Biggest Prejudice About Thinking
I n order to approach the answer to the question of what “knowing” means — more precisely, what the mental engagement with the world entails — it is essential to study the nature of thinking as a second element of knowledge¹ comprehensively and without prejudice.
There is a widespread view that thinking only serves to create images in the mind that show things in the external world.
This is understood to be a kind of mental counter-image of external things, the form of which is created by thinking, but without contributing anything to the content and which is therefore itself devoid of content.
Thinking is therefore only understood as a kind of photographing of the external world, in which all content about things is already contained in order to conceptualise them.
Any activity that claims to be scientific or objective would therefore have to be based exclusively on the perceptions of the sensory world.
At this point, however, it is usually overlooked that even a purely materialistically-minded scientist makes use of his thinking in order to not only depict the experiences of his senses internally, but also to explain them, which, however, he should not consequently accept.
For such a view — known as ‘nominalism’ — assumes that the external world, which confronts us in finished form, exists in all its perfection even if we do not conceptualise it in our thinking.
Accordingly, concepts would only exist for man’s need for order, i.e. they would have a purely subjective claim and would have no meaning for (objective) reality.
They would therefore have no meaning (in terms of being) for objective reality and are therefore only ideal designations or ‘names’ (Latin: nomina) for it.
In concrete terms, this means that the term ‘wolf’, for example, is merely a mental summary of the characteristics common to different wolves.
I.e. all its visible material characteristics such as flesh, blood, bones, etc., by refraining from or abstracting from the special characteristics of this or that wolf.
This (subjective) ‘scheme’ of a wolf thus formed serves the purpose of mental categorisation, but has no significance for (objective) reality, insofar as the only real thing is the material substance of the wolf.
However, it may be objected that any substance found in wolves is also found in other animals.
So there must be something that organises the substance into the living context in which it is found in the wolf.
This organising ‘reality’ is given by the concept.
I.e. through the lawfulness of the order existing in nature, here in the case of the wolf, as conceived in thought.
The Austrian philosopher Vincenz Knauer (1828–1894) summed this up in the following words:
“The wolf, for example, consists of no other material components than the lamb; its material corporeality is built up from assimilated lamb meat; but the wolf does not become a lamb, even if it eats nothing but lambs all its life. So what makes it a wolf must, of course, be something other than ‘hyle’ [substance], sensual matter, and it must not and cannot be a mere thing of thought, although it is accessible only to thought, not to the senses, but an active, therefore real, a very real thing.”²
For nominalists, however, only the visible matter of the wolf is ‘real’, as mentioned.
The implication is that there is no addition to reality by man (the subject) that is not already there.
In other words, all concepts existing in man would be purely subjective and therefore have no relation to reality.
If the external world were to disappear, all concepts would consequently lose their meaning.
This fatal assumption is profoundly ‘ungoethical’ or unscientific with regard to science, as it works with an interpretation that does not emerge from the observation of thought, but has been placed or presupposed in it.
Instead, the starting point should always be an unprejudiced observation — as exemplified by Goethe — in order to penetrate the nature, in this case of ‘thinking’.
It is often overlooked today that thinking within incoherent experience is also initially a pure fact of experience, as it is perceived directly and without any interference.
Compared to the experience of the external world, however, the experience of thinking has a completely different quality or position, as it is able to establish connections.
For in the direct experience of thinking, i.e. in the occurrence of the first form of thinking, connections occur that can be recorded as lawful connections.
In contrast to the experience of the rest of the world, in which the connections or laws only appear indirectly, in thinking there is therefore direct knowledge of how thinking comes about.
Thus it is not, as in the experience of the surrounding world, only the external ‘appearance’ that is perceived, but the inner core or context also emerges directly as part of the content of experience.
The highest form of experience therefore consists in observing thought, as the laws contained therein are experienced directly and can be grasped accordingly.
The fundamental task of epistemology is therefore to observe thinking itself, without first — as the great philosopher Immanuel Kant and his successors, among others, erroneously did — rashly projecting their own interpretations into it.
For when philosophers such as Kant place other principles at the beginning, they can only do so by applying their own thinking and thus presuppose that thinking already confirms their thesis.
They simply overlook the fact that although thinking is not decisive for the appearance of an external process, it is certainly decisive for the way in which we form a judgement about it.
For the fact is that perceiving an appearance in the world and thinking (forming concepts) about this appearance occur separately in the organisation of the human being.
In other words, just as it is not possible to produce a phenomenon in the world through thinking alone, it is not possible to grasp it conceptually through mere observation.
It is therefore essential to examine the way in which thinking arises before it is taken for granted in the acquisition of knowledge.
[1] The first element of knowledge is experience, read about it on my previous article: https://medium.com/@HeimatloserM/experience-first-element-of-knowledge-4b5305d55905
[2] “Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie”, S. 137 (Wien 1892), Vincenz Knauer
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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