We have been moving toward a relational conception of reality.
Things are not necessarily independent substances.
Being may be inseparable from becoming.
Difference can generate transformation.
Relations can alter the possibilities available to the things that participate in them.
But there is one relation that seems at first to stand apart from all this:
the relation between the knower and the known.
The traditional picture is straightforward.
There is a world.
There is an observer.
The observer looks at the world and forms a representation of it.
The ideal observer would, as far as possible, remove themselves from the process. The world would remain what it is, independently of whoever happens to be looking.
There is an obvious truth in this picture. The world does not simply become whatever we believe it to be.
But the picture conceals another fact.
The observer is also part of the world.
The knower has a body, a history, a language, purposes, capacities and limitations. They encounter the world through particular forms of perception and action.
The question is therefore no longer simply:
What is the world?
It becomes:
What kind of relation makes knowing the world possible?
That question marks another step toward relational philosophy.
Kant's intervention
Immanuel Kant provides one of the great turning points.
Before Kant, the dispute between rationalists and empiricists had largely revolved around the sources of knowledge.
Do we know through reason?
Through experience?
Through ideas?
Through sensation?
Kant changes the question.
Instead of asking only where knowledge comes from, he asks:
What must be the case for experience and knowledge to be possible at all?
Space and time are not simply things encountered in experience as though they were objects among objects. They are forms through which experience is organised.
Likewise, experience is not simply a collection of sensory impressions. It is structured through concepts and categories that allow us to recognise objects, events and relations.
This produces a profound shift.
The knower is no longer an invisible spectator receiving a finished world.
The conditions of knowing have become part of the philosophical problem.
The world does not become subjective
It is important not to misunderstand the move.
Kant does not simply say that we invent reality.
There is something that affects us.
Experience is not arbitrary.
The world constrains what can appear to us, even though what appears is necessarily encountered through the forms and capacities of our cognition.
The important distinction is between saying:
reality is whatever the observer constructs,
and saying:
whatever we know is known through a relation between what is encountered and the conditions under which it can be encountered.
The second claim is much closer to what concerns us.
Knowledge is relational without being merely subjective.
The world answers back.
The observer has conditions too
But Kant leaves us with another possibility that later thinkers will develop.
If knowledge has conditions, what about the knower?
The knowing subject can no longer simply be treated as a transparent point outside the process.
The subject itself has a structure.
Yet that structure raises further questions.
Where did this kind of subject come from?
How did the human capacity to experience the world acquire its particular form?
What role do embodiment, history, language and social life play in knowing?
Kant's transcendental subject is not yet the historically situated, embodied participant toward which later philosophy will move.
But the door has opened.
The conditions of knowledge have entered philosophy.
And once they have entered, the observer cannot quite leave again.
From conditions to experience
Phenomenology takes another step.
Edmund Husserl asks us to return to experience itself.
Instead of beginning with an abstract theory of what exists and then asking how a subject represents it, phenomenology examines how things are actually given in experience.
A chair is not first a collection of physical properties to which we subsequently attach a meaning.
It appears as something we can sit on, move around, approach from different directions and use.
An object is encountered from a perspective.
Its other sides are not simply absent. They are implied by the way the object presents itself.
Experience therefore has a structure.
The world is not merely a collection of data presented to a spectator.
It is a field of things appearing within relations of attention, expectation, action and possibility.
The observer has entered the world.
The body enters too
Maurice Merleau-Ponty pushes this further.
We do not ordinarily experience the world as detached minds looking out through windows.
We experience it bodily.
We reach for things.
We walk around them.
We distinguish surfaces by touch.
We perceive distance in relation to possible movement.
The body is not simply another object located in the world.
It is the means through which a world becomes available to us.
This has an important consequence for relational ontology.
The relation between observer and world is not primarily a relation between two objects.
The knower is already organised for participation.
A hand can grasp because of the relation between bodily structure and the possibilities offered by the environment.
A path appears as walkable because of a relation between terrain and bodily capacity.
A doorway appears as an opening because of what an embodied creature can do with it.
The world is therefore encountered partly through affordances.
Possibility is not something added after perception.
It is built into the way a world becomes perceptually available.
Heidegger removes the spectator
Martin Heidegger makes an even more radical move.
The human being is not fundamentally a detached subject who occasionally encounters an external world.
We are already being-in-the-world.
Before we theorise about a hammer, we use it.
Before we formulate a philosophical account of a room, we move through it.
Before we distinguish subject and object, we are already involved in practices, purposes, relationships and circumstances.
This reverses the order in which the traditional picture imagines things.
The detached observer is not the starting point.
Detachment is something that can happen within an already existing involvement.
We can step back and examine a hammer as an object.
But we normally encounter it first as something with which we can do something.
Theoretical observation is therefore a special mode of participation, not the primordial relation from which participation must somehow be reconstructed.
This is enormously important.
If knowing is already a form of being-in-the-world, then epistemology cannot be completely separated from ontology.
How we know depends partly upon how we are situated.
The world as a field of significance
Heidegger also changes what “world” means.
A world is not merely the total inventory of objects that happen to exist.
It is a meaningful field of relations.
A hammer belongs to a workshop, which belongs to a practice, which belongs to a form of life. Its significance depends upon these relations.
Remove the relations and the object remains physically present, but its role changes.
A hammer in a museum is not the same kind of thing, in practical terms, as a hammer in a workshop.
The material object may be almost identical.
The relational possibilities are not.
This does not mean that significance is simply projected onto objects by human minds.
It means that what a thing can be for us depends upon the world of practices in which it is encountered.
Meaning emerges within relations.
Pragmatism changes the question again
American pragmatism approaches the same problem from another direction.
