Knowledge as appropriation

Knowledge as appropriation describes the tension at the heart of knowing: consciousness brings an object into thought and makes its disclosure its own, yet the object retains an independence that resists being reduced to the knower. Scientific research is therefore not a detached reception of facts but a form of appropriation, driven by the wish to apprehend thought as a thing and the thing as thought.

Discovery and ownership

Scientific research appropriates by discovering a truth that becomes the researcher’s knowledge. The truth is formed as a thought and disclosed through consciousness: a facet of the world reveals itself through the knower, who is in this sense both its creator and possessor. This does not mean that the discovered aspect is merely an invented representation. It exists profoundly and really, even though it is revealed through the act of inquiry.

Knowledge thereby resembles artistic creation. A work is made through the creator’s activity but can stand apart from its maker; likewise, a thought originates in a knower and yet acquires an objectivity not exhausted by that origin. The relation is not simple ownership of a private mental image. What is discovered has being beyond the individual act that brings it to light.

The thought that becomes public

The objectivity of a discovered thought also separates it from the person who forms it. Once thought, it can be thought by everybody, taking on an anonymous existence beyond its first knower. It is doubly connected to the self: it is a facet of the world revealed to the knower, and it is a thought formed with the mind of others. At the same time, it is doubly closed against that knower: it is a being that the knower is not, and its availability to everyone makes it no longer exclusively personal.

The term “mine” names this conjunction rather than resolving it. The thought belongs to the knower because it is formed and disclosed through that consciousness; it is not simply the knower, because its objectivity and public circulation give it an independent life. Appropriation in knowledge thus holds together intimacy and distance, personal formation and shared truth.

Seeing as appropriation

The account extends the idea of possession from forming a thought to the very act of discovery. To see is described as a kind of appropriation: familiar figures of speech picture knowledge as removing a veil or bringing an unknown object’s concealed truth into the open. Nature is imagined as keeping a secret, while inquiry seeks to disclose what had not yet been revealed. The Actaeon complex names the convergence of these images of investigation as a hunt and a visual taking.

This imagery makes the knower’s relation to the known more than a neutral encounter. The object is presented as unaware of the investigation, while the observer seeks to surprise and disclose it. The metaphors cast discovery as an act directed toward an object that does not participate in the knowing of itself. They expose an appropriative dimension within scientific inquiry even when its stated aim appears simply to find truth.

Assimilation without destruction

The hunt also gives way to an alimentary figure: curiosity, the account proposes, can be understood as sexual or alimentary, and knowing as devouring with the eyes. In sensory knowledge, consciousness draws the object toward itself and incorporates it as thought. The known is assimilated: it becomes the knower’s thought and seems to receive its existence from that act of knowing.

Yet assimilation never finishes the work it begins. The object remains in its place, wholly absorbed in thought and wholly outside it, as indigestible as a stone. The image of something digested yet indigestible captures the desired but impossible outcome: an object made entirely one’s own without losing the integrity that made it an object in the first place. The difficulty is sharpened by the claim, attributed to Hegel, that desire destroys what it desires. If the object is consumed completely, nothing remains except the self; appropriation would cancel its own object.

The relation culminates in a paradox rather than a settled possession. Knowledge is penetration and superficial caress, digestion and distant contemplation; the object becomes thought through the knower’s continuing activity while also retaining total objective independence. Research seeks to apprehend thought as a thing and the thing as thought. That impossible conjunction explains why knowing, however disinterested it may seem, remains a form of appropriation and one way of having.