[Canute]

Originally Posted by Mr. Nobody A true knowledge, identical with an object is impossible. An object is defined by observation (self observation included). For how would the object exist if no one (including the object itself) is there to identify it. What would the world look like if you have no senses at all, no touch, no smell, no sight, no hearing, no taste. How would the world communicate with you and how would you perceive this world. Where would this true knowledge come from and if it existed what would the meaning be, if as mentioned afore, no one is there to absorb it, including the object itself. Therein lays the inconsistency for completeness

Wow. If you'd left out the first sentence I'm sure I would have thought you were quoting from the Upanishads. There's a passage that is astonishingly similar to this in both content and style. I can't find it at the moment but will try later. It concerns the nature of both knowledge and understanding. Who is understanding what once the understander is one with the understanding? What is there to understand except the understander?

Everything you say seems spot on to me, and extremely well put, except for your opening statement. This conclusion does not follow from your argument.

I think you are saying a lot here, all of it worth discussing, but as an objection to Aristitle you seem to be saying that true knowledge cannot be an object, and also that where knower and known are one knowledge cannot be said to exist. This would be perfectly consistent with Aristotle's assertion.

A person who holds the view that true knowledge is identical with its object must also hold the view that the distinction between objects and objects, subjects and subjects, and even between subjects and objects are ultimately, in the final anlaysis, illusory. You are right imo to say that true knowledge cannot be identical with its object if this means that knowledge must somehow become an object to be true. But nobody is suggesting this. True knowledge would be possible precisely because ultimately, at the deepest level of analysis, everything is identical. This 'Unicity' is neither an object nor a subject.

In other words, it does make sense to say that true knowledge is identical with its object, just as long as we don't mean to imply that objects and subjects are fundamentally distinct, nor that true knowledge is not, in some paradoxical way, also the absence of knowledge.


"Very few seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questionner." (Anne Rice, The Vampire Marius, The Vampire Lestat)


The identity of subject and object spoken of by Aristotle does not entail that a subject becomes an object or an object a subject. Where subject and object become identical there is no distinction between them and thus no subject or object of which we can speak. He implies a third state which, as you point out, it would be paradoxical to call either an object or a subject. One might say that true knowledge consists in the annihilation of subject and object.

Does that make sense? Would you be ok with the idea that true knowledge consists in the identity of knower and known? This phrase avoids the subject/object problem to some extent.

For an example of knowledge by identity, or at least it seem to be one to me, consider how you know that solipsism is unfalsifiable. By solipsism I mean the proposition that nothing truly exists apart from my/your own Being or phenomenal consciousness. For unfalsifiable you could also read undecidable. How do you know it is unfalsifiable? Do you know it?

It turns out that our knowledge of the existence of our identity is more secure than our knowledge of the existence of anything else. But on analysis this is a strange kind of knowledge. When we try to work out how we know that solipsism is unfalsifiable we find that it is not entirely by reason that we know it. If we know for certain that we exist as an individual knower this can only be because it is knowledge by identity, knowledge that we cannot help but have because of what we are. In this way we can be more certain that solipsism is unfalsifiable than we can that the phenomenal universe exists. This is the strange but true fact on which the plausibility of the plot of the Matrix rests. It's a funny old world.

Canute