Keywords

[T]he idea of asking philosophical positions, of attempted answers to the great philosophical questions, what difference they have made and can make in practice, what difference they make to our lives, is a necessary first step towards bringing philosophy back in contact with human concerns, a first step to doing what Dewey asked us to do when he wrote that “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.” (Putnam 2014)

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense. (Thoreau 1991, p. 112)

Introduction: What Is Useful Knowledge in the Global Economy?

What is useful knowledge for human beings? What is the task of philosophy in service of life? In times of a global economy, these familiar questions have gained a new resurgence. Problem-solving is taken to be the task of education in the terms of a global economy. The call to bring philosophy back to life and to return knowledge to practical use is emphasized all the more, yet with a distinctive sense. In the so-called knowledge economy, higher education in Europe, Gert Biesta has claimed, is under “an economic spell” (Biesta 2010, p. 45). Current discourse in Japanese educational policy further illustrates this. A recent policy statement from the Council for the Implementation of Education Rebuilding is entitled ‘Education for Realizing the Learning Society, Full Participation and the Revitalization of Local Communities’ (2015). The vision and language of education here is redolent with good intentions for the creation of a society that can respond to the diverse needs of people who want to continue their education. For lifelong learning and citizenship education, the significance of the Shutai-teki (active and autonomous) power of finding and solving problems is emphasized. Japan is encouraged to be a “country well developed for the solving of problems” (p. 3). But while the language of education is oriented towards practical use and problem-solving, these ideas themselves – use, practicality, activity, and life – are subordinated to economic need: so is democracy. What it means to acquire knowledge, what education’s role is in cultivating democratic citizenship, is skewed and narrowed in the discourse of global economy. Though this apparently humane language of education echoes Deweyan ideas of ever-continuing growth and self-realization, what is in fact envisioned is an ideal of the human being in terms of human resources for economic growth.

In the current circulation of the global economy as a part of our daily lives, we cannot ignore the use of knowledge in what we teach and what we learn. Neither simple evasion nor superficial criticism of the global economy will suffice in the face of what constitutes the reality of our lives today: we cannot avoid the currency of the language of the global economy and useful knowledge. A deeper threat lies in the fact that the currency of the language of use, which has come to dictate, so it seems, the terms of any philosophy for life, makes it difficult to think beyond its surface value, as if language itself blocked the liberating power of thought, circumscribing its own possibilities of circulation. For a higher sense of practice, the humanities must work to a different economy: they must question what it means to bring our thinking back to life; they must keep thinking about the meaning of practicality, usefulness, and the point of knowledge and enquiry.

Hence there is a need to present an alternative sense of useful knowledge. What should be resisted is the assimilation of the idea of use into the dominant discourse of profit, efficiency, and transparency. At the same time, the isolation of the humanities, especially philosophy, from the global trend of the economy of thought should also be resisted: a pedantic, abstract, and decontextualized philosophy colludes with the global economy by retaining the dichotomy between the useful and the useless, mind and body, and theory and practice. Now is the time to reconsider an alternative use of philosophy and education, to rethink the meaning of thinking in life, and the role of higher education in terms of the humanities, towards education for a higher sense of practice.

In response to this challenge, this chapter explores the contemporary significance of Dewey’s pragmatism – a philosophy in service of practice and action and answering to the problems of common people: it reevaluates the use of Dewey’s American philosophy today, especially as lip-service to this is sometimes paid in the rhetoric of this new, alleged practicality. Dewey’s pragmatism can offer us an insight into the current issue – if, in the spirit of “reconstruction in philosophy” (1920), it is critically reconstructed such that it is not assimilated simply into ‘pragmatic’ use and hijacked by a superficial idea of problem-solving and instrumentality.

In the following, I shall first introduce some philosophical features of Dewey’s pragmatism as a philosophy for life, showing how they are relevant to the issue of useful knowledge today. Second, for the sake of making Dewey’s pragmatism more thoroughly and robustly resist the tide of global the economy, I shall explore a dimension of thinking beyond problem-solving. These matters are pursued in terms of interrelated notions the obscure and twilight. Dewey’s later writings on aesthetics shed light on an alternative sense of useful knowledge. What Thoreau calls Beautiful Knowledge here helps show that it is a way to make best use of the wisdom of Dewey’s pragmatism, and more in general, of American philosophy in resistance to the tide of the global economy.

