From Real Self to Reality: an epistemological attempt for understanding Production of Theoretical Knowledge

This paper is an epistemological attempt to bring to attention the problem of real self and its intervention in production of theoretical knowledge. This will be done through a search into how it is handled in current Iranian life-world as we approach it from an Iranian scholarly point of view. Based on these preliminary postulates, the paper first refers to the statement that reality in fact is an interpretation of real self of human beings. The paper also indicates that all realities are depended upon the meaning that takes shape in inner world of humans. In that sense, human beings are producers of meaning and searchers of meaning and reality is nothing more than a meaning. Based on this logic, reality is a contemplated or a reflexive meaning which is fabricated by relations of knowledge and power and is entrenched in the course of history. This process takes place in a way that what is fabricated presents itself to everyone as a natural real matter. In this sense, elites of knowledge and power are the founders of fabricated realities and who gradually affect masses of every society. Social masses are in themselves uncontemplated and non-reflexive real selves or bodies whose ability to contemplate has been taken away from them by the dominant knowledge and power hegemony. This hegemony imposes, instead some other patterns on them based on which they develop a tradition of how to imitate and how to follow rather than how to produce. It is for this reason that we can conclude that realities don’t have essential validity. Intellectual and cultural experiences of individuals are the only valid realities and are built by the real self. We conclude that real self therefore is a comparing tool of self with other at the individual and social scales. In the end we will refer to attempts made by Iranian academic world in order to extend our logic over to the question of what shortcomings can be seen in production of theoretical knowledge in Iranian academic atmosphere that hinders the process of production of knowledge.