2.9 What Knowledge Really Is -- and What Happens in It

2.9 What Knowledge Really Is — and What Happens in It

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 2.9 Was Erkenntnis wirklich ist — und was dabei geschieht

How, then, does philosophical knowledge come about? It comes about when the mind directs itself toward an object and grasps its essence.

That sounds abstract, but it is an entirely everyday occurrence. When you understand a sentence — really understand it, not merely hear the words — your mind performs an act of knowledge. It directs itself toward something it did not itself produce, and grasps it. Reinach described this directedness of the mind toward something as the “immediately graspable relation of [the] experiences to some objects”.¹ All knowing is directed toward something — it has an object at which it aims.

The decisive point is this: what the mind knows is not changed by being known. The truth that a part belongs to a whole obtains whether or not anyone knows it. Whether a single human being in the world ever thinks about it changes nothing about this truth. Knowledge happens when the mind conforms to things — not when things conform to the mind.

This also means: what is known is not simply a part of the knower. The content of my knowledge — for example, that responsibility presupposes freedom — is not a piece of my consciousness. It is a state of affairs that obtains independently of me. My mind grasps it, but it does not produce it. In every genuine act of knowledge, the mind goes beyond itself and touches something that it itself is not.

Here another essential difference comes to light: knowledge as a spiritual act — what takes place in me when I know something — is something other than the content of that knowledge, the state of affairs that I know. The act of knowing is a psychic process that occurs in time and is bound to a particular person. The content of knowledge, by contrast, is not a psychic process. It is bound to no person and no time. That two plus two is four was true before anyone knew it, and it will remain true when no one thinks about it any longer.

This is why genuine knowledge differs from mere opinion. An opinion is my holding something to be true. Knowledge is the grasping of a truth that is independent of my act of grasping it.

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Fußnoten

1. Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, Munich: Philosophia, 1989, p. 383. German original: „unmittelbar zu erfassende Beziehung [der] Erlebnisse auf irgendwelche Objekte”. ↩