For William James, John Dewey and their successors, knowledge is not primarily the possession of a representation that mirrors reality.
Inquiry is something organisms do when they encounter problematic situations.
We act.
Something resists.
We revise our understanding.
We act again.
Knowledge develops within this process.
The knower is therefore not outside the world.
The knower is an organism attempting to cope with a world that can frustrate its expectations.
This introduces a particularly important asymmetry.
The world is not simply whatever our conceptual scheme permits.
Reality can surprise us.
It can resist.
Our concepts can fail.
Inquiry is therefore relational in a strong sense: it is a process through which an organism and its environment alter one another's possibilities.
The experimenter enters the experiment
Science makes this especially visible.
The traditional image of scientific objectivity can suggest that the ideal scientist eliminates their own participation.
But actual scientific inquiry involves instruments, experimental arrangements, measurements, choices of variables, techniques of observation and repeated interventions.
The scientist does not simply look at nature.
The scientist asks nature questions.
And the form of the question matters.
A telescope makes certain astronomical phenomena available that unaided vision cannot disclose. A microscope makes other structures visible. A particle detector opens another field of phenomena.
The instrument is not merely a neutral extension of the eye.
It changes the relation through which the phenomenon becomes accessible.
Yet this does not make the resulting knowledge arbitrary.
Quite the opposite.
The instrument, experimental design and theoretical framework are themselves constrained by what happens when they encounter the world.
The world can refuse the question.
An experiment can fail.
A prediction can be falsified.
An instrument can reveal something no one expected.
Participation does not destroy objectivity.
It changes what objectivity means.
From representation to encounter
This gives us a useful distinction.
A representation asks:
How accurately does this picture correspond to the world?
An encounter asks:
What happens when this way of approaching the world meets what it is trying to understand?
The second question does not make correspondence irrelevant.
It places correspondence within a larger process.
A map can be accurate.
But its accuracy becomes meaningful through its use.
A scientific model can predict successfully.
But its significance emerges through encounters with phenomena that can confirm, complicate or defeat it.
A philosophical concept can illuminate.
But it can also conceal.
Knowledge is therefore not simply a possession.
It is an ongoing relation between a way of knowing and something capable of exceeding it.
No view from nowhere
The consequences become increasingly clear.
If the observer is embodied, historical, linguistic and situated, there is no completely neutral standpoint outside the world.
This does not imply relativism.
It means that objectivity cannot be identified with the elimination of perspective.
A perspective becomes more objective when it can survive encounters with what lies beyond it—when it can be tested, criticised, translated, compared and revised.
Objectivity becomes something achieved through relations.
This is a very different ideal from the fantasy of an observer who sees everything from nowhere.
And it fits something we have already encountered in another context.
A relation can constrain without determining.
The world constrains our descriptions.
But the world does not dictate one final description in advance.
Different investigative relations can disclose different aspects of what is there.
The challenge is to understand how those perspectives can encounter one another without collapsing into “anything goes.”
The knower changes too
There is another consequence that is especially important for our developing ontology.
Inquiry does not merely change what we know.
It can change the knower.
A scientist who discovers a new phenomenon may have to revise their conceptual framework.
A person who encounters another culture may discover that distinctions they considered natural were historically specific.
A philosopher who follows an argument far enough may discover that the question has changed them.
Understanding is therefore not a one-way movement from observer to object.
The relation can work in both directions.
We encounter the world.
The encounter alters our understanding.
The altered understanding changes how we encounter the world.
And so the relation continues.
This is very close to the recursive structure we encountered in Hegel, but without requiring contradiction as its motor.
Encounter changes the participants, and changed participants alter subsequent encounters.
The world participates too
At this point the phrase “the observer enters the world” acquires its full meaning.
It does not mean that the world enters the observer's mind as a representation.
It means that the distinction between observer and world cannot be the foundation of the account.
The observer is already one of the world's participants.
The organism is part of the ecological system it studies.
The scientist is part of the experimental practice through which phenomena become accessible.
The philosopher is part of the linguistic and historical world whose concepts they examine.
The artist is part of the cultural field from which their materials and possibilities emerge.
Knowing is therefore not a relation added to existence.
It is one form of participation in existence.
A relational epistemology
We can now see why this matters for our genealogy.
The earlier posts concerned the ontology of things.
Now the knower itself has become relational.
The observer has conditions.
The observer has a body.
The observer inhabits a history.
The observer acts.
The observer encounters resistance.
The observer changes.
This does not dissolve the distinction between knower and known.
It makes the distinction itself relational.
The world is not simply produced by the observer.
Nor is knowledge simply copied from a world that is completely independent of the conditions through which it can be encountered.
Knowledge arises through an encounter between capacities, structures, practices and something that can answer back.
This gives us a more demanding conception of objectivity.
We do not become objective by escaping relation.
We become more objective by entering relations in which our assumptions can be tested and transformed.
The next problem
We have now made another step toward a relational philosophy.
Things are not necessarily independent substances.
Being can be understood through becoming.
Difference can generate transformation.
And the knower is not outside the world but participates in the relations through which the world becomes intelligible.
Yet one problem remains.
We have spoken repeatedly of relations.
But relations do more than connect and transform individual participants.
They can become patterns that persist beyond any particular participant.
A social relation can survive the individuals who entered it.
A language can constrain speakers who did not create it.
An economic institution can shape people who never chose it.
A conceptual distinction can continue to organise thought long after its origin has been forgotten.
Relations can therefore acquire a kind of durability of their own.
They can become structures.
And once relations become structures, another question appears:
How can something that exists through relations come to constrain the very things whose relations constitute it?
That is the problem to which we now turn.
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