Is knowledge always violent?

Is every attempt to understand someone else simply a projection of ourselves onto the other, and in thus way a violence against them? Only if you sre limited to a Cartesian ego and Kantian epistemology, says D B Hart. Instead, we should think of the moment of knowing as always preceded by creation. Every knower shares in the created 'givenness' of the world they know. Yet christian theology affirms the beauty of the particular to give glory to god, and so we know by analogy and difference.



'There is, then, no 'ethical' need to leave the other suspended between the superintentional darkness of blind obligation and the imprisoning representstions of an imperious ego, unable to show him or herself... All true otherness appears only under the form of and analogical difference,this does not mean a difference simply dissoluable within the abstraction of a resemblance, but rather one sustained in proffering itself..according to a shared dwelling in the light that gives being, a common grammar of love and delight, of beauty. This allows the other to be and to be other, to shine, to vary me in my recognition of his or her otherness'
DB Hart 'The Beauty of the Infinite' 143

Hart roots this in participation in God. It is right to rhetorically know because the other is a peice of God's rhetoric, e declaration of his glory, and so are you.