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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? 155 available in limited quantities, that spares some people from want, is desirable and just (it stemmed from the divine will, was the reward of excellence or was the driving force behind social progress). The raison d’étre of the prevailing institutional order of power was to sanction this asymmetrical arrangement. Since the Age of Enlightenment, however, new views in contrast with the above, have gradually taken root in Europe. Since then, ever more people think that poverty is an eradicable anomaly, for the existence of which the individual or society can justly be condemned. ‘They usually hope that the liberation from poverty — which is usually seen as part of emancipation — will result from two procedures: one is the increased production of lacking goods; the other is the fair distribution of produced things. These two will create the economic conditions for the satisfaction of the basic needs, i.e., for the eradication of poverty; all that is needed today is to want this. However, I will argue below that neither path is tenable and I will seek to draw constructive conclusions from this. I claim 1. that a priori no authentic description of poverty is possible within the scope of the satisfaction of needs; 2. that the increase of production can actually exacerbate poverty and currently is doing just this; 3. and finally, that the expectations of fair distribution are based on the false belief that goods can be distributed in several ways within a given social system without running into an irresolvable contradiction with the logic of the system’s operation. I have to support my position in opposition to the abstract understanding of poverty in the first case, an economy-centred understanding in the second and a socialist understanding in the third. 1. I call the approach abstract which tries to conceive of man independently of his natural and social environment and abstracted from the organic unity of life processes and which tries to do so, moreover, in opposition to these. In this arrangement, the starting point is the individual, the subject suffering from hunger or others’ contempt, on the one hand; on the other, the thing capable of alleviating his suffering: food, recognition, etc. “Need” thus understood and its object are, however, far from qualities of objects existing independently of each other: food and appetite both depend on the historically changing ways of nourishment. This connection is even more obvious in the case of social needs taken in the strictest sense of the word. What treatment
