Dying to Know is a
fascinating and brilliant work that requires several readings to "catch
on" to what Levine, an English professor and literary critic at Rutgers
University, is up to. The demands made on the reader to read, reflect and
re-read is part of the book’s charm: it has staying power and startling points
of view that "angle in" in on its subject rather than staging a full
frontal attack that invite conversation and comparison with one’s intellectual
and existential heritage.

In this book, Levine traces the historical,
autobiographical and literary textual evidence of the development of the
nineteenth century concept of objectivity: a compendious, complete knowing
containing no presence or taint of the self or personal being. The notion of
objectivity is that held by the average college student —
"objectivity" names what exists independent of the mind. At a deeper
level, Levine traces what philosopher Bernard Lonergan calls "the
truncated subject" that emerged in post-eighteenth century anthropology
that started with Descartes. Given its range, this book may be classified as a
history of ideas, literary criticism, history of philosophy and science, or an
essay in scientific epistemology. It will certainly interest all readers with
any interests in these areas.

Levine starts in a unique and
curious manner by asking what the idiomatic expression, "dying to
know," means. On Levine’s account, the expression reveals a connection
between formal epistemology and everyday ways of living that has a history and
cultural context that can be traced and affirmed as "going forward"
in as history as "modern objectivity." Modern objectivity, he argues,
emphasizes impersonality and disinterestedness that characterizes many popular
versions of science and which remains, even today, a popular cultural ideal and
the one against which post-modern epistemologies rage. Levine shows, based on
solid evidence, that for nineteenth scientists, novelists, poets, artists, and
philosophers access to the truth of selfless knowledge depended on conditions
of such profound self-denial that pursuit of it might be taken as similar
indistinguishable from the pursuit of death. The Victorians, particularly, he
argues, were "dying to know" in the sense that they could imagine
achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its
claims on he knower. To know, to achieve enlightenment, one must die, if not
literally, then figuratively — though the history of nineteenth century
science is populated with explorers, anthologists, physicists, biologist and
doctors whose pursuit led directly to their deaths.

The book is organized as a close
study of three male autobiographies, three female autobiographies and three
novels. The autobiographies are used to tease open the notion of an
"epistemology of dying to know." The three novels are case studies of
how the perspective of "the epistemology of dying to know . . . penetrated
the culture and helped shape it." (150) All three novels, on Levine’s
account, challenge in quite ordinary lives the cultural ideal of objectivity
and so the limits of self-denial and death of the self in its desire to know.
To that degree Levine’s is critical of the ideal of detached objectivity and
yet the arguments float on an admiration for, if not a belief in, the necessity
of the ideal. Thus, the book is a defense of the pursuit of objectivity and the
moral significance of self-sacrifice in the pursuit of shareable knowledge.  It
is, Levine concludes, a form of altruism — a giving of one’s self to the
pursuit of impersonal knowledge whose very impersonalism makes it
"shareable" — or in terms of modern science "repeatable."
Levine’s carves out a remarkable position given the angst engendered by
post-modern solipsism.

Levine’s portrays the
"dying-to-know project" as a quest narrative — the grail being
truth, objectivity and knowledge. Thus, full project is an ethical one in which
"the dying-to-know narrative replicates the narratives of religion and
ethics" (276). As Levine affirms, the ethical lies always buried and
latent in epistemology, making it do more than explain, enjoining, insisting on
the value of knowing and the value of dying to know (283).

Levine’s work is a refreshing
approach to epistemology that locates modern epistemologies in a historical and
cultural frame that comes as part and parcel of epistemological meaning in even
the most "objective" efforts to address the question of the nature
and scope of knowing. Levine’s work is access to the non-specialist and yet
will satisfy those with specialist knowledge in numerous areas.

© 2005 James Sauer

James Sauer, Ph.D. is Associate Professor
of Philosophy, St. Mary’s
University, San Antonia,Texas. He is author of
Faithful Ethics According to John Calvin: The Teachability of the Heart (Edwin
Mellen Press, 1997). He is co-editor of the journal Philosophy in the
Contemporary World, and specializes in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy
of social science. His articles have appeared in the Personalist Forum,
Southwest Philosophy Review, Southwest Philosophical Studies, and the
Journal of Social Economics among others.

Categories: Philosophical