Erkenntnisfaehigkeit, distilled into its parts, is recognition-ability. It is often translated cognitive ability. Yet recognition and cognition need not be coextensive.

It is not the ability to recognize patterns per se, but the ability to recognize that we recognize something. What does this mean?

When we recognize a pattern, something happens in that we see an object which adheres to some notion of order. Whither this notion of order comes to us remains hidden. It is a black box, another example of the rationality that lies in mammalian neuronic ensembles.

Much has been made about the fact that order, besides residing in neural networks, is a phenomenon of social networks. Without making a false equivalency that social networks and neural networks can be understood with the same theory — as yet, there is no theory of neural networks, though there are advances in topological anaylsis of some aspects of spatial learning which could apply to the development of social networks.

Even if we can define the recognition Still, we are faced with the problem of the social acceptability of recognition. Few would deny the social acceptability of reason, and all the silly fetishes which are attached to the rational person, or worse, the rational agent. Even if these are well-grounded, they are grounded in an expectation, they have an expectation value because, in principle, someone other than the person possessing this ability can derive material benefit from it.

The expression of the ability to recognize something is not the same as the expression of human reason. Recognition is something that comes before reason, in some sense. We cannot explain without first seeing the phenomenon. In this way, some genius is not the power to explain, but rather the ability to recognize in the mode of uncovering, possessing whatever state of the brain one must have in order to perceive something which remains hidden. It is thus not an insight, but an apocryphal activity, uncovering what is hidden. Insight is the domain of conventional wisdom, of thinking things through, it is bound to the social constraints of problem solving and of the task at hand.

The ability-to-recognize is then not recognition itself, and it is not “pure reason.” The latter can only be applied to what has been recognized, the former is the phenomenon itself. If one accepts that the ability-to-recognize must in some way encompass the entire social conditioning of perception, of what is “real,” what is possibly obtaining in the world — for what is deemed possible and impossible are, when not excluded on the basis of a theory or a logical system, determined by social constructs — then we are faced with the question of understanding this ability-to-recognize as a maximal form which is spanned by the entire social framework, not merely of the person who recognizes in an apocryphal act, but of the very potential of recognition.

In this sense, the rightful subject of this ability-to-recognize is found only in the critical examination of ideology. This is a variation of the thesis Karl Mannheim proposed, the “Funktionalisierung der noologischen Ebene,” that is, the “functionalizing of the noological level.” For the moment leaving Mannheim (Karl, not the city on the Rhine), when we self-censor words or actions, we do this out of a fear of alienation. We see something, but are not certain that any other person will see it, either. This is independent of the validity or soundness of any logic obtaining in the framework in which this apocryphal act takes place. A function is merely a map between two sets. Yet the Funktionalisierung, here again not claiming to have found this on visiting Mannheim (neither Karl nor the city on the Rhine), is merely a map between two sets. Yet this map is filtered through several constructs: the limitations of language are insignificant, but the limitations of the expectation value of new speech in a given context are highly significant. It is to minimize this expectation value, so that speech is acceptable, and that therefore I am acceptable and can enjoy the various pleasures of human contact, that the Funktiolalisierung must necessarily be a social construct, applicable between any two members of society. Therefore, it is clearly a matter of ideology, how my ability-to-recognize is mitigated through the tensor of expectation, independent of any truth-value assignment.

So the ability-to-recognize is more than the apocryphal act, it is in effect some constant which characterizes a society, a weighting of the expectation of truthful speech.

And here we find the very essence of political speech lying not in convincing the public of what is possible. That is already assumed before any communication, on the presumption that the person who wants power must ask for it, or legitimate taking it in some way to some group of people. Rather, it is the banal act of curtsying before some set of values, labelled as transcendent but really nothing more than a convenient guise for an evolutionary struggle of the fittest. The entire ability-to-recognize must be suspended, indeed, it must be annihilated, in order for these contests to be possible.

Political statements which preserve the ability-to-recognize are necessarily ideological, and as such, are necessarily dissonant, non-conforming, utterances of someone who does not want to be a “colleague,” of a person who is necessarily “needy” in some way for attention or other rewards of social conformity, be it in social circles or blog communities. Indeed, Roland Barthes has stated that ideology is the “Verwandlung von Geschichte in Natur,” “change from history into nature,” though I would say that history is nature expressed through our particular being, another manifestation of nature’s self-destructive (or metanoiic?) tendency. Much could be said about Barthe’s proposition.

Peace be upon you, reader.