Short reflection on traditional philosophy’s equation of knowing and being
So there’s no actual distance between the knower and the thing known in e.g. Japanese and Chinese metaphysics, but technically not in Aristotelianism either.
That which is known is really present as such in the knower.
They are one, and they collaborate in a “process of discovery” rather than as master/slave in detached spectation.
Therefore, the question of “how I know that X” ultimately becomes answered by “because we are X” in immediate phenomenal presence. Knowledge of immediate facts is not an indirect inference of any sort, so immediate phenomenal experience of facts becomes BEING rather than KNOWING per se, which actually renders doubt or radical skepticism a total category error.
So what difference does it make? It renders the relational act of intentionality the CAUSE of knowing. My liberty of action is the source of my knowledge (in a sense). The freedom implied by the interpellation of “how do I know X” (freedom in answering the question, an appeal to my agency) becomes the key to the question.
I know X because I choose to act, and the very subjectivity which is interrogated becomes one with the thing known.
“How” do I know it? Deny the how. There is no “how”, there is no mechanism or intermediary by which I know it. We are.
To ask for the mechanism is to ask for an intermediary within a self-identical thing.
There is none, and we have not implicitly claimed that there is one or begged any sort of question here.
“How” do I know that, in turn? Back to square one again. There is no “how”. There is no intermediary. I know in the fact that I am, and that I am is not knowledge in the sense of the intellect’s indirect abstraction of X from Y and Z, which can only be questioned by the presumption of another immediate phenomenal perspective.
I’m not important. We are.
So the correct answer to the skeptic’s question on how knowledge is possible really reduces to “I love you too. Thanks for asking”.