The Use of Dewey’s Pragmatism Today: Problem-Solving and Criticism

Inheriting Emerson’s call for a “philosophy of life” (Emerson 2000, p. 58), Dewey developed the idea of democracy as a personal way of living (creating democracy from within), of philosophy for the common man, and most importantly, of philosophy as education. In particular among classical pragmatists it is Dewey who demonstrates most concretely the contemporary significance of the praxis of pragmatism for the reconsideration of useful knowledge and education. Thinking in life as a whole means going beyond the dichotomies of mind and body, means and ends, and fact and value. Dewey’s pragmatism is known to be a kind of “instrumentalism” (Bernstein 2014, p. 11): thinking and knowledge are instruments to solve problems in our daily lives. Praxis and action are internal to the nature of American philosophy. The idea of useful knowledge is inseparable from this problem-solving as a mode of thinking. Against the opposition of “experience and true knowledge” (Dewey 1980, p. 271), Dewey reclaims “knowledge of how to do” (p. 192, my italics). With regard to informational knowledge, he says: “To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving added significance to the search for solution and to the solution itself” (p. 196). Such knowledge is a medium through which mind goes through a “passage from doubt to discovery” (p. 196): it is “experimental” (p. 197). Precisely because it is a philosophy for use, Dewey’s pragmatism has the potential to resist dichotomous thinking and its consequent narrowing of the sense of useful knowledge.

Dewey’s idea of thinking, however, cannot be simply contained in this stereotypical mode of problem-solving. This is best shown in his recount of critical thinking. Dewey says that a key to creative activity is criticism (Dewey 1984, p. 143). His idea of the “criticism of criticisms” (Dewey 1981, p. 298) is, on Hilary Putnam’s account, a matter of “higher-level criticism,” involving “‘standing back’ and criticizing even the ways in which we are accustomed to criticize ideas, the criticism of our ways of criticism” (Putnam 2004, p. 96). Criticism of criticisms is distinguished from analytical thinking for clarity. Rather it involves the robust power of thinking thoroughly in the uncertainty of life. It is also a key to creative democracy (Dewey 1984, p. 143).

Dewey’s criticism of criticisms opens a horizon of thinking beyond problem-solving – requiring us to delve more subtly into ordinary life. It offers a key towards a higher sense of practice and useful knowledge. Critical thinking in this sense involves an awakening to what has not been thought before, an adventure into the unknown by taking a chance. Critical thinking entails, as a precondition of problem-solving, the existential question of how human beings can convert crisis into a chance to be taken, and how we can transform the way we live our lives. It is risk-taking by nature, involving an awakening to what has not been thought before, an adventure into the realm of the unknown. In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey calls this comprehensive notion of thinking ‘creative intelligence’ – a kind of thinking that integrates reason with emotion and imagination (Dewey 1987, p. 351).

Furthermore, thinking beyond problem-solving requires a peculiar mode of thinking – thinking in “middle term” (Dewey 1983, p. 96): American philosophy entails the possibility of opening a third way of thinking – a form of antifoundationalism beyond the dichotomy between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism. In order to adventure into ‘genuine uncertainty’, Dewey takes chance to be the crucial element. Taking a chance, the moment of the leap, is at the heart of his experimentalism and philosophy for action. To think without fixed ground does not mean that anything goes. This is an idea of perfection without final perfectibility, without abrogating the quest for a better life. Thinking on the way, however, is difficult. Thinking on tiptoe is a key to sustaining a form of antifoundationalism that neither fully abrogates grounding nor fully relies on secure grounding. As Dewey expresses this poignantly, “Perfection means perfecting, fulfillment, fulfilling, and the good is now or never” (Dewey 1983, p. 200, my italics). This is what might be called perfectionist antifoundationalism – a kind of antifoundationalism that does not fall into relativism or anarchy and that retains a quest for a better life. Criteria for the betterment of life are constantly to be revised in an ongoing process of communication.

