Nevertheless, I do not conceive that the realistic assertion and the
idealistic assertion in this dilemma stand on the same level, or have
the same value. The fact that objects vary in relation to one another
independently of their relation to the "knower" _is_ a fact, and a
fact recognized by all schools. The idealistic assertion rests simply
upon the presupposition of the ubiquity of the knowledge relation, and
consequently has only an _ad hominem_ force, that is a force as
against epistemological realists--against those who admit that the
sole and exhaustive relation of the "self" or "ego" to objects is that
of knower of them.[62] The relation of buyer and seller is a
discussable relation; for buyer does not exhaust one party and seller
does not exhaust the other. Each is a man or a woman, a consumer or a
producer or a middleman, a green-grocer or a dry-goods merchant, a
taxpayer or a voter, and so on indefinitely. Nor is it true that such
additional relations are borne merely to _other_ things; the
buyer-sellers are more than and other than buyer-seller to _each
other_. They may be fellow-clubmen, belong to opposite political
parties, dislike each other's looks, and be second cousins. Hence the
buyer-seller relation stands in intelligent connection and contrast
with other relations, so that it can be discriminated, defined,
analyzed. Moreover, there are specific differences _in_ the
buying-selling relation. Because it is not ubiquitous, it is not
homogeneous. If wealthy and a householder, the one who buys is a
different buyer--i.e., buys differently--than if poor and a boarder.
Consequently, the seller sells differently, has more or less goods
left to sell, more or less income to expend on other things, and so on
indefinitely. Moreover, in order to be a buyer the man has to _have
been_ other things; i.e., he is not a buyer _per se_, but _becomes_ a
buyer because he is an eater, wears clothes, is married, etc.
It is also quite clear that the organism is something else than an
eater, or something in relation to food alone. I will not again call
the roll of perfectly familiar facts; I will lessen my appeal to the
reader's patience by confining my reiteration to one point. Even in
relation to the things that are food, the organism is something more
than their eater. He is their acquirer, their pursuer, their
cultivator, their beholder, taster, etc.; he _becomes_ their eater
_only_ because he is so many other things, and his becoming an eater
is a natural episode in the natural unfolding of these other things.
Precisely the same sort of assertions may be made about the
knower-known relation. If the one who is knower is something else and
more than the knower of objects, and if objects are, _in relation to
the one who knows them_, something else and other than things in a
knowledge relation, there is somewhat to define and discuss; otherwise
we are raising, as we have already seen, the quite foolish question as
to what is the relation of a relation to itself, or the equally
foolish question of whether being a thing modifies the thing that it
is. And, moreover, epistemological realism and idealism both say the
same thing: realism that a thing does not modify itself, idealism
that, since the thing is what it is, it stands in the relation that it
does stand in.
There are many facts which, prima facie, support the claim that
knowing is a connection of things which depends upon other and more
primary connections between a self and things; a connection which
grows out of these more fundamental connections and which operates in
their interests at specifiable crises. I will not repeat what is so
generally admitted and so little taken into account, that knowing is,
biologically, a differentiation of organic behavior, but will cite
some facts that are even more obvious and even more neglected.
1. If we take a case of perception, we find upon analysis that, so far
as a self or organism is concerned in it at all, the self is, so to
say, inside of it rather than outside of it. It would be much more
correct to say that a self is contained in a perception than that a
perception is presented to a self. That is to say, the organism is
involved in the occurrence of the perception in the same sort of way
that hydrogen is involved in the happening--producing--of water. We
might about as well talk of the production of a specimen of water as a
presentation of water to hydrogen as talk in the way we are only too
accustomed to talk about perceptions and the organism. When we
consider a perception as a case of "apperception," the same thing
holds good. Habits enter into the _constitution_ of the situation;
they are in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something
outside of it. Here, if you please, is a unique relation of self and
things, but it is unique not in being wholly incomparable to all
natural relations among events, but in the sense of being distinctive
or just the relation that it is.
2. Taking the many cases where the self may be said, in an
intelligible sense, to lie _outside_ a thing and hence to have
dealings with it, we find that they are extensively and primarily
cases where the self is agent-patient, doer, sufferer, and enjoyer.
This means, of course, that things, the things that later come to be
known, are primarily not objects of awareness, but causes of weal and
woe, things to get and things to avoid, means and obstacles, tools and
results. To a naïve spectator, the ordinary assumption that a thing is
"in" experience only when it is an object of awareness (or even only
when a perception), is nothing less than extraordinary. The self
experiences whatever it undergoes, and there is no fact about life
more assured or more tragic than that what we are aware of is
determined by things that we are undergoing but of which we are not
conscious and which we cannot be conscious of under the particular
conditions.
3. So far as the question of the relation of the self to known objects
is concerned, knowing is but one special case of the agent-patient, of
the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation. It is, however, the case
constantly increasing in relative importance. The connections of the
self with things by way of weal or woe are progressively found to
depend upon the connections established in knowing things; on the
other hand, the progress, the advance, of science is found to depend
more and more upon the courage and patience of the agent in making the
widening and buttressing of knowledge a business.
It is impossible to overstate the significance, the reality, of the
relation of self as knower to things when it is thought of as a
_moral_ relation, a deliberate and responsible undertaking of a self.
Ultimately the modern insistence upon the self in reference to
knowledge (in contrast with the classic Greek view) will be found to
reside precisely here.
My purpose in citing the foregoing facts is not to prove a positive
point, viz., that there are many relations of self and things, of
which knowing is but one differentiated case. It concerns something
less obvious: viz., showing what is meant by saying that the problems
at issue concern matters of fact, and are not matters to be decided by
assumption, definition, and deduction. I mean also to suggest what
kind of matters of fact would naturally be adduced as evidential in
such a discussion. Negatively put, my point is that the whole question
of the relation of knower to known is radically misconceived in what
passes as epistemology, because of an underlying unexamined
assumption, an assumption which, moreover, when examined, makes the
controversy verbal or absurd. Positively put, my point is that since,
prima facie, plenty of connections other than the knower-known one
exist between self and things, there is a context in which the
"problem" of their relation concerns matters of fact capable of
empirical determination by matter-of-fact inquiry. The point about a
difference being made (or rather making) in things when known is
precisely of this sort.