Answer

In Jain Dharma, knowing cannot exist independently by itself. Jainism accepts that knowledge is a quality, and every quality must belong to a real substance. Therefore, if there is knowing, there must be a knower.

The knower is the jīva — the soul or conscious substance.

Jainism does not say that the knower is a material object, a body, or an ego-personality. The true knower is formless, conscious, and non-material, but still real.

Explanation

Your question is subtle: why not simply say there is “knowing,” without positing a separate “knower”?

Jain philosophy would answer:

• Knowing is a quality — it is not an independent substance.
• A quality cannot exist without a substratum — just as color cannot exist without something colored.
• The soul is the substance whose essential qualities include knowledge and perception.

So Jainism does not imagine a knower as a separate “thing” standing behind knowledge. Rather:

• The soul is not different from consciousness in a crude dualistic way.
• Knowledge is the manifestation of the soul’s nature.
• The jīva is the conscious reality in which knowing occurs.

In Jain thought, saying “there is knowing but no knower” would be incomplete, because it treats knowing as if it can float independently without any real basis.

Jain View of the Knower

Jainism distinguishes between:

• Empirical knower — the embodied self associated with mind, senses, emotions, memory, and karmic limitations.
• Pure knower — the soul in its own nature, characterized by pure knowledge and perception.

The pure soul is not the ego. It is not the mental storyteller saying “I know.” It is the conscious substance itself.

So Jainism would agree that the ordinary “I,” the graspable personality, is not the ultimate knower. But Jainism would not conclude that there is no knower at all. It would say the real knower is the jīva, beyond body, mind, and ego.

Spiritual Understanding

This matters deeply in Jain Dharma because liberation depends on realizing:

• “I am not the body.”
• “I am not the passions.”
• “I am not the karmic modifications.”
• “I am the conscious soul, the knower and seer.”

The liberated soul does not become blank nothingness. It becomes fully manifest in its natural qualities: infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss, and infinite energy.

If there were only “knowing” without a real soul, Jainism would see no stable basis for karma, bondage, spiritual effort, purification, or liberation.

Takeaway

Jainism does not require a graspable ego as the knower. But it does affirm a real, conscious, formless soul.

In Jain Dharma, knowing implies a knower because knowledge is a quality of the jīva, and the jīva is the conscious substance whose nature is to know and perceive.