Still, American philosophy needs to show policy-makers the merit of choosing this risk-taking and unstable mode of living. The foundationalist drive is a part of the human condition. It can always lure us to the apparently secure and yet surface value of language in educational policy. This is a state in which each of us stops thinking for ourselves, relying instead on, and being assimilated into, the circulation of the existing economy of exchange. What would be the best possible use of the antifoundationalism of American philosophy for education? How can we shift the mode of our thinking?

The Obscure and the Twilight: Thinking Beyond Problem-Solving

The discourse of problem-solving, however, is on the verge of falling into the hands of the global economy, one that one hundred years ago Dewey would strongly have opposed. Precisely because it is a philosophy that would not avoid use, Dewey’s pragmatism must resist being assimilated into this dominant use. His discourse and pragmatism in themselves must be reconstructed, beyond the terms of problem-solving. Dewey acknowledges the limits of scientific intelligence in his reference to the obscure and the hidden (Dewey 1983, p. 200), the qualitative background of thinking (Dewey 1987, p. 197). These matters are pursued here then in relation to antifoundationalism as realized especially in the idea of betweenness, poignantly captured in notions of the obscure and twilight.

To think in an antifoundationalist way, by standing on tiptoe, one must venture into the precarious borderland between the known and the unknown, on the threshold of “a residuum unknown, unanalyzable” (Emerson 2000, p. 214). It is the notion of obscurity that is crucial to the sustaining of a thoroughly antifoundationalist mode of thinking and, hence, to the reconceiving of the idea of useful knowledge.

Behind problem-solving thinking, Dewey equally finds it important to note that for any object of primary experience there are always potentialities that are not explicit; any object that is overt is charged with possible consequences that are hidden (Dewey 1981, pp. 27–28, in Richardson 2014, p. 104). He expresses the sense of the obscure as the background of human intelligence – “the sense of our slight inability even in our best intelligence and efforts” (Dewey 1983, p. 200). In Art as Experience, he recognizes the significance of “obscurity” in Shakespeare and Coleridge, and “half-knowledge” in Keats (Dewey 1987, p. 39). The reality of the obscure requires us to exercise, in Keats’ phrase, “Negative Capability” – a kind of poetic insight after reason (ibid.). He expresses the sense of “a whole that stretches out indefinitely” as a background of the perception of objects (p. 197). Thinking in the strong present tense (in affirmation) is made possible in the midst of the obscure, the negative. Far from obscurantism, the realism of the obscure is an alternative way to see the reality of the world as always being translated. It expresses a proper respect for the darkness, and hence avoids the violence of language implicit in the clutching and grasping of comprehension. In order to say something, in order to see things, we need the background of the unsayable, the ungraspable. Our perception is fated to be partial. Dewey’s pragmatism as a philosophy for life, thinking beyond dualisms, is preconditioned by this sense of the obscure. To thoroughly resist the tide of a global economy geared towards transparency and accountability, and to live the life of perfectionist antifoundationalism, requires thinking in the obscure and living with what is beyond our grasp.

American philosophy retrieves the idea of light from the dichotomy between the clarity of enlightenment and darkness as a lack of knowledge. It realizes something different both from Plato’s light, which enlightens people in the cave and draws them upwards towards the sun, and from the light of clarity in analytical philosophy. Wittgenstein says, “nothing is hidden” (Wittgenstein 2009, #435). But this does not mean that we can see everything. Rather he indicates that the reality of the world and the truth of the matter cannot be fully elucidated in the light. If obscurity suggests non-presence (at least, what be made simply evident), light is non-mediated directness, casting light on something that is thereby revealed, while something else is thereby hidden. Similarly, to say something involves what is not said, what is hidden. To foreground something suggests another background. This rediscovery of the words is closely related to the idea of aletheia – the idea of revealing and of acknowledging the hidden as a background (Standish 2012, pp. 79, 176). The world under the explicit light of problem-solving thought sheds light only on a part of our lives. When Dewey speaks of the “actual focusing of the world at one point in a focus of immediate shining apparency,” he is hinting at the vague and obscure background that must accompany the explicit (Dewey, Essay in Experimental Logic, p. 7). In his recognition of the limits of intelligence, he indicates the nature of partial light:

At most intelligence but throws a spotlight on that little part of the whole which marks out the axis of movement. Even if the light is flickering and the illuminated portion stands forth only dimly from the shadowy background, it suffices if we are shown the way to move. (Dewey 1983, p. 180)

Here he indicates that the revealing of the world is closely related to the gradual finding of the way – being provisional, non-permanent, like the work of the foresters.

