowledge is an ancient one. Robert Proctor ( Value-Free Science? ) sees this impulse in Plato and Aristotle. For the former, knowledge is pure “in the degree to which it makes no appeal to practical arts. Thus Plato criticized Eudoxus, Archytas, and Menaechmus for trying solve the classical problems of geometry – squaring the circle, the trisection of the arc, and the doubling of the cube – using the mechanical instruments available to any Greek artisan.”

Further, pure knowledge is impossible “in the company of the body” but instead “consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body” and abstinence from “all bodily desires.” Proctor suggests that for Plato, “Wisdom itself is a kind of purification men achieve by casting off lowly emotions of the body. Men first philosophized, says Plato, not for any utilitarian end, or to seek the pleasures of the world, but to escape from ignorance, to revel in knowledge for its own sake.”

Aristotle is equally interested in seeking “eternal, unchanging truth. For that which changes cannot be known with certainty, and certainty is the object of scientific knowledge ( episteme ). Wisdom is the knowledge of certain principles and causes: we admire the man of wisdom more than the man of experience, for the man of wisdom will know the why , yet the man of experience will merely know the what .” Interestingly, Aristotle traces this drive for genuine, non-practical knowledge to Egypt, where “the priestly class was first allowed to live in leisure.”