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c h ap t e r 2 Interpersonal Dialogue: Key to Realism One of the most nagging and persistent problems in the history of modern Western epistemology—principally since Descartes and, in a more sophisticated and permanently influential way, since Kant—has been the problem of whether and to what extent we know the external world, the world of the nonself, Kant’s noumenon or ‘‘thing-in-itself,’’ as it really is in itself. I shall not waste time in recapitulating this all-too-well-known history. Suffice it to say that for Kant—and for a large proportion of modern thinkers in the West since his time—one must indeed posit the existence of a real world-in-itself, which acts upon our receptive cognitive faculties of sense to provide the ‘‘raw material’’ on which our minds then impose the a priori immanent formal structures of both sense and intellect in order to make these raw data humanly knowable. In a word, the real world provides the matter of our cognition; our own immanent cognitive apparatus, the form. This is the essence of Kant’s ‘‘Copernican revolution.’’ Our minds are not, as in Aristotle and the medieval Scholastic realist tradition, a receptive potency, or ‘‘matter,’’ as Aristotle calls it, in which our knowledge is informed by the forms of real things, projected intentionally into it. The situation is reversed: the world supplies the matter, and we, the form. Our minds are incapable of receiving any prestructured intelligible forms or patterns from outside; all intelligible or meaningful form is from within. The world is incapable, consequently, of revealing itself in any way as it really is to the human knower, and the human knower is incapable of receiving such a revelation and referring it back to its source in a real First published in Person and Community: A Philosophical Exploration, ed. Robert Roth, SJ (New York: Fordham University Press, 1975), 141–53. 16 Interpersonal Dialogue: Key to Realism 17 other, known as such in both its existence and its nature. In a word, there is no objective intentionality from world to human knower and from human knower back to world, at least in the dimension of nature, form, or essence —what things are in themselves. It is true that the old, rigid Kantianism, with its apparently timeless and immutable structure of a priori forms of sense and understanding, the same for all people in all ages, has in our day been transformed into new, more relativistic, linguistic modes. These new linguistic forms still postulate that it is we who impose our own immanent forms upon the world, but the a priori forms now are no longer timeless conceptual ones. They are linguistic structures and systems which are indeed a priori for everyone who grows up within them, yet they vary with different cultures and evolve down the ages. The principle that immanent a priori forms come from people and not from things is still there, but it has been transposed into the realm of language and, thereby, relativized and historicized. Kant is still very much with us. I am well aware that there is quite a different and strong current of thought also with us today beginning from the twentieth century, that of existential phenomenology, that simply refuses on principle even to raise the ‘‘bridge’’ question of whether we know the real world. For such phenomenologists the basic a priori of human knowing is an existential situation : we are always already beings-in-the-world, immersed by our worldoriented intentional consciousness in an enveloping real world already given as both other and yet open to our consciousness, a self-revealing world—and all this before we can even raise any theoretical difficulties about the existence or nature of this symbiotic interrelationship, whose givenness is the very condition of the possibility of our raising any questions about it at all. Hence all skeptical, agnostic, or idealist difficulties about our knowledge of the real world always come too late, after the problem has already been solved by our prereflective lived experience. There is undoubtedly a great deal of truth in this analysis of the existential situation into which we are already plunged without our having any say about the matter. Still it seems to me that the reflective philosophical mind cannot rest content simply with this fait accompli. It would like to know in addition, if possible, just how it is that we do come to...

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