The light that is flickering on an obscure border represents the transit from darkness to light, and a movement of evanescence. It is also a mixed state in which light and darkness exist side by side. If we think clearly about clarity, we realize that it must involve a proper (or appropriate) distribution of light and shade. We depend upon shade, the dark and the half-light. As Dewey says, “At twilight, dusk is a delightful quality of the whole world” (Dewey 1987, p. 198). In English, ‘twilight’ usually connotes the half-light of the evening. Etymologically speaking ‘twi-’ means between. ‘Twi-light’ refers to an indistinct border, between light and dark. It is, in a sense, the state in which light and darkness coexist. The state in which the light permeates the evening darkness evokes ending but is also an expectation of morning, of a new dawn. Twilight as flickering light against the background of darkness symbolizes the partiality of human intelligence.

If the experience of the obscure, standing on tiptoe, is a key to sustaining antifoundationalism, with the sense of perfecting now or never, what kind of experience of knowing would come to us? What kind of knowledge would we acquire?

Beautiful Knowledge: The Beautiful as the Functional

For the sake of making the best use of Dewey’s useful knowledge, the positive alternative vision of knowledge that should be presented is to be found in the contemporary wisdom of pragmatism. Its key lies in his aesthetic work. Dewey’s later writings on aesthetics shed light on what can be meant by ‘useful knowledge’: knowledge that cannot be simply assimilated into the practical or reduced to accountable and empirical evidence, and that is inseparable from the beautiful.

Such knowledge communicates illustratively and vividly, albeit in indirect ways, the nature of critical thinking beyond problem-solving. In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey presents the idea of art and aesthetic experience as being in continuity with “normal processes of living” (Dewey 1987, p. 16). Aesthetic experience is not a property of professional artists but at the heart of human experience. He also indicates that aesthetic experience has two phases: instrumental and the consummatory.

There are some distinctive characteristics in Art as Experience that guide the reader towards an alternative sense of useful knowledge. First, Dewey characterizes aesthetic experience as involving “happiness and delight”, related to a “fulfillment that reaches to the depth of our being” (p. 23) (which is the consummatory phase). Art has to do with the “intensity” and immediacy of the moment, of “what now is” (p. 24), and the experience of “direct seizure” (p. 150). Here Dewey highlights the role of a receptive dimension of experience typified in “esthetic surrender” (pp. 35, 51, 108). We find ourselves by “forgetting ourselves” (P. 110).

Second, we can find in Dewey’s aesthetic theory his idea of growth – growth without fixed ends. Aesthetic experience is “the ever-recurring cycles of growth” (p. 152). Creation without a preset goal does not mean the abrogation of an end: it is a reconfiguration of the idea of an end, as continuously reoriented and revised as we go. This evokes a process of “continuing perfecting” (p. 177). Dewey expresses the sense of being on the “growing edge of things” (p. 149), where the artist is a forerunner who carries forward a new vision. From time to time, Dewey describes the moment of what might be called being on a threshold in the “twilight” (p. 198), where “ordinary boundaries are transformed into invitations to proceed” (p. 213). When an aesthetic experience comes to a closure, this is not its final end but is an “inclusive and fulfilling close,” with the anticipation of a new horizon ahead (p. 62).

Third, in Dewey’s aesthetic theory, although an emphasis is put on “personal perception” (p. 157), aesthetic experience is understood not as limited to the individual experience of the artist but as extending into “a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity” (p. 87). And again, this is not a closed whole but “an expanded whole” (p. 171). As is typical of pragmatism, Dewey’s whole is a unity with diversity (p. 184). In this whole, the term “egotism” has no place, and we are to be understood as “citizens of this vast world beyond ourselves” (p. 199).

