How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XI. When Knowledge Needs Conditions

If knowledge is neither simply inherited nor simply given by experience, philosophy faces a deeper question.

What makes knowledge possible?

The question is different from asking where knowledge comes from.

Reason may contribute something.

Experience may contribute something.

But neither seems sufficient by itself.

Experience gives us particular encounters with the world, yet those encounters do not arrive already organised as knowledge. We recognise patterns, identify objects, distinguish causes, compare events and form expectations.

Reason can organise and connect what we know, but reason alone does not seem able to tell us what actually happens in the world.

Knowledge therefore appears to arise from an interaction between capacities that cannot simply be reduced to one another.

This problem becomes increasingly explicit in eighteenth-century philosophy.

The empiricist tradition presses hard on the dependence of knowledge upon experience. Yet if all knowledge is derived from experience, how do we account for concepts that seem to structure experience itself? How do we explain our ability to recognise regularities, formulate general principles or distinguish one object from another?

David Hume pushes the problem further.

He asks what experience actually gives us when we encounter causation, substance or the self. We observe events occurring together or in succession. But do we ever perceive the necessary connection that makes one event cause another?

The question is devastating because it turns the empiricist method against some of the assumptions of ordinary knowledge.

Experience may give us repeated sequences.

But repetition is not the same as necessity.

If necessity is not directly given in experience, where does our expectation of it come from?

The problem reaches beyond causation.

Perhaps some of what we take to be features of the world are partly features of the way human beings organise experience.

This possibility changes the philosophical landscape again.

Instead of asking only what the world is like, or what experience tells us about it, philosophy can ask:

What must be true of the knower for experience to become intelligible as knowledge?

This is the question that Kant will transform.

Kant does not simply choose between rationalism and empiricism. He asks what conditions must already be in place for experience and knowledge to be possible at all.

Space, time, concepts and the structures through which experience is organised can no longer be treated as philosophically innocent.

The knower is not simply receiving an already organised world.

But neither is the world simply invented by the knower.

Knowledge emerges through a relation between what is given and the structures through which it can be experienced and thought.

This marks another profound shift in philosophy.

The question of knowledge has moved from:

What can we know?

to:

What are the conditions under which knowing is possible?

That is a very different kind of philosophical question.

The subject is no longer merely a doubtful observer attempting to recover an external world. The subject has become part of the explanation of how a world can be experienced as an intelligible world in the first place.

The Aristotelian question of the structure of being has not disappeared.

But another question now stands beside it:

What makes a structure of experience possible for beings like us?

Philosophy has begun to investigate not only reality and not only knowledge, but the conditions that make the relation between them possible.

And this creates yet another possibility.

If the structures through which we know can themselves be investigated, perhaps the same must eventually be asked of the structures through which we understand ourselves, society and history.