Alarik asked:

I have been reading page 89 of Geoffrey Klempner's Glass House Philosopher.

I have a question that I have been asking for a very long time; indeed, I am now feeling pretty long in
the tooth and, more to the point, while I have read a lot, I've forgotten it all.

My question is: What is the relationship between knowing and being, between epistemology and
ontology. Is the relationship causal, coincidental, does the former create the latter? imitate the latter?
Or does the latter occasion the former? Etc. "Knowing and being are one and the same," said the
ancient.

I'm familiar with the ancient answers, and I made a kind of study of some medieval answers.
Klempner, you'd enjoy Bernard Sylvestris's and Alain de Lille's allegories of cosmogony; all about the
mediation of language and the problems therein.

But, on K's last page, toward the end, the question I ask here surely comes up: What is the relation
between knowing and being?

(For sure, as an atheist, I know that I am always near god when I worry about this; and, no joke, I
worry about it a lot. Silly.)

============

One of my favourite quotes on metaphysics comes from the Hegel's Inaugural Address, delivered at
Heidelberg on 28th October 1816 which serves as a Preface to his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy(Haldane and Simpson trs. Routledge):

But in the first place, I can ask nothing of you but to bring with you, above all, a trust in science and a
trust in yourselves. The love of truth, faith in the power of mind, is the first condition in Philosophy.
Man, because he is Mind, should and must deem himself worthy of the highest; he cannot think too
highly of the greatness and the power of his mind, and, with this belief, nothing will be so difficult and
hard that it will not reveal itself to him. The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has
no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the
seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.

Here is my respectful, but sceptical response, from Unit One of Pathways Program F. Metaphysics
The Ultimate Nature of Things:

The essential move of metaphysics — the thing that sets it apart from every other form of knowledge
or inquiry — lies in an attitude of radical doubt or bewilderment in the face of the very existence of the
world. The infant's desperate cry for its mother thus already contains the seed of doubt that will
eventually put the world itself into question. That primordial, temporary but necessary separation from
what nurtures and protects us is what first allows room for the fatal question mark to slip silently into
human consciousness, a question that is no mere abstract idea, but something that will prove urgent
and practical: our very sense of what is real. The metaphysical attitude is indeed no mere trick or
habit we pick up from pursuing the academic study of philosophy; it is in our nature. One of the first
lessons we learn is how to be metaphysicians (§7).

The hard lesson to be learned is the essential difference between fantasy and reality. A fantasized
breast is not an actual breast, even though the fantasy image may provide its own temporary
satisfaction. For the fantasy image, its existence consists wholly in its being perceived or enjoyed: the
breast overflows with milk because that is what the child desires above all else. The real breast, by
contrast, stubbornly remains the physical organ that it is in reality — perhaps dry and barren, or
beyond reach — irrespective of the infant's desires. Such a scenario might be thought of as more
relevant to analytic psychology than to philosophy. Yet its philosophical importance — which
transcends the biological peculiarities of the human race — is unmistakable. The Reality Principle,
the idea that there is such a thing as the way things are irrespective of how we would like them to be,
is indeed a sublime, opaque, baffling notion. There is something that is there,something that is that:a
harder-than-diamond hardness that our will cannot scratch or move, a blankness at the very heart of
things that (paceHegel) the intellect can never enter into and appropriate (§15).

This looks for all the world like countering one dogmatic statement with another, equally dogmatic
statement. As one of my students recently complained, “I'm still not quite sure what the reality
principle is. If all it says is that 'not all our beliefs are true', it seems not a principle at all, but a bare
assertion. How can it be useful? What is it for? Surely, like all other assertions, it must be explained
and argued for, before it can be used as a tool of reasoning of any kind.”

There is no proof of the Reality Principle, for any argument that one might put forward in metaphysics
presupposes it. Hegel would of course say that his gloriously optimistic statement of the prospect for
metaphysics does not contravene the Reality Principle. That which is, is knowable. “The rational is
the real.”

There is no mistaking the sexual imagery of Hegel's declaration. Ultimate reality lies waiting to be
ravaged, penetrated to its very depths. As various strands of idealist thought (Kant and
Schopenhauer are heroic exceptions) have discovered, there are various ways to make this task
easier. The general recipe is to reduce the conception of ultimate reality to fit the requirements of
human knowledge. (Kant's 'empirical realism' — his 'Copernican Revolution' in epistemology — is
founded on the proposition that 'the object must conform to our knowledge', but this must be
understood against the background of his distinction between the knowable world of phenomena and
the unknowable world of noumenaor things-in-themselves.)

The question, however, is whether in taking the idealist route, one has conquered ultimate reality or
merely laped into fantasy. This is how I would understand Berkeley's immaterialist metaphysic, and
also the more recent interest amongst analytic philosophers in anti-realist theories of truth and
meaning. (The metaphysics of logical positivism reveals the fantasy in its most blatant form.)

In my view there is no getting over the this,the gritty fact that there is something here now, a world
that spreads out from this unique act of indexical self-reference. Equally, there is no getting past the
that,the stony heart of reality, the sheer indexical fact that this world is actual, while all other words
are merely possible. It follows that there is no way to conceive of ultimate reality as a totality. If we
must speak of a 'world', then there is not oneworld but two,the subjective and the objective, which
stand in perpetual, mutual contradiction.

Geoffrey Klempner