This takes us to the fourth point: aesthetic perception as the precondition of social and cultural criticism. Discussing the significance of criticism from within tradition and convention, Dewey highlights the role of aesthetic judgment as social and cultural criticism. “Better criteria are to be set forth by an improved examination of the nature of works of art in general as a mode of human experience” (p. 313). Unlike his typical emphasis on social and scientific intelligence, Dewey reminds us in aesthetics of the significance of “a bias, a predilection” as the origin of social and cultural criticism, and encourages us not to surrender “the instinctive preference” (p. 327). And then he touches upon the necessity of the cultivation of aesthetic perception as follows:

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. (p. 328)

Through the power of “imaginative projection” and as “the moral prophets of humanity”, poets become “the founders of civil society” (p. 350). The aesthetic is hence inseparable from, and indeed is a precondition to, the political. Dewey’s aesthetic work and other later writings help us see again the dynamism between tradition and innovation, beyond freedom and control, and they point to the education of aesthetic perception as a key to cultural criticism.

Going beyond the dichotomy of the beautiful and the sublime, and between the aesthetic and the functional (the instrumental), Dewey’s pragmatism can turn us towards the experience of transcendence in the ordinary, the moment of rebirth, by finding high intelligence in the low and the common.

Dewey’s insight into an alternative sense of useful knowledge – an idea that the beautiful can be useful, the useful is what makes life beautiful – can be further developed in reference to Thoreau’s idea of Beautiful Knowledge. Integrating more robustly body, mind and language than Dewey, Thoreau redeems the economy of living in what he calls “higher knowledge” – “the highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence” (Thoreau 1991, p. 113). “Higher knowledge” is anything but the object of a direct perception under clear sunlight. Without negating the concept of use, knowledge is more than anything aesthetic. Thoreau calls this Beautiful Knowledge (p. 112). It is important to attend here to the note of satire evident in the quotation from Thoreau at the start of this chapter. This pokes fun at the pomposity and earnestness of the advocates for the “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” the capitalization of which Thoreau ironically appropriates. This helps to show why the point that he is pressing and the phrase that he chooses to adopt do not amount to any simple gesture of romanticism. Knowledge said to be beautiful is tough, robust, and grounded on earth – being surrounded by daily objects, instruments, animals, plants, air, light, sound, etc.

Bob Davis has recently drawn attention to “the legacy of the Transcendentalist writers now so popular in the USA across many areas of philosophical enquiry” (Davis 2015), and in particular he has identified Dewey as an important influence on the idea of outdoor education. In Davis’ delineation of outdoor education, Thoreau’s Walking also can definitely be included as a book that encourages us to go outdoors. There is a danger here, however, of the self’s losing itself within a version of the outdoor education caught up in the tide of the global economy. Against such a reading of Dewey and Thoreau, there is much in the account of Beautiful Knowledge that should lead us reconsider the meaning of the outdoors there (by it, through it). Beautiful Knowledge relates to a realm in which the functional and the aesthetic are united. Intellectual work should be integrated with what is commonly thought of as practical (or vocational) education.

Beautiful Knowledge points us neither to experiential education nor to a quasi-mystical realignment with nature – that is, it is not some kind of return to the woods. The beautiful, Thoreau says, is inseparable from the wild – the apparently unbeautiful – as expressed in the metaphor of the “most dismal swamp” in the darkest wood (p. 100). As “wild and dusky knowledge” (p. 112), Beautiful Knowledge can be experienced in the reading of classic texts (pp. 102–103). Beyond the dichotomy of the natural (the wild) and the human (the civilized), and far from anti-intellectualism, Thoreau proposes that we regain the untamed, self-reliant power of thinking and reading as a distinctive capacity of the human.

Associated with ignorance as “negative knowledge” (p. 112), Beautiful Knowledge involves the recognition that “the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us,” “a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before” (p. 113). Such experience of imperfection is a drive towards further perfection in continuing education. Education for Beautiful Knowledge drives teachers and students into the obscure. Knowing is to know what one does not know, and to know how one should know: it never allows us to loosen the power of our thinking.

