The Epistemological Self
The Knower and the Known.
by Marjorie Grene.
Basic Books. 283 pp. $6.00.
Although the conceptual split between the knower and the known is an ancient philosophical problem, in its most pressing modern form it derives from the metaphysics of Descartes, where one finds the beginnings of a powerfully influential divorce of the knower—the subject and his interior awareness—from the known—the exterior reality which is the object of knowledge. Since the 17th century, science has repeatedly insisted that subjective knowledge, in its idiosyncratic variety and relativity, is not real knowledge at all. For knowledge to be real, i.e., truly warranted, it must be “objective,” that is, verifiable, veridical, and ultimately dependable. The task of the knower, then, is to transcend his limitations as an individual and to achieve the status of the scientific observer.
The consequence within science of this epistemological split between the world “within” and the world “outside” has been a decisive tendency toward a mechanistic conception of nature, which reduces the world to elemental fragments and devaluates the knower to the status of a passive receptacle for experience or a psychological prison accessible only to the bizarre and questionable devices of introspection. The world of naive, everyday life and experience is devaluated along with the knower, and is to be transcended in favor of the natural scientist's theories and formalizations. Thus, the villainy of the subjective is to be overcome by the clean heroism of scientific method.
Fortunately, there has been no lack of opposition to this sort of philosophical and scientific reductionism, although it is still uncertain how effective the opposition has been. Marjorie Grene's new book represents one robust voice in a general chorus of revolt that has included such philosophers as Bergson, Dilthey, Whitehead, and (more recently) Merleau-Ponty, and, among philosopher-scientists, Buytendijk, Erwin Straus, and the thinker to whom Mrs. Grene is most intellectually indebted, Michael Polanyi. Mrs. Grene's own voice, however, is clearly heard in the protest. She is against the splintering of man's awareness into sensationistic bits; she is against maintaining a scientific paradigm for all domains of knowledge; she is against the dogmatism of a scientific establishment which has relegated value and teleology or purpose to a kind of leprosarium; and she is against philosophical obscurantists who would junk the possibilities of a genuine metaphysics. Concomitantly, she is for understanding man as an active agent in a knowing process which emphasizes the role of discovery and exploration; she is for a conception of physical man as a being-in-the-world, a being through which events in situationally structured unities and patterns of meaning are given status as human affairs; and she is for a metaphysics in which persons are rediscovered and redisclosed as the centers and sources of meaning. Altogether, she believes that “to put finally to rest our Newtonian delusions, to renew our conception of nature as living, and so to see ourselves once more as living beings in a world of living beings, still constitutes the major task of philosophy in the 20th century.”
_____________
The knower and the known is a collection of essays, some of them previously published in journals, with a tripartite structure. Part One treats of “Knowledge as Conjecture” and contains essays on Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. Part Two, entitled “The Structure of Experience,” covers problems in Hume and Kant and includes an essay on “Facts and Values.” The final section, “The Complexity of Things,” deals with Darwinism, biological theory, and questions of teleology. Taken together, the essays form a coherent argument which rests chiefly on the traditional contrast between knowing as a dynamic, knower-ground-ed activity, and knowing as an essentially empirical and naturalistic phenomenon seen as part of an evolutionary process. The central philosophical contrasts examined by Mrs. Grene are Plato's doctrine of anamnesis—the idea that the knower is ultimately able to know because he can remember or recollect what he had original knowledge of in a Heaven of Ideas—and Aristotle's location of knowledge in “demonstrative science.” The debate reappears in transposed form in the chapters on Hume and Kant, where associationism gives way to transcendental philosophy—the quest for an a priori machinery of cognition which would tell us something of the conditions necessary for the very possibility of experience. According to Mrs. Grene, Hume's skepticism foundered on the problem of the self, “his want of a theory of the person.” And Kant, despite his emphasis on the mind's activity, nonetheless gave us an epistemological self which could never achieve the rank of a flesh-and-blood knower. “The Kantian agent is an agent with no identity, no individuality, no destiny.” Yet, as Mrs. Grene sees it, Kantian questions have led to new versions of an activistic theory of knowing—specifically those of phenomenologists and existentialists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Polanyi's “tacit knowing,” and the “non-thetic” consciousness of the phenomenologists both point to a primordial dimension of experience: the world as given, immediately and directly, to an agent for whom experience and the world are a continuous, surging aliveness, within which and through which individual acts of perception are embedded and realized. It is within this matrix of integral con-sciousnesss, activity, experience, and “objective” reality that the “person” resides.
Oddly enough, this radical concept of the person, which is the focus of Mrs. Grene's entire argument, is accorded little direct or systematic treatment in The Knower and the Known. Taking Polanyi's philosophy of personal knowledge as her point of departure, Mrs. Grene neglects to scrutinize this notion with the same talent for analysis and clarification which she applies so successfully to the work of Descartes and Kant. We are thus treated to a series of exceptionally illuminating analyses of the integral relationship between knower and known, while the root of the issue, the nature and structure of the knower himself, is left indecisive. Yet it is precisely this problem which is most in need of elucidation.
There is, of course, no doubt about the direction Mrs. Grene would take were she to set about writing a major chapter on the concept of the person. “It is Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing,” she writes, “which can start us on the right path, coalescing as it does with the existentialist-phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty, and it may be, in large part at least, something not unlike the philosophy of Process and Reality that will emerge.” The disappointment is that Mrs. Grene, at a decisive stage in the development of her argument, points back to her base of operations instead of reconstructing the problem.
_____________
There are other difficulties. Systems of existential and phenomenological philosophy (mainly represented by Merleau-Ponty) tend to be treated as supernumeraries in the drama; they are brought onstage at critical moments but play a limited role. The questions they raise, however, are at least as interesting as the fact that they are, as Mrs. Grene points out, compatible with Polanyi's theory of “tacit knowing.” Similarly, Husserl's conception of the “life-world” is urgently relevant to her conception of the sovereignty of experience as against the dominion of science, but she does not pursue the subject. Nor is the phenomenological theory of the “intentionality” of consciousness, a crucial part of Merleau-Ponty's thought, given sufficient consideration in these pages, although, to be sure, the task of establishing a correlation between the position Mrs. Grene is proposing and the contributions of Merleau-Ponty would require an advance considerably beyond the limits of her present essays.
Within these limits, Mrs. Grene has successfully launched a frontal attack of informed and significant dimensions. The Knower and the Known is perceptive, sensitive, and, where necessary, blunt. Mrs. Grene is as much at home with the Greeks as she is with the evolutionists, and her close reading of classical philosophers is matched by her informed study of recent biological theory. And to compensate for her failure to venture an analysis of the concept of the person, her own person is very much at the center of this humane and belligerent volume.
