Experience — First Element of Knowledge
The first indispensable element of knowledge is the appearance or the experience.
Through the experience of the external world, the need for knowledge is immediately stimulated, i.e. it is always ignited by the appearances and phenomena with which one is confronted.
There is a constant conflict with reality.
Namely with that part of reality, in the creation of which one is not directly involved, from which a need for knowledge arises.
Thus, experience provides the first form in which everything confronts us.
Thereby experience is differentiated into a ‘pure’ form and into one in which a context is already created by the activity of thinking.¹
The pure form of experience can be described as the experience of the external world, i.e. of the surrounding reality, as well as of one’s own inner world under restraint of (rational) thinking.
Symbolically like an empty vessel in relation to the outer and inner world.
Incoherent but different impressions of the outside world are experienced, which are all of equal value to each other, i.e. no impression or object is given greater importance.
For example, when looking at a leaf on a tree, it turns out that only the contours, the differences in brightness as well as the movement of the leaf belong to the pure experience.
Everything that could be differentiated beyond that would only be possible by the admission of the thinking or the ordering mind, i.e. every determination of the same would be a consequence or result of the thinking process.
Therefore, the pure experience can be called the ‘immediately given’ from an epistemological point of view.
In consequence this means that nothing can be said from the outset about the objectivity or subjectivity of the world of experience that precedes mental determination — that is, the immediately given.
Nevertheless, since Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) the widespread prejudice exists that the whole world of experience is only the own subjective world of imagination, i.e. only a construction in the consciousness.
To call this a prejudice is meant in the sense that statements and assertions of this kind are not based on epistemological investigations of the knowing and thinking faculty per se, but are hastily placed at the beginning.
Thus, to this day, authoritative representatives of modern theories of knowledge, such as Willard Quine (1908–2000), hold:
“What is to be considered an observation can only be clarified by means of the stimulation of the sensory receptors — let consciousness remain where it wants.“²
According to this, the entire world of experience would only exist as long as one’s own senses are exposed to the effects of this world, which is unknown or hidden to one, insofar as this world is only available to one as subjectively generated ideas within one’s own consciousness.
The German philosopher E. v. Hartmann (1842–1906) also expressed it this way:
“What the subject perceives are thus always only modifications of its own mental states and nothing else.“³
However, such views suffer from the missing differentiation between the ‘how’ (process) and the ‘what’ (object) of an experience.
More precisely, it is demanded that in order to perceive something (the what) really as it actually is, there must be no process (the how) for it.
In other words, as long as there is a how (process), the what (object) is never experienced, but only the how or the process.
Thus it is postulated that an experience (the what) would not be the subjective product of one’s own process of experience (the how) unless it came to one directly, so to speak, without any organs of experience necessary for it.
However, this idea contradicts every logic and empiricism.
Because a experience must logically always be processed in some way — unless one would have godlike abilities — , otherwise there could never be a knowledge about something.
Also the just quoted statements of Quine and Hartmann about the human experience are only possible, if before a ‘what’ was experienced, which allows their conclusions.
It therefore always requires a process (how) and does not mean from the outset that thereby the experience (what) is falsified or distorted.
In everyday life this is completely clear insofar as nobody would get the idea to speak of a distortion of reality if, for example, an object is looked at and touched at the same time and two different experiences of the same reality result from it.
Instead, one only concludes that one merely receives more information about one and the same experienced object through the two different organs of experience (seeing and feeling).
But in spite of clear empirical evidence to the contrary and logical contradictions, further assertions about the nature of knowledge are built on this view — as represented for instance by Quine and Hartmann — until today.
Although there is no justification whatsoever to regard it as a fundamental truth, let alone to place it at the top of a science of knowledge.
If only because this characterization of the world of experience is already based on a mental determination of it and has nothing more to do with the investigation of its first appearance.
In other words, thinking is already applied to experience before the connection between these two factors of knowledge is clarified.
Thereby statements about the subjectivity of experience are already made unjustifiably.
For a experience in itself — before any mental determination — simply exists in itself and cannot be judged hastily as subjective without having examined the necessary thought process of this judgment itself or its justification as knowledge.
Therefore, the task of a science of knowledge is not to determine the content of a experience, but its form, i.e. the concept of experience, no matter whether it is about physical or mental phenomena.
And this in such a way as they are immediately present to the experiencer, without any knowledge of the connections and relations already being present.
It is not about questioning the physiological knowledge, that e.g. only with the cooperation of the own organism the contents of experience come into being in the own consciousness.
Rather, it is to be shown that what physiologically has its justification, epistemologically requires a multitude of further considerations and investigations, which must not be based on hasty or one-sided assumptions.
Since the influence of Immanuel Kant up to today’s modern epistemological positions, the previously described view has prevailed that everything that man experiences is conditioned by his own organization or is generated as a purely subjective construct.
That this view does not stand up to empirical and logical scrutiny is further shown by the fact that it neglects the fact that when observing the world of experience, it is divided into sensory and cognitive elements.
The cognitive part of a experience is accessible to one even after the object of perception has disappeared.
A sensory experience, on the other hand, is given from the outside and occurs only in the concrete presence of the object of experience.
Now, however, from the empirical observation with sensory experiences, no proof can be found, for their subjectivity or construction from the own organization.
Furthermore, all these determinations or distinctions can also only be the result of empirical findings of the corresponding special sciences, such as psychology, for example, but cannot possibly stand at the beginning of a science of knowledge.
For every special science already presupposes knowing.
Consequently, a science of knowledge as a fundamental science can only be based on the fact that it consistently focuses on the empirical investigation of knowledge in and for itself and does not already digress into questions of the special sciences.
The non-observance of this insight may be one of the reasons for the large number of diverging epistemological positions that have emerged, especially in the course of the 20th century, and which, on closer examination, are already interspersed with aspects of special sciences.
For only when thinking itself, which establishes the relations between the individual (pure) elements of experience for the purpose of knowledge, is moved into the center of scientific consideration, is it possible to arrive at the sought-after starting point of a science of knowledge.
Concretely: Thinking has to be visited — consequently, strictly according to scientific method — itself as a fact of experience.
Then it becomes immediately clear that the (pure) experience, on which thinking first ignites, receives its determinations by thinking alone.
Therefore, judgments about the content of experiences cannot be made in advance and certainly cannot be placed at the beginning of a theory of knowledge.
Rather it has to be shown by empirical investigation of thinking, in how far thinking is entitled to judgements about experiences.
For in this point lies the difficulty since the beginning of all ideological positions.
Thus, either too little value is attached to experience or it is completely dismissed as illusion (e.g. critical idealism), or too much value is attached to experience (e.g. naive realism).
Finding a justified middle way is therefore of crucial importance for all further considerations.
[1]: This distinction is largely absent in today’s academic doctrine. In other words, experience is equated from the outset with thinking observation. See “Grundkurs Philosophie / Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie, Band 4: Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie”, Wolfgang Detel.
[2]: In the words of Norbert Schneider summarised from his work “Erkenntnistheorie des 20. Jahrhunderts”, 1998, Reclam, Stuttgart.
[3]: Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie. Sämtliche Werke, Berlin 1845, Bd. I, S. 98.
Note: This text was originally written in German and translated into English using Deepl, because I am a native German speaker.
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