Beautiful Knowledge is transformational rather than informative. In other words, it is the experience of knowing, undergoing the moment of self-transformation. More as a matter of reception rather than acquisition, it involves the experience of human transformation undergoing the phases of crisis. Such experience is consummated in the moment of what Emerson calls the “flying Perfect” (Emerson 2000, p. 252), a symbol of something that can never be fully grasped, never fully elucidated. It is this secular sense of transcendence that is missing from our obsession with useful knowledge today.

In Art as Experience Dewey quotes the famous aphorism of John Keats:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all y need to know.

– Keats quoted by Dewey (1987, p. 40)

The twilight of American philosophy prompts a reconsideration of the meaning of thinking (especially of critical thinking), of knowledge, and of the human subject. It reminds us that the language of policy documents (i.e., of self-realization, of diverse needs) cannot help but connote further implications that would touch upon the ungraspable dimension of human transformation. Still we can hear the voices of those whose eyes are only directed to the transparency of the knowledge economy. How can we persuade them of the use of “half-knowledge” – knowledge only known in half-light? Wouldn’t the twilight simply be metaphorical, without any substance and impact on educational practice?

Outward Excursions

In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey proposes the “place of active occupations in education” (Dewey 1980, p. 202). He says that play and active work in the curriculum are “intellectual and social, not matters if temporary expediency and momentary agreeableness” (ibid.). Here “knowledge-getting” is the result of actions and active occupations (p. 203, 207). “Outdoor excursions” are useful as well as social in their aims (p. 204). Dewey illustrates this by using the experiences of gardening, hunting and play (pp. 208, 210, 211). In his strong emphasis on the outside and the active, however, Dewey, on the one hand, leaves room for its being hijacked by the global economy. On the other hand, without fully persevering on the border between the inside and the outside, he lends support to the romantic opponents to the global economy who would seek spiritual salvation by going outdoors, to the woods. Outdoor excursions are not merely active but by nature receptive: they constitute a kind of withdrawal but, through this, a more fully fledged turning outward. Turning inward into the territory of the vague, the uncertain dimensions of human life, Beautiful Knowledge envisions a more difficult path of education, more fully outward than outdoor education. Such education for Beautiful Knowledge should not be limited to extraordinary experience in the woods. Rather it relates to diverse contexts of intense experience, crossing their borders – ranging from daily occupations outside to the learning of a classic text inside. This is a vision of liberal education in resistance to freedom in the global economy – the kind of education Dewey envisioned in Democracy and Education one hundred years ago.

Dewey’s emphasis on outdoor education has importance today, but it can also seem somewhat dated. How can it be received in a way appropriate for today – especially against the state of education foregrounded in the introduction of this paper? First and foremost, the insight of Dewey’s pragmatism, his “criticism of criticisms,” can elucidate the problems in what is there in the present curriculum – consider especially assessment and practices of a reductive kind – that eulogizes the significance of immediate experience and yet that in fact blocks what experience can afford us. Second, it reminds teachers, practitioners, and policy makers that the liberal/vocational dichotomization is a distraction and that it is not sound. Following Dewey’s insight, vocational education, as might be seen in the experience of civil engineers, can be deeply stimulating and it can help develop the whole person. This is the implications of beautiful knowledge, in the combination of the functional and the aesthetic, knowledge in service to human transformation. Third, in view of Beautiful Knowledge, it is a mistake to be nostalgic about old methods of teaching – learning and teaching in the immediate encounter between teachers and students in a small classroom. New technology and distant learning can also provide occasions for rich learning experience of Beautiful Knowledge. Fourth, if Democracy and Education is read along the lines of his later work, Art as Experience, it is all the more clear that the cultivation of aesthetic judgment is crucial for the education of democratic citizens. Quoting Shelly, Dewey says that poets are “the founders of civil society” (Dewey 1987, p. 350). This is especially so in the light of the inadequacy of (or misplacement of) critical thinking in education. Dewey would say that aesthetic judgment is the condition of creative democracy, what is at the heart of the criticism of criticisms. For example, the incorporation of film education can be a promising way of cultivating aesthetic judgment and political emotions, and this, in an interdisciplinary way. These implications can constitute an alternative economy of beautiful knowledge today.